Australia, Day 1

G'day mates. Well we made it to Australia. The times and dates get a little confusing but we figured it took about 35 hours from start to finish. The trip from Houston to New Zealand was "only" 14 hours and we all seemed to handle it well. Before the flight, we found out we were in middle seats, so I asked if they had any business class upgrades available. I figured for $100 or so it would be worth it... I was off by a zero, so I settled for a free upgrade to an aisle seat. 

 

Once we got to Australia, we immediately boarded the buses and headed off to our first destination, the Sunshine Coast. Our first stop was an aquarium. Not sure if it we were just tired or if it was the fact that we've seen our share of fishes and turtles, but we were having trouble matching the excitement level of the group of first graders in front of us. Just as we were about to head for the exits, we ran into the seal exhibit. We were just in time for the show, and it was actually really cool! Probably something you could see at Sea World but it was new to me. These seals were waving, barking and doing handstands on command, it was pretty impressive. They even had a fake audience member planted to volunteer to pet one of the seals. It knocked her into the water and the other seal started circling her as she acted terrified to really sell it. Pretty sure everyone thought they we were about to witness the next Harambe.

 

 

After the aquarium we finished the trip to Surfer's Paradise and arrived at our hotel. It was a pretty nice resort type place as you can see from the pictures. There were a lot of different water activities you could do like kayaking or stand up paddleboarding, unfortunately they closed right after we got there.... maybe next time! We did take a nice stroll down to the beach, then we went to the hotel restaurant and had a nice dinner with our group. The main goal of the night was trying to stay up until 8 pm so we could acclimate to the new time zone. Pretty sure we were all asleep by 8:01.