The Twins Travel

I did not get an overseas assignment, so I won't be going to SHAPE or Turkey. Apparently, two long & three short tours are enough as far as the AF is concerned. Of course, I wouldn't be racking up so many short tours if the AF didn't deploy me so much...I'm just saying. My state side list comes out 13 April, so I will know what my options are then. I'll be given a list of options & I'll have to rank them in order of preference. I'll find out three to four weeks after that what my next assignment will be.

This is the hotel I stayed in while I was in Cairns. It was located in Yorkeys Knob, which is a beach 15 mins north of Cairns. This is the beach which I had pretty much to myself. This is a stinger net. They put these up for people to swim in so they don't get stung by jelly fish. Not sure if it was because of all the weather from the cyclone or if the beach is always like this, but these small shells were just piled up along the tide line.

I flew down to Sydney the day before I had to leave and spent the night there. I stayed in the Mercantile Hotel in the Rocks. It was a short walk from the Central Quay train station (pronounced "key", which is weird because they don't pronounced queen as "keen") and steps away from the Sydney Harbor Bridge and right across the bay from the Opera House. The hotel was right over a pub & reminded me of the hotels in Ireland, which probably makes sense since it was an Irish pub. I checked in and then walked up to the the bridge to do the bridge climb. It was neat & there were some great views, but I can't say it was worth the cost. You aren't allowed to take your own cameras with you, which I understand since they might get dropped on the bridge & then smash into some car below. what I don't understand is the price gouging for purchasing the photos taken by the guide during the bridge climb. $25 for the first print & $10 for each p...

Got out to the Great Barrier Reef today but I didn't get to go diving due to the medication I'm on. That kind of sucked, but I still got to snorkel around the reef. We went to three different locations on the reef & were able to see small reef sharks, sea turtles & giant clams. The weather was perfect & visibility was great. FABULOUS day!!

Can't say I'm all that impressed with the city of Cairns. WAY to touristy. There is literally nothing except shops, places to eat & backpackers hostels. There isn't even a beach in Cairns. The city built a "lagoon" (read 'pool') so that people would have a place to swim. Other than the multiple choices of places to eat, I'm SO glad I decided to stay out here in the 'burbs. It's peaceful, quiet &, oh yeah, I'm 50 m from the beach. Plus, taking the bus into town took an hour. It's really only about a 15 minute drive, but the bus goes everywhere. I'm going out to the reef tomorrow. I'm going to get dive certified again. So excited!!! And a baby lizard just crawled across my floor.

Got into Cairns (pronounced 'cans') late Wednesday & took the shuttle from the airport to my motel. It's a self-contained apartment style room half a block from the beach & about a 10 minute drive from the heart of Cairns. I spent Thursday walking around, finding all the stores, getting some food, & spent a little bit of time on the beach. Cairns reminds me a lot of Hawaii. You have the city on the coast, with sugar cane fields & mountainous rain forest surrounding it. Today, I took the scenic railroad up to Kuranda, which is an old hippie town in the World Heritage rain forest just north of Cairns and which now mainly draws in tourists. The whole trip is narrated & there are some really beautiful shots of the valley & coastline. The train goes through 15 tunnels & over however many bridges & stops at Barron Falls for pictures. In Kuranda itself, there is the Koala Gardens, Bird World, Butterfly sanctuary & the venom zoo. I just we...

Lungkata, a blue-tongued lizard man, traveled to Uluru from the north. He went to Uluru because he heard there were many other beings there and he was lonely. As he was walking around Uluru, he came across an emu that had been speared through the thigh. This was a dilemma: although Lungkata was lonely, he was also hungry. Although it was wrong to take another hunter's prey, Lungkata decided to kill the emu and take the meat. Knowing the hunter who had speared the emu would belooking for the bird, Lungkata cut the emu into pieces and hid them. Shortly, two brothers who had tracked the wounded bird found Lungkata and asked him if he had seen the emu. Lungkata told the hunters he had not, but that he had heard what sounded like a wounded emu way, way off in the distances and sent the brothers off. Lungkata gathered all the pieces of the emu and set off to find a place to hide. In his haste to get away, Lungkata dropped pieces of the meat, leaving a trail behind him. Meanwhile...

Long, long ago, there was a young Kuniya (python) boy was surprised and ambushed by a Liru (poisonous snake). Liru threw spears at the boy striking him and killing him. The spears were thrown so hard that holes were left in the rock of Uluru, which can still be seen. The boys aunt felt the evil that happened to her nephew and went to search for the Liru, leaving traces of her tracks around Uluru. When the python woman (the Kuniya of the story) found her nephew she fell to her knees in mourning. Liru, seeing this, began to mock Kuniya. In her grief and anger, Kuniya took her digging stick and struck Liru three times, killing him. This is the only spot on Uluru where water from the rock runs red. Even though Liru was dead, Kuniya curled up on the spot and keeps watch for his return. The first photo shows the path of Kuniya and the second shows her curled up watching for Liru's return. If you look at the rock, the top of it looks like the head of a snake resting on it's ...

The tour I booked was the eco tour which included a sunset & sunrise tour of one of the rocks, depending on which one you wanted. My thinking was I could get a picture of Uluru at sunset from one of the many lookouts around the resort, so I would take the sunrise walk around the base of it. Now, my thinking was that there would be a viewing point to watch the sunrise hit Uluru while we enjoyed our breakfast (included). Not so much, so that was kind of disappointing. Other than that, the walk was about 12 km (~9 miles) & included some Aboriginal stories regarding the rock. Uluru is considered a sacred site for the Aborigines & there where parts of the rock we weren't allowed to take photos of. One supposition is that by taking pictures of the rock, it's spirit is sucked out of it. However, since there are many, many photos of Uluru from a distance & you can see those parts of the rock, & there probably isn't an effective range of a camera's spirit suc...

Arrived at Yalara (the Ayer's Rock area) in the rain. Turns out the area has been getting more rain this year than in the previous 9. According to the locals, there's a 10 year cycle and I happened to plan my trip during the 10th year. 'Cause I have that kind of luck. Checked into the Outback Pioneer Hotel & Lodge where I had booked one of the backpacker rooms. It was a room with 20 beds (bunked) with dividers separating the room into five smaller spaces and I have one of the spaces to myself the entire time. It was kind of like being deployed only there was hot water and good food. As soon as I dropped my bags, I called the tour company I had booked my tours through to let them know I had arrived late since I was running late. I was worried the tour was going to be cancelled (or completely suck) because of the rain, but neither of those happened. The tour I was going on was the sunset tour of Kata Tjuta (the Ulgas - the 'Tj' is pronounced the same way as the ...

Australia is a little bit like coming home. Probably because it was where I spent the most time in high school and was a teenage girl. Leisa and I drove by our old house. I knocked on our old neighbor's door to see if they still lived there but they didn't (sorry Tom, no info on Sy). We drove around the city center and stopped Burley Griffin Lake and had lunch at the Regatta Cafe. Burley Griffin Lake is where we would go to watch the Bird-Man competition and the Skyfire when we lived here. Then we went to the Telstra Tower on Black Mountain to get a view of Canberrafrom up high. As we were walking out we saw a Rosella (I think it's a type of parrot) and a Magpie (I hate those birds - when they're nesting they'll "swoop" at you if you get close to their nests. They terrorized us when we were growing up). When we lived here, we used to go out to a park where you could feed the grey kangaroos, but I guess it closed, so we drove out to Tidbinbilla, a nature pr...

Made it to Australia after a very long flight. Felt a little bit like Alice after taking a drink. Well, probably more like Neo in the Matrix since I managed to take the wrong pill and hardly slept at all during the flight. I took melatonin instead Ambien and couldn't figure out why I wasn't staying asleep until it was too late to take the Ambien and not be comatose when we landed in Sydney. Oh well, lesson learned. Landed in Sydney & breezed right through immigration & customs. Had to walk, what I swear, was the entire perimeter of the airport to get to the domestic transfers. Turns out the Sydney domestic and international terminals are completely separate from each other so passengers are bussed in between the two, so I got a lovely tour of the airport's taxiways & hangers. Thankfully you only go through security once, so I didn't have to worry about doing that more than once. Had an AWESOME view of Sydney harbor as we were coming in. The bridge cl...

As most of you know, I've been traveling around a lot in the last few weeks & I've noticed a trend: airlines overselling seats on flights. Delta is currently offering a $400 voucher, hotel accomodation, & rebooking tomorrow. Now, I realize there are a lot of other factors that go into flight scheduling but I'm also pretty sure airlines have decreased the number of flights they have. Now, demand for air travel hasn't decreased but the availability of flights have. MY common sense tells me to book more flights; especially to major hubs. But, as my demotivational poster says, "Common Sense...so rare it's a super power." Don't get me wrong; if I weren't going to Australia I would SO be taking that $400. Sent from my iPhone

"I so wish I had taken a picture of those bloody sheets in the street. That was a moment of a life time." My sister, STILL lamenting the fact that she didn't get to see the stabbing ACTUALLY occur.

M y sister, Kaiya, and I drove up to NY city on Tuesday to go see Wicked, the musical based on the book by Gregory Maguire. We got into NY around 3:30 in the afternoon and a s we were walking from the parking garage to the hotel (which were right next to each other) my sister notices some action going on across the street from us. She later looked it up online and found out that "in Hell's Kitchen" a teenager had been slashed in the face by another teen ager. She's telling everyone she talks to about it, because that was the most exciting thing during our trip - in her mind anyway. Anyhoo...we checked into the hotel and decided to walk around the city for an hour or so before we had to get ready for the show. We headed to the Empire State building but we didn't have time to go up to the observation deck. We could have but we would only have had about 15 minutes to take it all in and it really wasn't worth it. We walked to Times Square on the way back (I expec...

This is a test to see if I can post from my email. Sent from my iPhone

As I was going through security in Anchorage and getting ready to put all of my things on the conveyor belt to be x-rayed, I glanced down at the table and saw the guy in front of me had used his passport as his identification. And screamed a very loud F*** inside my head as I realized I needed my passport in order to go to Australia. I very frantically called my sister to let her know I wasn't going to be able to make it until Monday because all flights were booked due to spring break. (Seriously? Who thinks it's a good idea to send their kid on a week long drinking binge? And parents...if you don't think your kids are drinking...reality called. It would like you to check in.) Anyway, she managed to talk me down from my ledge and suggested I call someone to get it from my house and send it out here since I'm in Virginia for a week before heading on to Australia. Oh...yeah...I could do that. I called Naomi and ask her to please come back to the airport and get my ...

I found a place to live! Hurrah! I was getting a little worried because all the places I called about wanted a one year lease & I'm leaving in Oct. Plus, the Army unit at Ft. Richardson is rotating back in from Afghanistan so there's THOUSANDS of Army people looking for a place to live as well. Rental market in Anchorage...thriving. But as soon as I told my future landlord I was military he said no problem. It's a three story, two bedroom, 1 & 1/2 bath townhouse in Fairveiw right off Debarr. I know, you're not suppose to live anywhere with 'view' in the name, but all but one of my seven neighbors are military & the other guy is the regional manager for Walgreen's (who I just want to hug from bring Walgreen's up here...now if I could only meet the regional manager for Target). The bottom floor is the Alaska entry & garage. The garage is actually a one plus garage - it's really long & has a lot of room for storage (for all th...

Note to self: you can only fly out of Fayetteville with four bags. Never mind having JUST returned from Afghanistan and two of the five bags you're carrying are your weapons case and the rucksack-o-crap you were issued at Combat Skills Training at Ft. Dix NJ even though you TOLD them you wouldn't be transiting through a location to turn it in and are now stuck with said rucksack-o-crap. FOUR BAGS ONLY. BTW: it costs $40.50 to send a rucksack-o-crap from NC to NJ priority.