Traveling with Ray Owens

Day 8 January 21, 2025

As promised we started the day quite early. We met downstairs at 5:45. The luggage ferries had taken the bags from the hall to the lobby.

They provided continental breakfast. It occurs to me that no one ever specifies which continent is being referenced when describing said breakfast. Since Australia is pretty much the entirety of the Oceanic continent I suspect this continental breakfast is just another Australian breakfast. I did get a pretty decent cup of coffee.

The koala’s and wombat’s were loaded on coaches and we bid fare thee well to Port Douglas and made our way to the Cairns airport. (As a side note the word Cairns has two silent letters. The ir is unnecessary. The city is pronounced “Cans” like two cans of green beans.

We arrived at the airport to catch a chartered flight on Air North Airlines. It was nice not to have to worry about how much my bag weighed. I felt a bit like a professional football player taking a chartered flight to the Super Bowl.

We are flying to Ulura, this small city is near Ayer’s rock. Pictures below.

The flight was pretty much uneventful. We arrived and the luggage ferries loaded our bags and off we went to the “Sails in the Desert” hotel. We had a nice salad buffet lunch. After lunch we rode the free shuttle to the town center and inspected the local IGA grocery store. There used to be a chain of IGA stores in the states which stood for international grocery association. Here it means international groceries of Australia.

We bought and consumed apples. Then we caught the shuttle back to the hotel and discovered it was just a 5 minute walk.

At 6:30 we boarded the coach and drove into the national park that has as its main attraction the Ayer’s rock. It is very big. We were told that the setting sun changes the hues of the rock. They served us sparingly wine and snack food out by the bus parking lot. As the sun went down the temperature became somewhat bearable as it was 108 degrees when we arrived. It was fun. There were some aboriginal ladies that were selling their artwork. It was quite lovely.

After returning to our hotel Frank and I opted to walk to Imalung lookout. It is a Brett’s high dune that is pretty much light free. I took some photos of the stars.

It was a good day. And tomorrow begins at 5:00 so we gather the matching bookend of seeing the sunrise.