Brisbane Briefly

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Kate has her annual KBS conference and this year it's in Fremantle, WA (that's the port city suburb of Perth Australia). We've been to Australia many times, I think the first was in 2003 for a conference that was also in Fremantle. That time we went for a month, likewise this time.

It's an awfully long way to Western Australia, they are 12 hours ahead of us (8:30am Sunday there is 8:30pm Monday here) so flying is a pretty long and tortuous adventure. We took the Stratford Airporter to Toronto on Monday for an afternoon flight. We flew non stop to Vancouver, where we had a brief stop over (9:30pm dinner in Maple Leaf  Lounge) and then flew overnight over the Pacific to Brisbane in QLD arriving in the early morning of Wednesday — over the International Date Line we lost Tuesday!

We stayed a couple of nights at the Brisbane Domestic Airport (the International is a short cab ride away) at the Pullman Hotel to try to adjust to the time change and recover from the travel. The plan is to recover for a few days and then fly out Friday morning for Perth.

Kate is recovering from nerve damage in her ankle so navigating long flights and walking any distance is a bit of a struggle. We took advantage of ground staff at the various airports to get us around. We were flying business class so we would have "pods" to sleep in on the overnight leg over the Pacific. There was a really nice fellow from Air Canada helping us in Brisbane. He had lived in Toronto for a while but much preferred the semi-tropical climate of QLD (but there's a photo I cribbed from the local news of a frosted car window in the higher elevations of QLD that day — after all, it is their winter). Having help with a wheel chair made getting through security and passport control a snap. We bumped into the same fellow on our return home a month later when Kate was even more in need of assistance. She had torn ligaments in her ankle and was on crutches for our return!

We arrived at the Pullman well before check-in time but they were able to get us a room fairly quickly. We had a coffee by the pool while waiting. We never got in the pool, it wasn't heated and would have been quite cool. There is a very fancy restaurant at the hotel. Reg had breakfast there and we did have a nice dinner there one evening — oddly you need to make a reservation for dinner!

The Pullman and Ibis hotels are at the airport conference center which is only a short walk from the Domestic Airport and Parking Garage. There's a more easy going restaurant at the Ibis, where we grabbed a pizza on our last night (before we flew home).

One of the first things we did after check-in was to take a cab to a nearby shopping mall (the Skygate/DFO Brisbane) for a lunch. Here we found a supermarket that also sold telephone SIM cards, that was one of the main reasons for outing. One of the wisest decisions we made was to leave a message on all of our phones "We are out of the country and unavailable, if you need us send email" and buy local phone numbers. This worked very well and was considerably cheaper than paying roaming fees which cost us a fortune on our last Austin trip. We got a SIM for Kate's phone when we arrived in Fremantle. Dealing with Telstra on line to activate phones is another story. Suffice to say it's not trivial for visitors from out of the country.

Our friends Ross and Bev were gracious hosts and wanted to show us around a bit. On the Thursday, Ross came out in his new Tesla and drove us to the South Bank for dinner with Bev at a favorite Turkish restaurant. The drive from the airport to the South Bank was not at all what I had expected. There's an incredible system of roadways under the city! The last time we were here they had just completed the north/south tunnel under Kangaroo Point. Now there's seems to be tunnels everywhere. Of course they're toll highways, we avoided them when we rented a car later in the trip.

This is not our ideal time to travel. They think of winter beginning the first of June, we think of our summer beginning. Those who live here like the cooler weather, it can be unbearably hot in the summer, I miss working in our gardens and the spring flowers of our more moderate summers.