Frustrating Day in Brisbane

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Today started out very early. We were up at 5:30 am for our 6:55 flight. We flew from Christchurch to Auckland, then we were to head out to Brisbane. At first they gave us a hard time and we weren't sure if we were going to get on the plane. We did after a little bit of frustration. The good thing was we finally got on a plane that had the individual movies on the seat. The time difference between NZ and Australia is 3 hours, which we gained, so our flight landed at 11 am. We got down stairs to find out that Brisbane is rather large and the only way to get to the hotel from the airport is by taxi or limosine. We were so annoyed at this point to learn that not only was it nearly impossible for us to get to the city from our hotel, due to the distance, but we also found out that everything we wanted to do closes at 4:30. At this time it was 11:30 so we only had 5 hours in Brisbane to do anything. So annoyed, we ended up renting another car. The women at Hertz made it worse, she was the biggest @#$%^ in world and gave us a hard time about not getting the additional insurance, claiming that they had big hail storms the previous night and we would be liable if there were any more tonight. Oh well, it ended up that there were hail storms in Australia but not in Brisbane. To make things worse we just wanted to get out of the airport and the elevator we were on would not go down. We finally got off the elevator and found an escalator. What a day so far.

We got our car and headed out to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary. This made up for most of the frustration earlier in the morning. We saw kangaroos, wallabys, lorikeets, bats, tasmanian devil, koalas, and many more Australian animals. We got to feed the kangaroos and the lorikeets. The best part was that we got to hold a koala named Denzil. He was so cute and I wanted to keep him. We got our picture made with him as well. At the end of the day we also watched a sheep dog demonstration. The dogs in Tignall were much better trained than these dogs, they were too hyper and actually bit one the sheep.

We left the Koala Sanctuary and headed downtown. We were able to get a little bit of shopping in before we headed to the hotel. We checked in and ordered a pizza from Pizza Hut, woo hoo. It was the best pizza I think we have ever had, we were so hungry and tired at this point. We ended up going to sleep before 9 to get ready for the next day.

It has to be better than today.

Tami