8th June - Heading North

Monday 8 June was a public holiday in NSW and the NT (Queen's Birthday) so the traffic from the hotel to Mascot (Sydney) airport was very light. I arrived with plenty of time to check in and read the papers in the lounge before the QANTAS flight up to Darwin. The flight was very ordinary and I had a good seat so I could look at the outback and then the incease in vegetatin as we got further north. Finally we reached Darwin and I was met by Shirley the partner of Chris my old golfing partner - they had kindly offered to put me up as my own house is still rented out.
Before we went back to the flat Shirley drove me around Darwin to show me the changes since I was last home 15 months ago. Heaps of new tower blocks changing the skyline and character of the city as well as many unimginative rectangular apartment blocks down by the new convention centre. Named the "Cockroach" by the locals the CC is rather an odd design and not wholly functional in my opinion. Disabled access is far from state of the art. Since all my time on crutches over the last year or so I am much more aware of these issues and I am surprised at how the darwin authorities allowed such a design. But them maybe knowing Darwin maybe not.......
In the evening I met up with my French colleague from Vienna Didier and we headed of to Mitchell Street for dinner. As it was dry season all the places were open to the street and we had a very pleasant time- especially as the waitress was a french canadian backpacker and we all spoke French! Monsoon was our choice of eatery - last time I was home it was called Rourke's Drift, but in Darwin restaurant name chnages are pretty common every year or three.
It was an early night as D was still recovering from the flight as he had arrived at 0530 from Europe and we had an early start next day.