Old Fears and New Friends

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Welcome to Australia. We arrived a few days ago here in Cairns. This is a city in Queensland which is the NE section of the country/continent. Oh yeah check that off the list new continent visited. The city is mainly a beach town (without an actual beach) and relies mainly (exclusively) on tourism. The main tourism is the Great Barrier Reef. For those of you that missed a retell of our sordid diving history it plays out like this. No dives in 4 yrs since Jon perforated his eardrum and Aneta had repeated panic attacks on descent into the water. So you are wondering what are we doing here. Well like the psychiatrist in our relationship says, you must confront your fears to ever overcome them. so we took this opportunity to ease back into SCUBA. By ease I mean a 3d/2n live aboard dive boat. Now you can also snorkel so we figured it worked out well. Ironically we only donned snorkels once. We did manage 9 dives including a nite dive and 2 solo dives without a guide which was a big step. The good news is Jon's ear is still intact and Aneta has mostly exorcised her demons of the deep. As for the boat trip. The diving was lovely. Lots of interesting fish and even many sharks, the little ones that wanted nothing to do with us as opposed to the large man eaters that we were told spent 4 hours devouring a beached whale in the Southern city of adelaide about a month ago. For more info check out the pictures from the cabin on the boat and assorted others included. The food on the boat was not however as good as the diving and we are still discussing what exactly was for lunch the last day. We also managed to meet some nice people on the boat including a couple from the UK also on an extended honeymoon. They are already many months into their trip and had some great stories to share. We got back to land yesterday and after a long needed shower we set off to meet this couple for a few drinks and free beer and pizza sponsored by the dive shop. The locale for this event is an infamous bar in town called the woolshed. It's the kind of place where at 32 we began to feel very old and very lame. Sorry but we left before the dirty dance-off and wet t-shirt contest commenced. We did move onto the toad races held down the street and proceeded to split our evening on gender lines with Aneta discussing shoes and child birth with Blue and Jon and D discussing guns and politics. I swear. Anyways. Today is a business day. We are off to finish up some immunizations and laundry today before setting off to Sydney for a few days touring the city and seeing Anna. More later....... And happy holidays whichever one(s) you are celebrating.

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Photos

Stinger Suit Sexy
Yes after the rafting suits we thought nothing could be less flattering. enter stinger suits to protect from jelly fish - tis the season

Comments

[Trevor]

I cant believe....
I cant believe Aneta left BEFORE the wet T-shirt contest started! Thats it....you are officially old. D