Day Six - afternoon

We take a bus to the mustering site for the parade. We find ourselves amidst a plethora of pugnaciously pink paddlers.




In addition to the colors, there are the boob, cancer and dragon team names/puns. The race itself is called “Abreast in Australia.” Team names include “Boobialla,” “DAM Oarsome” (“DAM” is “Dragons Abreast Mackay”), “Flamin’ Breasts aDraggin” (oops, my mistake; it’s “Flamin’ Dragons Abreast”), “Nipples on Ripples,” “Tittytittybangbang,” “Breast Friends,” “Breast Strokes,” “Chemo Savvy,” “Machestic Dragons,” and my personal favorite “Missabittatitti.”

Miriam’s team is called “SOAR” for “Survivors on a River; “ it is less pink than most.


We husbandly support people think we will be the audience for the parade, but we are told that we are to march in the parade behind our team. We worry that there will be no audience for the parade.

We need not have worried. Caloundra is a small place, but there is a big, supportive turnout. Many women bring their daughters to watch. It reminds me of something that I tend to forget. We have lived with Miriam’s struggle with, and eventual victory over, cancer, for ten years. But others are just learning to deal with the “C” word. The women on these teams are brave survivors of a terrible disease, and seeing them march proudly and joyfully truly inspires hope and courage in others. It brings a lump to my throat.

The lump is dispelled by a little wisp of a man with a bristly moustache from a Canadian team. He sees the Team SOAR emblem on my shirt, rushes over, stops me and tells me that his wife’s team is the one that beat SOAR at Alcan. I smile, taken off guard. He passes one hand by another to show how his wife’s boat beat my wife’s boat, and says he will send us a movie. Still clueless, I thank him. He looks taken aback, and says it may be December before he can send it. Continuing cluelessly, I tell him "no problem" and thank him again. He looks puzzled and we walk on.

I ask Miriam about it later. She tells me the race had a disputed result. The incident reminds me of the other side of competition. I think the little fellow actually felt superior to me because his wife's team beat my wife's team in a disputed race.

We arrive at a small park. There will be opening ceremonies after we are fed. We are told our feeding will not occur for two hours, and that we should make ourselves comfy sitting on the grass. We catch a bus back to our hotel, have dinner with friends, and go to bed too early again.

Day Six - morning

Miriam has to meet her team at 5:30 am on the beach to warm up and prepare for the races. Today we have the first real race event; a parade in downtown Caloundra.

While Miriam trains I walk North along the beach trail. I see what appears to be a cactus growing in a tree;


















Termite mud nests in the crotches of trees;


















Banksia pods trying to say something to me; and,

Parrot-like birds with pink bellies and white heads.

Day Five

Miriam goes to practice at 6:50 am. I edit photos and practice dobro. The death has made everyone feel sad, sentimental and tired. Miriam flakes out on the couch. The husband of one of her teammates offers to teach me about Photoshop. He has an amazing knowledge of the program, optics, digital imaging and related sciences. He spends about five hours with me, teaching me things I never would have figured out myself.

Miriam’s team and supporters (husbands and other significant others) all gather for dinner at the local surfing club. It is a large two story building. The upper story is open, and has cafeteria style food service, but a very good restaurant style menu, a bar, and some type of gambling. It’s some sort of club. To qualify at guests and be admitted we have to show ID to prove we live more than 15 klicks away.

We celebrate Anita’s birthday. Anita is turning 75. She’s an active dragonboater; she is also a babe. Everybody wants to be like Anita when they are 75.

We walk (or perhaps I should say “weave”) back to our room and fall asleep.

Day Four

We actually sleep until about 5:30 am. Miriam has her first practice and needs to meet the shuttle bus at 7:10 am. I cook Australian bacon and eggs. Australian bacon is excellent; thick and ham-like, with good flavor. Miriam goes to practice. I edit photos, do my first post to the blog and practice dobro.

Miriam gets back from practice and we catch the shuttle to our mid-day kayak trip to Bridie Island. Bridie Island is a sand island; it has no rocky substrate, and is constantly creeping about. But its about 25 miles long, and has a small city of about 12 thousand people at its South end.

We put in near downtown; the water in the sound is several beautiful shades of blue. We paddle across to the North end of the island, which is the newest part of the island and the part that changes most rapidly. It is a “preserve” and vehicles are prohibited. We tramp about a bit, get back in the kayaks, travel farther South, clamber out and have tea. We learn about “she-oaks;” short-lived trees that grow on the dunes; they provide the shelter that allows other, longer-lived trees to grow behind them. That's a she-oak in the picture, doing its job growing right at the edge of the sand. We walk across to the ocean side of the island: long, long beaches with almost no one but us, and big ships not very far offshore, making their way to and from Brisbane.

The paddle back to shore is a bit strenuous. The wind has come up, there is a fair bit of chop, and some boat wakes too. No one swamps, but several of us experience an unexpected cooling sensation as the ocean pays a surprise visit to our shorts.

Back on the mainland we watch a several of the large pelicans approach, hoping for a handout. This time Harvey gets pictures. The fellow on the left really does stand about four feet tall.

Then we shuttle back to our hotel. People from the team greet us with serious faces. The husband of one of the paddlers, who did not come with his wife on the trip, has died of a heart attack.

Day Three

Wednesday we go on the all day “Hinterlands” tour. We are expecting a vehicle, possible a four wheel drive type, that will take us to remote places where the tramping might be too strenuous for us. Instead we have a very nice tour bus that drives us to….

A winery. We sample seven different types of wine from that winery. We begin to think that strenuous tramping may be overrated.

We pop back in the bus and go to Mont Ville. It is a small town in the mountains outside Caloundra that is wholly devoted to shopping for bric-a-brac. There is a shop that sells Black Forest cuckoo clocks, a shop that sells Irish linens, a shop that sells Turkish whatnots – you get the picture. Lots of shops selling foreign stuff for tourists. Not exactly what we had in mind.

We walk the length of it and return to an attractive coffee bar. It takes a long time to place our order, and a while for it to arrive, but we are sitting outdoors, the weather is beautiful, and the coffee, when it comes, is delicious. We both order “flat whites.” This is maybe a cappuccino, or maybe a foamless latte, but whatever it is, its about three hundred percent better than any coffee we have had in Australia. We realize that Mont Ville is not a complete bust after all.

While we wait for coffee two Kookaburra birds come and perch in the trees directly over our heads. We are delighted to see them, but they are disappointed that we have not ordered anything they can share. They compensate by stealing some food that children at the neighboring table have dropped.

After Mont Ville we go to a very nice restaurant with stunning views. We are seated at long tables, and they serve two entrees (one fish and one lamb) and two desserts (one a key lime pie and the other ice cream with berries in a crystallized sugar basket). The entrees and desserts are delivered to the table in alternation. If the person on your left gets fish, then you get lamb. If the person on your right gets key lime pie, you get ice cream. We have not seen this before. Trading is allowed and encouraged, and it all works out nicely.

We then drive to a small rainforest. We have an hour, and decide to walk slowly for a short way, rather than hurrying to see the whole thing. One of our companions stops and points into the forest. A wallaby grazes. I whip out my camera and get a great shot of tree bark and a blur that might be the wallaby.

The rain forest is full of vines; they range in size from twine, to rope to hawsers. The vines wrap other trees forming odd patterns. Some of the trees are very large, and look to be made of many trees that have melted together. We learn these are strangler fig trees. The wrap themselves around, and strangle, a core tree. More wrap around and melt in. They look like they should be part of the set for the movie Alien.

The driver takes us home. Someone who lives at the hotel has agreed to allow us to share her high speed, wireless internet connection for $5 a day. We get the password and, with minor difficulty, get hooked up and check emails. All is well.

We go to bed about 7:30. It was a good day. Not what we expected, but a very good day.

Day Two

Day two is a day of rest. We have no scheduled events. We wake up at three a.m, convince ourselves we can go back to sleep, and lie there for another two hours. At around five am the birds start to sing. Many birds. Cheepers, peepers, cooers and cacklers. It is loud but delightful. I decide I might as well walk down to the beach. Miriam rouses and joins me. The path to the beach goes by a trailer campground. A white Australian ibis, a bird about the size of a chicken with a long, downturning beak, is scavenging the campsites for yummies.

The beach is beautiful. We walk by the wreck of the S.S. Dicky, for which our beach is named, and farther North. A group of teenagers are taking a life saving class. There are a few other people on the beach, but it is not crowded. It is lovely.



We return to our hotel and decide we should go shopping. We grab a bus with another couple and go to the downtown area of Caloundra. It’s interesting to shop in another country. Some of the prices here, maybe most, seem higher. A six pack of beer is about $12 Australian, which is over $10 US. Foods are priced by the kilo, and prices are in Australian dollars, so at first it seems like meat is way too expensive, and then when we realize the price is for more than two pounds, it seems pretty cheap.

We have brought backpacks and rolling carryon bags to help us schlep the groceries back to our hotel. Our companions purchased celery. It’s leafy top sticks out of their backpack as we head back. Again we fail to look like the people in travel magazines.

We stop and have lunch at a Chinese restaurant. The very nice Chinese lady speaks broken English, but with an Australian accent. She tries to engage us in conversation. We smile and nod a lot, mostly having no idea what she is saying.

We take the bus back, put away the groceries, and go to bed way too early.

The end of the first day

Miriam and I have signed up to go kayaking our first evening. We have second thoughts because we are so tired, but go anyway. It is WONDERFUL.

From the shore, before we even go out in the boats, we see very large whitish shapes on the opposite shore. They turn out to be pelicans with white bodies and black wings. Standing on land, the big ones are four feet tall. We paddle out and see dark shapes downstream. The guide tells us they are black swans.

We travel upstream as the sky gets darker. We see osprey, heron and a pair of azure kingfishers. Mangroves grow at the water’s edge, their trunks standing about two feet above the waterline on thousands of root-legs.

There is a small forest fire close by. Smoke drifts across the river; it smells good. After a while we pull off, get out, and Dean, the guide, and his wife offer us water or an orange flavored liquid we do not recognize and can not pronounce, and “biscuits” (cookies). They taste good. Evidently we taste good too, because we begin to be bitten by midges. They are too small to see, but definitely not too small to feel. Dean sprays us with something that repels them, mostly.

We talk to a man who has come down to the river with his two young sons and his dog. The dog is a Queensland blue heeler. He is beautiful.

We paddle back. Some of the river is quite shallow, and the guide tells us not to worry about the stingrays. We ask more about them. Apparently in deeper water they get up to six feet in diameter. Steve Irwin's zoo is just a bit of a drive from here: he was killed by a large stingray in deeper water. Here in the shallows they are rarely more than two feet, and the biggest the guide remembers seeing is about three feet. He tells us that he once had one push his kayak aside, calmly and determinedly, so it could get to where it wanted to go.

The guide is delightful. Very knowledgeable about the wildlife. He is tall, thin and muscular, and wears an Indiana Jones style hat. He once was a shipwright, built his own sailboat, and spent some time sailing around Australia with his wife, Debbie, who has a smile that lights the world around her and an attitude to match. Now they run Blue Water Kayak Tours in Caloundra. Highly recommended! He made all the kayaks himself, which are excellent and easy for us novices to handle.

At the end some of us travel beyond the takeout point to see the black swans. It’s almost dark and we get close enough that several take flight. They are big birds. We paddle in as the light fades, pry ourselves out of the kayaks, and head back to our hotel.

We grab fish and chips at a “takeaway” next to our hotel, eat it in our room, pretend we are going to read, crawl into bed, and lose consciousness. It’s Sunday evening and we left home Friday morning. Even allowing for the fact we crossed the international dateline, it’s been a long day.

The beginning of the first day

This is a long post about a long trip.

We were up late the night before. I worked until about ten, came home, packed and crashed at about one in the morning. Miriam kept packing, cleaning and organizing until about 3:30 in the morning. We got up a little after seven Friday morning.

Our flight left at noon. We wanted to make sure we weren’t late, so we asked the shuttle to pick us up at 9:00 am. Of course there was no traffic, so we got to the airport by 9:30.

A bunch of folks from Miriam’s team were already there. After greetings we checked our luggage, had breakfast, and sat down to wait for our flight. We had lots of time.

The flight to Los Angeles lasted two hours. For reasons I will never understand, the travel agent who booked Miriam's team had given us a nine hour layover in LAX.

We decided to take a cab to Marina Del Rey to kill time. It’s about four miles from LAX. The trip took half an hour and cost over $20 because of traffic. We ate at the original “El Torito” and watched it start to rain.

We called a cab, went back to the airport, and waited. We finally boarded and the engines started. We got a little giddy, and then we waited. The captain announced a problem with the runway, and our flight that was supposed to take off at 11:00 pm finally left the ground at 11:30.

It was a nice airplane and a nice flight. Our seats were in row 52. Fourteen hours in coach is fourteen hours in coach, even if the Qantas seats are wider than some and have those nifty LCD screens in the back of the seat and a very nice complement of free, first run movies. We tried to stay up as late as we could to help get on Brisbane time. Made it through the dinner and closed our eyes. We slept fitfully, read some, and watched some movies.

At about 4 am Brisbane time the flight attendants served breakfast. Our flight landed about 6 am. We were starting to get really excited. They let the whole other side of the plane out first and then 51 rows of people in front of us. I had trouble finding my bag in the overhead bins.

But we finally got out of the plane to get our first real view of Australia. It was raining. We looked and felt as fresh as daisies that have just made a leisurely trip through a cow’s cloaca.

We staggered off the jetway and saw what every exhausted traveler drams of seeing –customs!

Unfortunately, our view of customs was a bit hampered by the hundreds of people queued up in front, arranged in switchbacks that rival Disneyland on Spring Break. We queued too. We were punchy and slow moving. People took advantage and cut the line in front of Miriam. It did not improve our mood.

We finally made it through the switchbacks, talked to a very nice man in a little box, and were given the OK to go get our luggage. We did, and had the opportunity to queue up in another long line. We were still punchy and slow. More people cut the line in front of Miriam. Still it did not improve our mood.

Finally we got through the queue and emerged in the airport lobby. It had stopped raining!

Miriam leaned over and told me it looks like it’s going to be a pretty day. I get mad and tell her she has no business saying hurtful things like that to me when I’m so tired. It does not improve her mood.

A nice lady holding a sign with the name of our group’s travel agency directed us down a long sidewalk to our hotel shuttle. Miriam’s small bag, which was supposed to lie happily on top of her big roller bag, turned out to be just a bit too big to fit. She had to wheel two bags across curbs and through narrow passageways while carrying her backpack. I’ve got my messenger bag stuffed full of was beginning to seem like lead bricks, wheeling my big bag with one hand and carrying my dobro with the other. Travel magazines do not show pictures of people like us.

We reach the end of the long sidewalk. There is no shuttle. There is nobody from our group. There is nobody from the travel agency. I finally hail someone and am told we need to cross the street, go down a ramp, and walk through the parking lot. The person says we will be able to see our bus when we reach the lot; it will have the name of our hotel on its side. We cross the street and go down the ramp. The parking lot is huge. It is full of buses. None have the names of hotels on their sides.

We are comforted to see others of our group looking lost and wandering the parking lot.

Finally someone finds where we are supposed to be and we gather. There are two buses guarded by determinedly cheerful guides who work for our travel agency. You just check with them. They just check their lists to find your name. The lists tell them which bus you are allowed to get on. People we know who found the buses before we did are boarding happily. All of us feel like we can relax now. The long trip is almost over; we just get on the bus, have a nice ride, check in the hotel and do something decadent like showering.

Our turn comes and we ask the travel agent person which bus we should get on. She asks us our names. She pauses. She asks our names again. Our names are not on the list.

She tells us to wait. We wait. Miriam asks for more information. We get more information, but it is not useful information and it does not comfort us. It omits any clear statement of what will happen to us. We are told to wait some more. We are getting pretty frigging tired of waiting. I explain this to the travel agency person rather clearly. Some might say excessively clearly, but I did not think so at the time. I do obtain clear assurances that we will be bussed to our hotel sometime. Eventually we are actually put on a bus. We regard this as a hopeful sign.

On the bus we do something unexpected: we wait. The other bus going to our hotel leaves. We continue to wait. Then we wait some more. Then a nice, cheerful travel agent person boards the bus and tells us two things:

1: They are not going to keep us waiting for the people who had trouble getting through customs.

2. The hotel is trying to get our rooms ready, and if we are lucky, we might actually be able to check in when we get to Caloundra, which is an hour’s drive from Brisbane.

Neither bit of news cheers us much. It had not occurred to us that we might have to sit on the bus until everybody cleared customs. We wonder briefly if any of our traveling companions are smugglers.

It also had not occurred to us that we would not be able to check in as soon as we arrive and do decadent things like showering. It is a blow. We check our watches and realize it is only about 8:30 in the morning, Brisbane time. Now it makes sense that we might not be able to check in right away. It irritates us that it makes sense.

We wait more. Someone else comes aboard the bus. She is from an environmental agency of the Australian government, and is there to help us. She explains that Australia is very concerned not to import obnoxious algae from the US and Canada into Australian waterways. The dragonboating ladies nod their heads sympathetically. They hate that mucky, smelly algae.

Then the agency lady says that everyone with a life vest in their luggage must surrender it to the agency for a few days so the agency can sterilize it. Sympathy among the dragonboating ladies diminishes visibly. The ladies carrying life vests have to get their luggage out from under the bus, extract their life vests and hand them over to the agency.

Miriam accepts all this with impressive good grace. She and the members of her team didn’t bring life vests.

Once the vests are collected everybody gets back in the bus and we wait some more. Someone pulls out a walkie-talkie type device and calls the bus that already left. That driver is told to pull off the highway so the nice person from the government can go get the vests in that bus too. Our envy of the other bus diminishes.

Then somebody new from the agency gets on to explore a new plan, in which the agency will just keep the life vests and not disinfect them, and the ladies who brought them will simply do without. After a shorter discussion of this plan than the agency person would have liked, this plan is rejected by the dragonboating ladies who brought lifejackets, the agency person leaves, and the bus driver actually starts driving.

We are in a nice tourist style bus, seated up high with great views. We are traveling down a divided freeway. We note we are driving on the left side of the road. We are so tired it seems natural.

We see a building that looks familiar. McDonald’s. There is a KFC next to it, and a Subway somewhat farther along. Except for the trees and driving on the left side of the road, it looks a lot like Southern California. Lots of houses have tile roofs. Big areas of land are being scraped raw and prepared for new housing developments.

A ways out of Brisbane we enter forests of some sort of long needled pine. They look a lot like odd: every once in a while, as the bus drives by, we can see broad aisles between the trunks. These are farmed pines, planted in neat rows. There are lots of them.

About half an hour out the driver pulls off the road at a commercial rest stop. We are told we can get out, use the comfort station and grab a bite to eat. The place has a food court. with a “Wild Bean” coffee shop (kind of like Starbucks), a McDonalds, a KFC, and some sort of place that serves sandwiches that seem to consist mostly of mayonnaise.

Miriam gets in line to get us coffee, and I get in line to get us our first meal in Australia: KFC chicken wings – extra crispy.

We arrive in Caloundra at our hotel: Portobello by the Sea. The driver brings the bus to a stop and tells us to get off. The ocean is just across the street and the sun is shining. Our hearts beat a bit faster.

We rise up, pull on our bags, and a determinedly cheerful lady enters the bus and tells us to sit back down. The driver is told to drive us to the back of the hotel. We then get out, get our luggage, and assemble in the interior courtyard to receive our keys. It all takes about five times longer than seems necessary. People stand in the courtyard looking dazed. The courtyard is lovely. Swimming pool, tall bamboos, palms, hibiscus, other things we don’t recognize. Finally we get our keys, our rooms and, ahhh, our showers. It’s about 9:30 am Sunday morning, but it feels like late afternoon to us.

(The picture is of the wreck of the S.S. Dicky, which is on the beach directly in front of our hotel, which is located at Dicky Beach in Caloundra, Queensland, Australia)