Wednesday 4th April

Check-out from Cairns was at 10 am and check-in at Port Douglas, just a one hour drive North, wasn’t until 2 pm so we made our way slowly up the coast.

There was a quick Chemist shop stop to purchase sea sickness tablets and then a slightly longer coffee stop to check out Palm Cove. We hadn’t been there before so it was good to tick it off the list. Palm Cove is very pretty and such a pity that the box jellyfish keep swimmers from enjoying the tropical paradise swimming.

There was just one lookout stop before we arrived at Port Douglas which meant we still had an hour to kill before picking up the apartment keys. So we decided to fill the time with a light lunch and the choice was between a pub with no a/c or Paddy’s Irish Pub that was blessedly cool. It was a tough decision but you can guess which one won out from the photo of Tom having his first ever Guinness. The other bonus was the huge screen TV showing AFL re-runs so it was also a rather quiet lunch for me 🙁

We headed out at around 2pm to collect the keys for our AirBnB  and this ended up being another lovely apartment pick making the success rate for this trip 2/2! We quickly settled in to our new lodging and then Mark and Tom walked down to Coles to pick up some supplies. Mark and I then headed to the pool and how lucky was Mark to find that the one and only guy at the pool was an AFL fan (Tigers) and keen to talk footy! We eventually drifted back upstairs after about an hour and, feeling rather lazy, decided to BBQ in for the night. The boys were booked in for a full-day reef visit the next morning so we opted for an early night.