12 March : Mackay --> Eungella --> Airlie Beach

A good one.

+Jill and I got up and asked the hotel owner where the good coffee was located in town. He sent us a couple of blocks away and off we went. We ended up ordering something to eat and I enjoyed the coffee with a meal.

As we were about to get the bill and pay, the hotel owner dropped into the coffee shop with a carry bag to take coffee back to work. He sat down and we exchanged travel stories. He and his wife are going to Seattle in May for an Alaska cruise which is how the entire conversation started.

They are spending 3 weeks on the road in Canada (Whistler, Banff, the Canadian Rockies, etc) and the Northeast US (Boston to Niagara Falls). He also managed to tell us about the time he was driving the family in the redwoods for a couple of hours and he spotted what he thought was a lake. It turns out it was Lake Pacific - as in the ocean. He still isn't living that one down.

After we left town, we drove to Eungella National Park where some platypii are known to live and hoped for the best. Dawn and dusk are the best times to see them out and about -- or overcast days. Score! Even though it was about 11 am, we saw one of them swimming in the river in the park. I got photos. We were happy and the trip here was worthwhile!

We headed North to Airlie Beach so that we could check into a B&B and get situated for our 3 night boat trip in the Whitsunday Islands. Things did not go well.

Google maps completely sent us down a dead end out of town and the phone line was constantly busy so we could not talk to anyone. We drove around downtown several times. The town is under total street renovation so all the streets are one massive detour in a single direction. We finally just parked and started asking local businesses where the boat place was located.

So just before we walked in the door to check in, the boat owner cancelled our tour. We walk in to find this out and find out that the booking agency is separate from the boating establishment and they cannot seem to communicate things like contact info for booked guests. The boat people had no way to talk to us not that it mattered much given the timing. Have you seen +Jill pissed off????

I'll leave out the bits about going into the travel agency office and just say that we ended up with an alternative boat for the same number of nights. As of now we are just hoping for a nice experience after all of this.

So we walked over to dinner but checked out Fish D'Lish's "Yum Rum!" bar to sample some stuff. While Jill sipped a sub-par white wine, I sampled 3 rums and found the bottle from Venezuela called Diplomatico to be very tasty.

We headed over to dinner and had a fabulous meal at a low key kind of place and headed home to prepare for a 3 day trip about a boat that better come out on the spectacular end of the scale.