Saturday 17 December - home

We're leaving the ship so early that we had to set a wake-up call, but I woke up before it went off anyway.  Since Paul missed the sail-away due to being confined to quarters, we made the effort to get up on deck in time to watch the ship go under the Gateway bridge.

Then we had a quick breakfast - at 5am!!!
The way they organise departures is that they split everyone up into about 20 different groups, and give each group a time and a place to meet.  Because we're in a minisuite we could go to the 'VIP departure lounge' to wait - and have coffee and pastries - until it was time to go to our specified meeting place (in the Casino), but as it happened, before it was time to go to the Casino they announced that everyone in our group could leave the ship.  We were off the ship before 6:30am.
Of course, we then had to wait for mother and Adam, but it wasn't too bad, we had a coffee and then sat around talking.  There was a bit of a panic when Adam arrived without Mother, but it turned out that she had been stopped and made to go to the purser's desk apparently because of a 1c discrepancy in her onboard account!  Anyway, she eventually arrived and we all went our separate ways.
While we were waiting though it became clear just how well organised the whole departure process is - there was a steady stream of people leaving the ship, there never more than 15 or 20 people waiting for a taxi or for their shuttle.  They get all 2,000 passengers off the ship in less than 3 hours, and by the time we left there were already people arriving and getting ready to check in for the next cruise.
Paul, Adam and I got a taxi to the airport.  We got there at about 10am, checked in for our 2pm flight, and then got a train to the city and looked around for a while.  They sure know how to charge on those trains - $84 return for the three of us!  As Paul said, it would have been cheaper to hire a car - I hired a car in Brisbane from about 7am to 5pm a couple of weeks ago for around $70 including petrol.
Anyway, we had a look around town, then came back and caught the flight home.  It cost $152 for under-cover car parking for just over a week - exactly as the Canberra Airport website had said.  It's not exactly cheap, but definitely cheaper than getting taxis - and Canberra taxis aren't particularly reliable anyway.  Anyway, we drove home via the shop where we picked up takeaways for dinner and then crashed.