Heading home

Time to head home, from lovely warm Cairns to cold dark Melbourne.

But first we checked out of the accommodation. it’s unattended apartments apart from cleaning staff – you just pack up and leave the key in the room.

This works fine, but I did appreciate the hotel from our earlier stay in Cairns, which had a friendly chatty manager who recommended a great cafe and a great restaurant nearby.

We found a place to drop our luggage. It turns out if you Google for left luggage in Cairns, there are several online services: Stasher, Luggage Hero, Bounce, MindMyBag…. Many of them end up using the same businesses – car hire places, newsagents, whoever has signed up to accept left luggage.

This is very handy, but the message I have for everyone here is, if you use Luggage Hero, it worked fine, but for some reason all the pricing is in USD, and it doesn’t say so, except in an obscure FAQ page. So it’s not as cheap as it seems. As it is I spent about A$23 storing two suitcases for about 3 hours – which is fine, but didn’t seem like exactly a bargain.

After leaving the luggage we walked to the Cairns Museum, paid the admission and explored. It’s bigger than it looks from the outside, stretching across three levels, and gives a picture of the development of the city.

Bonus: I spotted my cousins Billy and Fern and their dad Bill Senior, pictured in one of the displays.

By this point we’d started getting messages from Qantas that our flight was delayed. That’s not ideal, but at least knowing about it in advance meant we could change our plans a bit.

It meant that we took our time and had lunch at a nice cafe, rather than rushing to the airport and trying to find a probably expensive and possibly mediocre lunch there, then sitting around waiting.

After lunch we got our luggage and called a cab to the airport.

The cab driver could read us like a book.

“Going to the airport?” he asked. Not a hard guess given our luggage. Yes.

“Domestic terminal? Flying back to Melbourne?” Now that’s a good guess. He must have seen it in our faces. That yearning “I don’t really want to go home to the cold” look.

We got to the airport. Once inside with the aircon I decided to change from shorts to jeans, since our destination would be so much colder.

Greeting tourists at Cairns airport when arriving are warning signs about crocs. Flying out, I couldn’t help but notice the big ads for Brisbane’s Air Train.

I’d been feeling a bit off-colour, and by this point I definitely had a sore throat, and a little bit of coughing. It didn’t feel like the spicy cough, and several COVID RAT tests over several days confirmed that. But it was certainly something.

As I post this in early August, whatever it was is still hanging around – while the symptoms were minimal, the cough has lingered for weeks. Not sure what it is, but I’m guessing some friendly soul at Horn Airport passed it on. Oh well.

So once again I masked up for the plane ride home, to try and prevent the exchange of germs with others.

Apart from the flagged delays, the plane was on time, if that makes sense.

For the last leg I ended up backtracking from my outbound trip – catching a cross-city train… which terminated unexpectedly, breaking the connection and adding a 20 minute delay to my trip.

Welcome back to Melbourne.

Welcome back to real winter.

But we’d returned with some great photos, and fantastic memories.

Postscript: Things I shouldn’t have packed

In my quest to pack more lightly for future travels, here’s a note to myself: a list of things I probably shouldn’t have bothered taking:

• phone + laptop + iPad and their the chargers was too much. I really need to work out how to lighten the tech load
• And the Kindle and its charger. I did do some reading on planes, but the charger at least was completely unnecessary. Battery life is fine for a two week trip (it’s not like I was reading all the time)
• I’m not sure about the DSLR camera. It did make for some great photos, but it’s so damn bulky, and the iPhone rivals it for picture quality in many cases – as well as handily adding GPS data. I wonder if a smaller camera with optical zoom might be the go. (I’m betting iPhone optical zoom lenses aren’t great, and I still haven’t found an equivalent for a DSLR’s TimeValue/Shutter Priority mode.)
• I definitely didn’t need the DSLR battery charger. The battery in the camera was fine, and I even had a spare.
• And I barely used the zoom lens for the DSLR. The standard lens was fine.
• Long sleeve tops. Somehow I had 3 – the one I was wearing on the morning of departure, and two others. The weather forecast – should have made it obvious they would not be needed.
• Rain jacket – worn as a layer on the way to Melbourne airport at the start of the trip, but unused for the rest of the holiday. (The umbrella came in handy though.)
• Virtual, not physical packing: the booking.com app is a bit of a waste of time, when all the useful alerts come through email. And it gets way too many updates for what it does.

Things I should have taken, but didn’t? Nothing really springs to mind.

One other thought: things that should be in every hotel room or apartment but surprisingly are sometimes missing (beyond the basics like toiletries, beds, aircon, a fridge, good WiFi):

• Plenty of power points – one place we stayed was otherwise excellent but there was nowhere in the kitchen to plug in the kettle… we ended up boiling water in the bathroom, which worked, but seemed odd.
• Related: bedside tables with a spare power point nearby – it’s not an unheard-of scenario to plug in your phone overnight to recharge and to also use it as an alarm clock (I’d rather do this than risk mis-setting an alarm clock in the room)

Anyway, this was a fantastic holiday, for escaping the cold, seeing relatives both from both close and extended family, and chasing family history.

I’m now thinking about my next winter trip!

But for now, so long FNQ, and thanks for all the fish.