Day 11 - Flying to Cairns, walking through botanical gardens, and starting our home stays!!!

It was an early morning...we flew from Darwin to Cairns...arriving in Cairns about 9 a.m. Our first stop was a botanical garden...can't remember the name, but it was beautiful. Most of my pictures don't do it justice...but I'll post some of them:







After leaving the gardens, we went to Cairns Central...aka 'the mall.' Apparently, P2P had not scheduled anything for us this day except flying here and then meeting our host families at 4 p.m. Tim knew about the gardens - which is why we went there. So we went to the mall. We had vouchers from their wonderful food court...but it was a long time to be at the mall - at least for a lot of us. However, it ended up being a good deal...there was a huge kiosk of computers so we had MANY of our delegates catching up on email or on their MySpace accounts. Plus, there were PHONES...I know I called my husband and was able to talk to him without a long line of people behind me waiting to use the phone. So that was all good.
Stephanie had forgotten - maybe a couple of times - to wear her name tag...so we had told her there would be consequences if she forgot it again. Well, it became a joke...I would always comment on how great she looked with her lanyard whenever I saw her. I had just commented to her here at the mall...so she and Lynne posed with their lanyard/nametags.

At 4 p.m., we went to the barbeque with our host families. Most everyone was excited to meet them, and some were a bit nervous...but from all I've heard, everyone had really nice families. I absolutely LOVED my family - the Parsells.