I’ll start this blog with a public service announcement. You likely are much smarter than I and already know this, but Cairns is pronounced as “Cans”. So either (1) you now know that I clearly pronounced it incorrectly in front of many an Australian or (2) you can just save yourself some embarrassment if you ever need to reference it in the future. You’re welcome. This is also the part where you sit back and realize how clever the title of this blog post is…and I just lost at least 10 followers with that one. Anyway, I digress.
By the time we made it to Cairns from Daintree it was late, as in Jack pretty much went straight to bed kind of late. I found a room available at the Rydges Esplanade hotel that had a family room with two separate bedrooms, hooray! These aren’t always easy to find, so then they’re available it’s basically like hitting the jackpot. My strategy was to find the cheapest room that I could that had (1) a high rating on Trip Advisor and Booking.com (2) had a separate space for Jack, (3) was within walking distance of restaurants and (4) was actually free for the night! Um, not exactly easy (especially on a weekend!), but we did well with this one.
The plan was to stay one night, check out the next morning after breakfast and head to Kuranda. However, when we woke up the next morning and looked the window, we saw this…
Then we looked down and saw this…
Plans kind of went out the window after that. We’d wrapped up our time in Sydney with some pretty packed days trying to make sure we saw everything that we wanted before leaving. And since we flew into Cairns we’d been on the go all day, every day. The good (and bad) thing about the kind of traveling we are doing is that there’s really no such thing as a weekend. You can just keep going and going without any natural sort of break like a weekend to relax a bit. And yes, I know it sounds ridiculous to say we ‘don’t have time to relax’ on this trip. However, it’s easy to find ourselves just going and going until we’re all kind of exhausted and not sure why!
All that to say, plans went out the window and we took the opportunity to stay an extra night and spend all day relaxing by the pool. It’s funny, at first when we were trying to decide what to do, Matt said he’d check the weather. He looked and it was supposed to be a stormy afternoon, but nice in the morning. Jack immediately pipes up and says, “We probably shouldn’t go to Kuranda if it’s supposed to storm.” He knew it was a place where we were going to take a skyrail to the top of a mountain. So, of course, he started nonchalantly championing for a pool day…well played, sir! Needless to say, it wasn’t really hard to twist our arms.
We spent most of the day hanging out by the pool and enjoying some nice weather.
As the weather had predicted, some afternoon storms did start rolling in. Once it started to look a bit ominous, we headed in and spent a few hours inside being lazy, catching up on our to do list (just for the record, to do lists don’t exactly go away when you decide to check out of normal life for awhile…they still exist!) and enjoying the view.
By the time dinnertime rolled around, it had cleared up enough for us to take a stroll down the Esplanade in search of some fresh seafood for dinner. It was a perfect lazy day and I think we all needed a day of not doing anything ‘productive’! Thank you, Cairns, for the amazing time. I apologize as I know you have so much more to offer the world than nice pools and comfy hotels rooms, but it was pretty much exactly what we needed! 🙂
The Detour Diary 