Final day in Airlie

We slept so much better in a stationary, climate controlled room. We woke up and got to FaceTime with MacKenzie which makes everything a little better.

FaceTiming with MacK (and Susie)

The place we stayed had a free breakfast complete with Vegemite. We decided there was no better time for Jackson to try it.

Fake excitement

I posted the video of the experience. He hated it. He says it was SO salty and didn't taste like anything he'd previously eaten. The best description he had was "burnt, concentrated beef gravy." I don't know about you, but that sounds horrid. They say if you don't like beer then you won't like Vegemite as they're both derived from yeast. I hate beer so I skipped the taste test. :)

The closest we've come to an animal attack- HA!

We got packed up and caught the airport shuttle. It is a good thing we've relaxed into "holiday time" because no one moves with haste in Airlie Beach. The airport had two gates and the easiest security ever. Our flight to Brisbane was on the cleanest airplane we'd ever been on (yay, Virgin Australia) and was not nearly full so we both got our own rows to sleep in. It was a quick 1.5 hour flight into Brisbane where we got our first rental car of the trip and headed south to come to the Gold Coast. Jackson drove and I navigated with our rented TomTom Navigation unit. We never pay for those but the who driving on the opposite side in a foreign land thing trumped our normal frugalness.

Jackson had a bit of a transition issue, but eventually mellowed out and got us here safely. He said that his who perspective was so off that he just could not get comfortable.

The view from our new place

We got to our place around 3 p.m. local time, got all checked in and parked (whoa, harder than it should have been due to their parking garages making ZERO sense). Our serviced apartment here is on the 7th floor and partially faces the beach. The space itself is quite nice, but the finishes could use some upgrading. The bathroom feels especially European! The unit does have laundry, though, so we were happy!

LAUNDRY

Making breakfast dish

(Note: It appears that Jackson is the only one who works on things but in reality he just never takes photos so I did most of the laundry and then made him pose with it. He did actually do the whole breakfast dish prep as I needed to catch up on blogs!)

We walked to two grocery stores near our place and they were insane. It was like people didn't know if the stores would ever reopen after Christmas so they had to buy everything that night. It was like the Wednesday before Thanksgiving plus some madness. The area of Surfers Paradise is pretty cool. It is like Miami Beach but quite a bit bigger. We did some exploring and walking along the beach last night before just calling it a night. We were happy to have a completely private home base for a couple of days where we could just settle in and get comfortable.

It was certainly not what I'd call a traditional Christmas Eve, but I'm not sure we have those anymore. We figured out that we had not been home for Christmas in at least 9 years so we don't even really know what it would be like anymore!