Rain and Shine

It was a dark and stormy night. 

Shortly before 5:00 a.m. we left the house for the two hour drive to Shute Harbour, a little past Airlie Beach, where we were to board a catamaran for our trip to the Great Barrier Reef.

It rained harder than I have ever seen. 

If rain were fired out of machine guns, then we drove through thousands of machine guns pelting us intermittently on our drive.  Thank goodness it was intermittent.  Now and then it would let up, even stop momentarily giving us a ray of hope but it was just reloading before bombarding us some more.  And it was still dark for the first hour, making the driving even hairier.  I didn’t talk to Hans at all because I knew he was concentrating hard on the road.  It was an awful drive, and ditto on the way home except that now there was oncoming traffic and the lights were not only blinding but reflecting off the wet surface making it difficult to see where the road was going.

But then, as dawn gradually lifted the night, the clouds also parted and we could see blue sky.  By the time we reached the end of the road at Shute Harbour, the sky was mostly blue with only some cloud.  Lo and behold, a perfect day.

And it got better.

Here we are at Hamilton Island where we picked up more passengers.  It’s obviously a place of not only many expensive yachts but clearly some of the rich and famous fly in.