Lyn’s Recovery Continues but the Credit Card takes a Hit with Retail Therapy

Despite been deprived of wine last night (doctors orders, Barry’s enforcement), Lyn continued to improve and woke up as expected this morning. The most noticeable difference in her appearance being that the bruising from her forehead has dropped down to her eyelid and socket. She has a real shiner, but for some reason doesn’t want the photo published!!

Lyn was happy enough to go exploring today so we headed off, not back to Magnetic Island, but to the local aquarium which had some wonderful live coral and sea life exhibits. Again the pictures can do the talking.

The aquarium was excellent, a majority of the fish were in a VERY large central tank probably 25ft deep. Well worth the visit.

Lyn was still fine and up for more exploring so we headed up Castle Hill, at the top was a look out with an old WWII fort, complete with graffiti.

This is the hill looking up from our hotel parking lot

This is the hotel from Castle Hill, its the tall white building just to the left of the escarpment.

This “60’s painted” car was more likely a more modern rendition referring to Brexit? Its slogan down the side is “Anarchy in the UK”

We saw this fruit tree in the area, we suspect it is a Pomelo. Anyone agree or disagree?

Buy nw the heat was building so we headed down to the town, I wanted to get a couple of things from my new favourite store Jaycar, an Electronics store of the type that is now hard to find in N. America with the possible exception of Fry’s in the US.

I went in to buy a small buzzer to fit in the MGB as a warning that I have left the lights on, and a suction holder for the cell phone, to use in the car (more on that shortly). I walked out with buzzer and a “GoPro” type camera! After leaving the aquarium I really thought I needed to be prepared for our snorkeling trip on the Great Barrier reef. Originally I planned on buying a throw away, waterproof film camera. Why buy one of those when for only 10 times the price you can buy a digital one!!!! When I got back to the car Lyn reminded me of my original objective, the phone holder!

I didn’t have the official Garmin Oz maps in the car GPS, instead I had downloaded some open source maps. The maps are fine as you drive along, but are sorely lacking when you put in a destination address. 90% of the addresses input result in no address found message, even though the GPS has auto completed the address when it has been partially input. This got to be highly frustrating, so one day I said “OK Google navigate to 75 The Strand”, Google politely replied “OK, I’ve found that” and proceeded to guide me there. So far Google has only let us down once, sort of, we navigated to a town not an address and we were taken to the town limit sign rather than the town centre. The speech recognition is fantastic. Bye bye Garmin!

Next stop was a belated lunch, which unfortunately was in a shopping centre. After lunch, the credit card was in for a further beating. Lyn had lost her watch in the accident, so that was replaced. A handbag and dress found their way onto the shopping list as did 1.5Kg of CDM (that’s just a start for the CDM!). We also found a few presents to take back as well.

Over the last 24 hours I’ve been busy doing paperwork for the insurance companies. I was surprised how cheap some of the medical costs were, particularly for a private hospital, e.g. 3 CAT scans for a total of ~$1000 and admission, assessment, diagnosis and a 4 hour stay for for observation ~$400. It appears that my retirement insurance package should cover it all at 100%. Our only real outlay was ~ $400 for repairs to the scooter, the credit card doesn’t cover vehicles with less than 4 wheels. No problem it will be taken out of Lyn’s pocket money!