Great Barrier Reef Trip

Here's a summary Ryan wrote up of our trip. I'm so glad he's gotten the bulk of things down, because it has been so hard to get time to write. I'm going to try to get the beach trip written next.

Monday and Tuesday, December 10-12, 2007

Ryan and Amy got on an airplane early this morning to fly to Cairns (pronounced, “Cans”) for their tenth anniversary trip. Grandma Quinn watched the children while they were gone. She took them to the zoo. Apparently, Andrew found a nice, small kangaroo to terrorize, chasing it around while it hopped away.

Ryan and Amy arrived in Cairns in the early afternoon, and without even going to a hotel (it’s amazing how two adults can travel for two days with nothing but backpacks if they do not have children with them), hopped a bus to the SkyRide. The SkyRide is a gondola that takes you over Australia’s tropical rain forest. The view was gorgeous and relaxing. At the end of the ride we arrived in a small town called Kuranda. It had small places to eat, aboriginal art, a few little zoos specializing in different types of animals, and other quaint shops. We felt like we were in a scene from a movie as we ate our lunch while people around us played musical instruments and sang at a leisurely pace.

After lunch Amy went into one of the zoos so she could get a picture of herself receiving a hug from a koala while Ryan looked for gifts to get people, and then we hopped back onto the gondola. On the way back down we stopped at each of the stops, enjoying some amazing sites, including a gorgeous mountain waterfall in the middle of the rainforest. When we reached the bottom we found a public bus that took us to our hotel.

After staying in the ghetto hotel in LA, the sulfur trailer in Rotorua, and a decent but average hotel in Aukland, Amy was in love with this hotel. It was called the Sea Temple, and she kept taking pictures of it and admiring the pools and the decorations and so on.

We called the kids and got a report on the day. They seemed to have enjoyed themselves. Then we walked the beach for a while, with Amy taking pictures where the light was good. We stepped a few feet inland to find a street full of restaurants and eventually settled on one. We walked back home along the beach. This time, it was night. The stars filled the skies and we admired the constellations and had the beach all to ourselves. When we got back to the hotel, the swimming pools was also empty, so we swam in one of the gorgeous pools, and then went to bed.

The next day we went on a tour to the Great Barrier Reef. We were both very excited, but also a little nervous. The directions on how to scuba dive in a way that both enabled breathing underwater and equalizing pressure in one’s air cavities was a bit intimidating to people who had never done it before. Also, Ryan had the remnants of a mild cold, and was very worried that this was going to prevent him from being able to scuba dive. He was feeling very sad about the possibility of coming to the Great Barrier Reef and not scuba diving. Worrying, of course, did not help anything, as Amy reminded him many times, but somehow he still seemed to have trouble stopping worrying.

It turned out that the worrying was, in fact, pointless. Ryan did just fine, even in spite of his cold, and the scuba diving was AMAZING. The experience of breathing underwater. The experience of seeing an amazing array of biodiversity all around you. The experience of moving in three dimensions instead of just two (and learning how to do that). It was just one of those great life experiences. We would have smiled the whole time, but when you smile you let water into your facemask, so we just smiled inwardly the whole time.

We went to three different dive sites that day, and at the second two sites we snorkeled rather than scuba dive. Although this was not as comprehensive of an experience, it was still extraordinary in terms of what we were able to see, and the advantage of snorkeling was that you could decide where you wanted to go, instead of having to stay with a guide the whole time. We did have a little snorkeling guide for part of the time, in which we got to hold sea cucumbers and learn about other sea life. We saw a bewildering array of fish, a turtle, a shark, a sting ray, and so on. The weather was perfect, and the experience was wonderful.

After the tour we bought some gifts and returned to the hotel. We took another walk through the little town we were in and got some dinner. We talked to Mom who added further testimony to the fact that if you make sure the kids spent lots of time getting exercise during the day, they sleep better and longer. She had them do their chores, had them play outside, took them to the beach, took them to IKEA for lunch (where Mason had “the best lunch in the WHOLE world—hot dogs), picked uncle Garrett up from the airport, put Andrew down for a nap and played in the back yard with uncle Garrett, took a family walk down the street a few blocks to Kmart, and put three exhausted kids to bed early.

The next morning we went for another walk, called the kids (who were about to leave for the beach house with Grandma), and Ryan bought an anniversary/Christmas gift for Amy which will remain unnamed until Christmas. We caught the bus to a shopping mall where we got our underwater pictures developed from our tour of the Great Barrier Reef and bought two identical Sudoku books so that we could compete against each other for the fastest completion times in Sudoku on the airplane ride home. This made the airplane ride go faster, we think, even though Amy beat Ryan about 30 times before Ryan finally won one “mild” puzzle as our airplane arrived in Adelaide. Amy tried to buttress Ryan’s feelings heroically as she told him that at least he does well in his job and “it’s only a puzzle.” An exhausted Amy and Ryan greeted President Quinn back at the mission home, told him about their trip, and packed up to drive down to the beach house the next morning where they would join Grandma, Garrett, and their children, who had had a nice afternoon at the beach.