Our thirteen hour flight to Brisbane, Australia was long but shockingly not unbearable. Jude did very well and slept for about four hour chunks at a time and was happy when he was awake. This enabled Tom and I to relax and catch bits of sleep here and there. Aimee was able to sleep more than six hours so that was great! We touched down in Brisbane and dashed to our next flight that would take us to our final destination (for that day) to Cairns, Australia.
Upon arriving in Cairns we de-boarded on the tarmac and felt the first touches of tropical heat and humidity! We found a taxi and made it to Tree Tops, the missionary guesthouse where we would be staying for our time down under. It felt so good to FINALLY be able to relax. Tom, Jude & I were definitely feeling jet lag at this point so it was wonderful to just be able to sleep and not worry about getting to the next place.
It’s actually winter in Australia right now so we were very thankful for the refreshingly cool mornings and evenings we enjoyed over our few days there.
We spent the next two full days “busily relaxing”. The first day we took the bus to the water front, walked all over the place and tested some Aussie cuisine (kangaroo and crocodile). The next day we took a relaxing train ride up the Cairns mountainsides to a little town called Kuranda. Here we took in the sites and sounds and even visited a small zoo where I held a Koala bear and we all got to feed some kangaroos! AMAZING. Australia is a very interesting and beautiful place, we definitely had our jokes about how maybe we should just stay there! Don’t worry, they were only jokes. 😀
Emotions. That’s what hit us the day we were going to leave for Papua New Guinea from Australia. Dealing with all our fears, stress, emotions of leaving everything that is normal started to weigh down on us. We spent time talking about it as a group and after entrusting our fears and stressors to the Lord, we found relief to our stress through just laughing together- which we did a lot of! We would joke by asking each other if we thought we had just made the biggest mistake of our lives, which of course we had not. Maybe you needed to be there but we laughed a lot and it really helped us get through! It was a huge encouragement to have Aimee along so that together we could pray and laugh together with her.
We are so thankful for all your prayers! SERIOUSLY, there were times we just had to think of you who are on our team through prayer and it encouraged us so much!
Overall, our time in Australia was the perfect way to rest up and even get over our jet-lag for the most part before the last leg of our journey to PNG. The Lord was our strength during that time!
Leave a Reply