Ginger Without Borders

Blog readers may wonder where we have been for the last few days. Saturday was our last day in Brisbane with a wonderful adventure chasing the humpback whales in Moreton Bay. Dawn was tired and said she was going to bed early but it turns out she had something to watch on the TV (more later). I took the opportunity for one more excellent dinner in Grey Street beside the South Bank Parklands. Then one last glance across the River into the commercial center of Brisbane.

We should have known that that Sunday was going to present some challenges when we arrived in the hotel restaurant at what my Vodafone cell phone told me to be the opening time of 7:30am. It was a Sunday but no one was in the restaurant and there was no food! I looked at my watch which said 6:30am, so in total confusion we returned to our room. I searched my phone and determined that it was on Sydney time (Vodafone’s headquarters), not Brisbane time. When I changed it to Brisbane time, it was suddenly 6:30am.

So we packed our things for our drive to our next destination in Coloundra about an hour north near the Australian Zoo. When we went back down for breakfast, we found some confused Australians who had also appeared at 6:30am because of their phones. A local from Brisbane explained that Sydney (and much of the rest of Australia) had switched to daylight savings time overnight. Unlike the US, we had not seen any announcements regarding a time change. He explained this was because Queensland (the province of which Brisbane is the capital) does not observe daylight savings time. We were so glad our humpback whale adventure had been on Saturday.

We had little time to ponder all the other evils that the time change could have made to our schedule because Lena had booked Dawn for some “animal encounters” at the Australian Zoo. We needed to make sure the hour long drive got us to the Zoo in time for Dawn to check in for an 11:00am for her first encounter. That drive went well but we arrived at the Zoo to a mass of families. Turns out, October 7 is a significant national holiday in Australia – the Queen’s Birthday Holiday.

Now here is where you get some insight into the Australian mindset. Queen Elizabeth (the longest serving British monarch) is the Head of State of Australia (and other British Commonwealth countries, like our neighbor, Canada). Only Christmas and Boxing Day (another one of those British Holidays that did not translate to the US – it is the day after Christmas) are more significant Australian national holidays, according to our Australian friends. The British don’t even celebrate the Queen’s birthday as national holiday. However, her birthday is in June which is in the middle of the Australian winter. The pragmatic Australians decided that they would rather have a day off in the lovely weather of Spring, so they celebrate her birthday in October. And for good measure, they throw in a school holiday for the kids the preceding week (ie., Spring Break). So you can imagine the “fun” all these families were having as the Spring Break was ending at the Zoo.

Lena worked at the Australian Zoo (home of Steve Irwin of Crocodile Hunter fame) for three summers. Two were with a high school exchange program and the third was as a college counselor for the same program. She loves the Australian Zoo. Her and her Mom have a practice of attending the local zoo wherever they travel together. Mom was not going to pass up the opportunity to see where Lena worked. Lena had done a number of the “animal encounters” while working at the Zoo and Mom wanted those experiences. Despite the crowded conditions (some of the encounters Dawn wanted were sold out even though Lena had booked them in advance), we got her checked in and off to her encounters. There was a good surprise in all the confusion but that stories will come in the next blog.

This blog is about the Queen’s Birthday Holiday. The encounters kept us at the Zoo until 4:30pm. We were tired but pleased with the day. I could almost taste the beer I was going to have in the pool that our “resort hotel” boasted. We pull up to the glass front doors of the resort at 4:55pm. Nobody is in the lobby and the doors are locked. So I pull out the book we got from the travel agent and call the hotel. An after-hours message begins telling us that it is the Queen’s Birthday Holiday and the resort desk closed at 4pm. I am transferred to another line. After about 3 minutes, a voice comes on. She confirms that we have a reservation but then tells me I have to hang up the telephone and use the intercom call button beside the doors so she can give me a code to the safe inside the lobby where our key and papers are deposited. Apparently, she can’t unlock the front doors unless I use the intercom call button.

I push the intercom button and go through the whole wait process again, but she finally come on the intercom, gives us a code for the safe and opens the glass doors. Luckily for us, there was another guest in the lobby. She was using the lobby WiFi because the WiFi in her room didn’t work. Not a good omen. She showed us in the safe papers the diagram of the twisting path to our assigned parking spot in the parking deck that was on the other side of the hotel (facing the water). She also directed us to the map showing which of the four towers was where our room was located. We find the parking deck space and our room. The A/C is not on and there are no directions for the A/C. We are right beside the pool and I ask another guest coming from the pool for A/C directions. He said he had no idea because he never used his A/C, he just opened his windows. So we opened our windows and hoped for some good wind. We are beside the water and there is wind that night. In the middle of the night, the A/C just started working spontaneously, so Dawn got up and closed the windows. We did not touch the A/C controls again for fear the A/C would stop.

For some totally random reason, my wife, who never watches sports of any kind, feel in love with Australian rugby while we were in Brisbane. She watched it constantly while I went out to eat. There was a big game that Sunday. Dawn wanted to watch it. There were two controllers but we couldn’t get either to operate the TV. And there was no one to call because it was the Queen’s Birthday Holiday.

We were also supposed to have free WiFi but, unless you could provide an access code, the only WiFi that the resort site offered was paid WiFi. The papers we were given in the safe had no mention of a WiFi code. So no blog post that night reporting all the fun we had gotten into at Steve Irwin’s Zoo. The paper from the safe also said that our Key would “expire” at 10am the following morning unless we checked in with the resort desk which opened at 8am Monday morning. Dawn’s “animal encounter” was at 9am Monday and the Zoo was half an hour away. So we were awake at 6:30am (intentionally this time) the next morning to get some breakfast and be at the resort desk as soon as it opened.

Upon reflection, I should have taken the time to ask about the WiFi access code Monday morning because, by now, I knew that the resort desk would only be open until 4pm because it was the Queen’s Birthday Holiday. But it was more important to get my baby to the Zoo in time for her animal encounter. We did and she had another round of stories that will wait for another blog.

Back at the resort around 5pm, I figured that there was a beer somewhere in my future but first, Dawn and I jumped into the pool to rinse off the heat of the day. The wind off the water was blowing pretty steady so it didn’t take long until we were cold. Dawn elected to stay at the resort while I went out for a light dinner. As you might suspect, not many restaurants were open, electing instead to allow their staff to celebrate the Queen’s Birthday Holiday. The Indians (for whom the Queen is not a Head of State even though they are members of the Commonwealth), the Italians and the Chinese did open their restaurants. I elected Italian pasta, so my beer became a nice Australian red wine.

Tuesday was going to be the Glass House Mountains road trip, so I has some time to visit the resort desk. The clerk agreed to send someone to “repair” our TV. She also said that in order to get the free WiFi, I had to join the chain’s loyalty club which was free. I said fine and started to open my laptop, which I had carried to the desk so I could be instructed how to enter the WiFi access code. She said she first had to send me an invitation to join the loyalty club by email and the email could take a while to arrive. So we were off to the Glass House Mountains. We arrive back at the resort at 5pm and the email has arrived. I enter the information requested and am accepted as a member of the loyalty club. I am given an ID number but no access code for the WiFi. So down to the resort desk again but it is no longer the Queen’s Birthday Holiday, so she is still at the desk. She now explains that since that I am officially a member of the loyalty club (with an official member ID number), she can give me the access code to the free WiFi. Who makes up these rules??? I guess customer service has a different meaning to different folks, but I will take the high road and not spend a whole blog post complaining about it in honor of the bloody Queen’s Birthday.