queensland's finest

As I mentioned in my previous post we are no longer in Australia's capital city of Canberra.  We were only there a few days, and are now in our new "hometown".  We are still living in hotels, and the one we are in is more of "serviced apartments" than a regular hotel.  That means slightly less housekeeping, but your own washer and dryer, and dishwasher. Plus a kitchen with a full size fridge, and stocked with dishes, and utensils (for eating and cooking).  It's pretty nice, until you have to evacuate.

We have been forcing ourselves to stay up late in order to kick this jet lag, and it's been going pretty well.  Last night I was sufficiently exhausted, and looking forward to a good night of sleep.  The universe had other plans though.  At around 1:30 in the morning we heard a very loud noise that was foreign to us.  Assuming it was probably a fire alarm, but not sure, I jumped out of bed repeatedly yelling "WHAT is that?!" and trying to track down the source of the noise.  I shoved the alarm clock to my ear just to be sure in Gunnar's button pushing earlier he hadn't mistakenly set the alarm to go off.  When the clock, and our phones were found to be innocent of the late night disturbance, I headed for the door, saw nothing alarming, and no one leaving.  Just as I was about to close the door, a gentleman casually stepped into the hall and started walking toward me.  I asked if he heard the alarm too, or if it was just our lucky room, and he said it was indeed at least our two rooms.  He was evacuating and we followed.

Once in the fire stairwell, we saw more people, but not as many as I expected.  We exited the building and found ourselves on the sidewalk with at least two QLD firetrucks, and their crews.  Their main concern seemed to be shutting off the fire alarm in the hotel.  A good sign; it couldn't be too serious right?  Then we noticed the sprinklers going in a restaurant on the ground floor of the hotel.  It appeared to have closed up shop for the night; all the chairs were on the tables.  Once they got the alarm off, they moved to the sprinkler, and seemed to have trouble getting that to stop too... I don't know what the issue was, but I guess we were waved in after a few minutes because simultaneously the crowd headed for the elevators.  We were lucky enough to get in with second group so we didn't have to wait out in the cold too long.  

But it certainly was an exciting night!  And it helped me sleep in a little later.  Until this morning, I haven't been able to sleep past 5 am, but today it was 7:30.  Slowly returning to normalcy...