Saturday, Oct 22nd, Mackay

Greetings!

Well, it seems we're taking you all on an internet travel.  On Thursday, in Arlie Beach, we joined about twenty-five holiday snorkelers out on the Great Barrier Reef.  RedCatAdventures provided us with an 8-hour double-dive, and lots of very speedy, DJ-enhanced, very wet racing around and between the WhitSunday Islands.  We don't know when we've ever been as wet and wind-blown out of the water.

But the very important lesson learned was to make every effort beforehand to waterproof your cell phone.  Nothing in the boat avoided getting soaked.  Not in the tightest wrapping, in the most secure hole, did the backpack holding the cell phone survive.  So a week after finding the best computer geeks in Cairn to try to fix our precious and essential Apple MacAir (and eventually buying a new MacAir from JB High-FI), we found the best computer geeks in Mackay (who were again unsuccessful in repairing what seawater will do), and eventually bought a new Google Pixel 7 at OfficeWorks.

Here's where the Internet travel adventure began.  Since both the MacAir and the Google Pixel were anchored (sorry) in my "gfearon@gmail.com" account, and the phone number filed to validate secure access to both is the American cell phone at home in Santa Rosa, I can't log into that Google account.  Thus, the Google blog and the vast storage of Google photo albums are inaccessible to me.

So my solution is to invite all of you to travel to a new Google Blog and set of photo albums.  Someday, I will find a way to reintegrate the remainder of this trip into our 15 year-old travel blog.  But for now, I will be asking all of you to join us in a new website (with a similar name ... GFPKTravels2).

Despite wrestling with all of the above, we drove out to a wonderful national park east of the coast today (Eungella National Park).  We've two more days in Mackay.  Hopefully, things will return to whatever is normal for this trip.  Here are the photos taken last night and today.  I'm just getting used to the new features on the cell phone.