July 23, 2007

Today was our last day in Cairns, and our flight didn’t leave until early evening. This meant we had essentially another full day, but with not quite enough time to do a full daytrip anywhere (not that there was anywhere we have missed on the list of big destinations). Our plan was to go see a couple of the small Cairns museums and maybe do a little shopping. First stop was the Cairns Art Gallery – closed for display modifications. This was our second failure at getting into the gallery. Ah well. Next we went to The Cairns Museum, which was a small museum completely full of displays that was put together by the Cairns historical society. It was a wonderful museum for the history dork in everyone, with displays that ranged from mining history to dentistry to teaching to telegraphs to aboriginal culture. It was also jam-packed into the little space and almost overwhelming for that fact. But still, very interesting. We had a late lunch at the Sushi Train restaurant that we had tried before, this time while they were actively making sushi. We had some very good fresh seafood and some interesting combinations and overall a great time and good meal. But then we had three hours still until we needed to go to the airport. So we wandered around and did some shopping. We thought about going to the “wildlife dome” in the one casino in Cairns, but ultimately decided it wasn’t worth $20 each to see what we were sure would be a smaller and less impressive version of the wildlife places we had already seen. So we walked around and strolled along the waterfront and got a late-afternoon-coffee, and headed to the airport late in the afternoon. We got back into Sydney at about 10:30 and checked back into the hotel for a good sleep.