England and Darwin

No pictures - sorry! We are having HUGE problems with getting onto a wireless connection here in Darwin. Apparently the Northern Territories internet service is not good and we have put many $2 coins into a slot to check our e-mail. We did manage to get a Skype call through to Zoe, but that was the extent of the wireless connection, so we can't put up any pictures. Too bad - so I'll have to describe what we WERE going to put up!
We had a really good time (in brief) in England (I hope I've already posted something about that - if I didn't, a highlight was going to Hampton Court (Henry VIII's pad) with my brother and sister-in-law and only just managing to stop myself buying royal underwear for my kids - Henry for him and Anne Boleyn for her! We had another really good day with my ex-brother and sister-in-law and their s - haven't laughed so much for ages! And thanks, Diny, for an amazing desert! (There's a story there concerning a pavlova, an over-heated oven and John's propensity to eat anything put in front of him!) We had a quick trip to my nephew's new house in Hertfordshire - 15th Century cottage complete with beams and thatched roof. Unfortunately, renovations in the 1980's meant that the outside beams were covered over which is too bad (there will be a photo in due course).
We arrived in Darwin at 3 a.m. on Friday (or was it Saturday? - all depends where you started and ended up!) after a very long journey (I STILL don't really want to know how long it took us - at least 2 movies, 2 meals and several dozes plus the odd su doku and trying to finish a really bad book) to find that the booking that I had so carefully done in May had mysteriously disappeared into internet heaven. Luckily the lovely young 'bloke' on the desk coud see that he had two tired and likely explodable Canadians on his doorstep, so he moved heaven and earth (and gave us early check-in so we could collapse into bed) and somehow got us registered. The second night we were here, we both woke up about midnight. I thought John was thrashing around in his sleep, but actually the whole hotel was thrashing around, we were feeling the aftershock of a magnitude 7 earthquake in Indonesia? It was quite alarming since I've never been in an earthquake before (and deliberately didn't move to California in about 1983 because I had no desire to live anywhere near an earthquake zone!) but there was only the one tremor.
Darwin is not a big city, seeming to have 3 main streets - the one we are on (conservative), the one parallel (commercial) and the next one parallel (backpacker heaven). We don't have any transport other than our feet and luckily our hotel is pretty much downtown. We did take a cab out to the local yacht club where there were (according to the guidebook) lots of restaurants, shops etc. but hadn't reckoned on it being a Sunday out of season. There was one restaurant open where we had a wonderful lamb shank pie, but when we tried to call the cab company to take us home, the line was and we had visions of walking back in the heat (yes, it's very hot and humid - we did say we wanted to miss winter!) But there IS a God - just as we were about to start walking, a cab came along. We have another 2 days here (I had allowed a few days for us to get our internal clocks re-set and to acclimatize) so we'll see what there is to see. On Wednesday, we're off on the first of our camping trips to Kakadu (someone at work please tell Chris we're on our way there, thanks to her) and I'm not sure when the next blog entry will be. Keep checking! We're having a great time, but keep forgetting that usually we can quite well share a meal. We also have to get into the habit of leaving home with a bottle of water - it's incredibly hot (did I mention that already?!) and humid and we're drinking like fish.