Leaving Hamilton Island

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This morning we packed up and left our luggage in our room for the porters to collect whilst we checked out and enjoyed a buffet breakfast in the hotel restaurant which looked over their pool. Unfortunately none of us really got our money’s worth from the buffet breakfast, not even Will. Clearly too much steak!

Our flight from the Island back to Sydney was at 3pm so we decided to use the Island bus to see those parts of the Island that we hadn’t seen the previous day. This only took 30mins so we still had time to enjoy some pool side napping before having to make our way to the Airport shuttle bus. The Island airport is tiny, with only a couple of commercial flights in and out of the Island each day. We were one of the first in the queue to check in, but as we were beginning to go through the usual security checks with the Virgin staff our check in assistant looked slightly alarmed and said that she couldn’t continue to check us in and she had to speak to her manager – always a slightly concerning scenario! But it turns out after much waiting and confusion, that our flight was cancelled due to engineering problems. Jo got her hopes up a little high at this point and was hoping they would be paying for us to stay another night on the Island! But much to Jo’s disappointment we prioritised to get on the Qantas flight that was leaving very shortly as we were going all the way through to Sydney where as many of the passengers on our original flight were stopping at Brisbane. However, as disappointed as Jo was, it turns out we drew the lucky straw as there were 70+ passengers who were going to have to make a 30min ferry ride and then a 3 hour coach journey to nearest mainland airport!

We arrived in Sydney earlier than expected as we caught a direct flight rather than stopping over in Brisbane, so we caught a shuttle bus back into the city. We dropped off our luggage in the flat and then headed to the Thai restaurant downstairs to get some dinner.

By the time we got home we ready to go straight to bed!

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