Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 27-Dec through 30-Dec-2019

As is tradition, Sarah and I spent Christmas and New Years on an international adventure of epic proportions.  This year, the Lydecker clan (including myself and Henry’s girlfriend Leah) met up in the land down under, the magical land of Australia.

Waking up in Cairns, our first order of business was to get ourselves to the docks, to begin the first big adventure of the trip – visiting Fitzroy Island on the Great Barrier Reef!

To warn you, there was one small issue with our trip to Fitzroy… See, Fitzroy is a beautiful tropical paradise, surrounded by coral, with warm clear water and blue skies.  Except when there’s a cyclone hitting the reef.  Then, it’s a beautiful tropical paradise island, covered in rain forest, with interesting trails to hike on.

But we’d planned on exploring the reef, which as I mentioned was currently being hit by a cyclone.  Which is Australian for a Monsoon.  Which is South Pacific for Hurricane.  Which is East Coast for “it’s a right big storm, it is!”.  But would 3ft visibility stop me?  No!  No I say!  I still snorkeled with the best of them!  Which was easy, because no one else was crazy enough to snorkel during a cyclone!

Thursday, 27-Dec

Early boat ride to Fitzroy, then hang out for a while as they finish getting our rooms ready.

Hike a bit of the Summit track with Greta, swim a small bit, and learn that I’m impressively bad at snorkling.  Like, really bad.  Impressively, terrifyingly bad.  So Sarah and I Snorkeled in the pool for a bit, which was fun.  Trivia fact: we both look awesome in swim suits.

Why did we have full-body swim suits, you may ask?  Well, this is jellyfish season.  There’s the Man-o-War jellies, which have 3meter long stingers that are sort-of pretty deadly.  But there’s also the Irukandji jellyfish, which is clear, and roughly the size of your thumbnail.  They’re both deadly.  The Irukandji is actually the most venemous jellyfish in the world!  And it’s tiny and effectively invisible!

So we wear stinger suits.  Not only are they a truly amazing fashion statement (not sarcasm, fyi.  I looked awesome), but they protect you from the jellies should they be nearby.  Of course, if there’s any evidence of the jellyfish then the resort would warn everyone to stay out of the water….

Anyways.  Then we Had dinner at Foxy’s (the lounge at the resort), and played the first round of trivia.  It was extremely pop-culture, and since none of us were any good at that…. we turned in and got an early evening.

Friday, 28-Dec

Sarah and I do the summit track, out to the lighthouse, after having breakfast in the dining room.

Then do a little more attempted swimming while Sarah relaxes and paints on the beach. I… almost get capable of it!  Slowly, the rock climber learns to enjoy the water!

Then back to the room to cook up some kangaroo stirfry!  Sarah and I cooked, and I’d like to think that we cooked pretty well!

Saturday, 29-Dec

Hike out to Nudey beach, which is not actually a nude beach.  They’re very adamant about that, with quite a few signs making mention.  That’s just the name of the beach, okay?

Explore to the “Secret garden”, which isn’t really much of a garden.  But it is a hike in, so I guess it fits with the “secret” aspect?

Then I swim around some more, actually getting almost good at this whole snorkling thing!  Take some more pictures… but still not much to be seen.  I did have a friend, though!  My stinger suit had yellow trim, and this little fish decided that I was his fish-bro, since he’s yellow too. Fish-bro swam next to me the whole time, hanging out and flipping around.

Dinner is at the main restaurant, which is quite lovely!  We eat, we drink, we laugh, and we enjoy ourselves as the rain lashed at the windows.  It was chilly… but honestly really impressive to see the storm over the ocean, and watch the mainland vanish as the storm rolled in.

Sunday, 30-Dec

Our last day on Fitzroy 🙁

I swim for a while in the morning after we check out from our rooms, and finally see coral! It’s terrifying, because it appears out of the murky depths, but is still beautiful.  Seriously, I freaked out so many times… I had the best visibility to date, but it was still less than 6 ft, and so I’d look left for 2 seconds, and then look straight and see this monster looming ahead of me.  I’d freak out, splash around a bit, and then realize it was just kelp, or something.

But it was lovely, and I got the best pictures of the trip.  So that’s a good thing.

Then we get the ferry back, had some lunch, got on a plane, and flew home to Sydney! It was definitely a long flight, but it wasn’t bad.  And since we layed over in Brisbane we were able to have some awesome tex-mex as a little taste of home!