Sarah dropped Zoe around this morning at about 8:30am. She was still a bit feverish, but otherwise in good spirits, so I decided to stick with my plan for today, which was a tour of the Port of Brisbane.
Originally the plan had been to do it with Megan and her Dad, Jason, but Jason had some stuff to work on on his house, so I offered to take Megan with us to allow him more time to work on the house uninterrupted.
I was casting around for something to do to pass the time until Jason dropped Megan off at 10:30am, and I thought we could do some foot painting. We searched high and low for something I could use as a foot washing bucket, other than the mop bucket, which I didn't want to use because of potential chemical residue. I gave up because I couldn't anything suitable, and we watched a bit of TV instead.
Jason dropped Megan around, and we immediately jumped in the car and headed out to the Port. I missed the on ramp for the M4 from Lytton Road, and so we took the slightly longer Lytton Road route, which was fine, because we had plenty of time to kill.
The plan was to get there for about 11:30am, have lunch in the observation cafe on the top floor of the visitor's centre building, and then get on the tour bus at 12:30pm. We ended up arriving much earlier than 11:30am, so we looked around the foyer of the visitor's centre for a bit.
It was quite a nice building. The foyer area had some displays, but the most interesting thing (for the girls) was an interactive webcam of the shore bird roost across the street. There was a tablet where you could control the camera and zoom in and out on the birds roosting on a man-made island. That passed the time nicely. One of the staff also gave the girls Easter eggs as we arrived.
We went up to the cafe for lunch next. The view was quite good from the 7th floor. On one side you could look out over the bay, notably Saint Helena Island, and on the other side you got quite a good view of the port operations and the container park.
Lunch didn't take all that long, and the girls were getting a bit rowdy, running around the cafe, so we headed back downstairs to kill some more time looking at the shore birds with the webcam, and then we boarded the bus.
It was just the three of us and three other adults, which was good. The girls were pretty fidgety, and I don't think they got that much out of it. The tour didn't really go anywhere that you couldn't go yourself in your own car, but you did get running commentary from the driver, which made all the difference. The girls spent the first 5 minutes trying to figure out where his voice was coming from (he was wired up with a microphone).
The thing I found most interesting about the port operations was the amount of automation. There were three container terminals, and the two operated by DP World and Hutchinson Ports employed fully automated overhead cranes for moving containers around. Completely unmanned, they'd go pick a container from the stack and place it on a waiting truck below.
What I found even more fascinating was the Patrick terminal, which used fully automated straddle carriers, which would, completely autonomously move about the container park, pick up a container, and then move over to a waiting truck in the loading area and place it on the truck. There were 27 of these things moving around the container park at a fairly decent clip.
Of course the girls didn't really appreciate any of this, and half way through the tour Megan was busting to go to the toilet, despite going before we started the tour. I was worried about her having an accident before we got back, she didn't, so it was all good.
I'd say in terms of a successful excursion, I'd score it about a 4 out of 10, because the girls didn't really enjoy the bus tour all that much. I was hoping we'd see more ships, but there weren't many (if any) in port today. They did enjoy the overall outing. Megan spontaneously thanked me as we were leaving, which was sweet.
We picked up the blank cake I'd ordered from Woolworths on the way through on the way home, and then dropped Megan off. Zoe wanted to play, so we hung around for a little while before returning home.
Zoe watched a bit more TV while we waited for Sarah to pick her up. Her fever picked up a bit more in the afternoon, but she was still very perky.