Great Barrier Reef Day One Green Island

These pictures are from our first day at the Great Barrier Reef. We got up at 5am got everything ready, woke up the kids and walked them over to our friends house where we dropped them off and caught a cab to the airport. When we were leaving Enoch gave Garrett his little Lego Ninjago guy and said. "Here dad, take this to remember me". It was really cute. It was a long flight up to Cairns and we tried to sleep, but unfortunately there was a couple next to us that just couldn't make out  very quiet and it was very difficult to sleep with all their kissing noises in my ear. RUDE! Garrett thought they would calm down part way through the flight and he was right. They did sleep for about 25min. They got their strength back and kept on going ;) Garrett Has always wanted to travel by train in a berth and on our plane there were little berths with curtains so you have a little privacy. We figured maybe that's what this couple needed. Please somebody get them a curtain.

(Sea Cucumber)

So when we got to Cairns we dropped off our luggage(our room wasn't ready yet) and went to lunch but it was still breakfast time there so we had breakfast for lunch :) I had a savory french toast and G got the traditional English style "Big Breakfast" we have come to love since moving to NZ.  Overall though the food in NZ is better than the food here in OZ so it wasn't quite as good as going to "The Elements" or "Polo" in Wellington. We ate, went back to our hotel where our room was ready and we changed and walked over to the pier and got on our first boat excursion of the trip. We went to Green Island and this is where we took all these pictures and a bunch of video as well. I will try to add more videos later.

This was one of my favorite fish. These guys are so unique looking. At the end of this post is a video of one and you can see it a bit better. Very cool fish.

We saw lots of these as well

Green Island(the part we went snorkeling) wasn't all that exciting. I think we went to the wrong side of the island. It just wasn't that colorful and it wasn't nearly as bright and colorful as the reefs further out and up in Port Douglas.  We saw some reefs but mostly the ground looked like this:

These guys are really neat looking as well. I love their long noses.

This fish was pretty big but you can't really tell here.