I finally had a familiar face come visit me in Australia.
One of my old softball teammates from UCA decided to take a vacation and come
hang out with me for two whole weeks! It was the best vacation, from my already
vacation :)
Day 1 (December 30):
Kelley’s plane landed in Sydney at 10am. I worked the night before in Wyong (an hour away from the airport) and didn’t
get off ‘til 9am, so I was a bit late picking her up. I would’ve been on time
had I not taken two wrong turns on the way…oops! Once I found Kelley, we left
the airport and headed to a nearby suburb in Pott’s Point to check into the hostel
we’d be staying at for the next four nights. Upon arrival we found out that a
mistake had been made and we were put in separate rooms. Fortunately they said
they could put us in the same rooms the following night. I don’t know if you’ve
ever stayed in a hostel, but this was my first time; it was an eight-bed, co-ed
room, with a community toilet and shower. Oh, and the only fan in the room
happen to be broken. It was cool, but it was dirty; there’s no room service in
hostels. Haha.
Prior to Kelley arriving I had just
finished the book Wild by Cheryl
Strayed. I can’t tell you how many times I referenced this book over the next
two weeks with Kelley, but when I was in the hostel meeting some of the people
who were backpacking across Australia I couldn’t help but want to ask them all
these questions about their adventures (while pretending I was an expert,
because I just read this book). I was
such a “poser” though, because I’m sure they could tell that I wasn’t actually
backpacking by all the cute clothes I wore each day…
After we
checked in we headed off to Bondi Beach, one of Australia’s “most iconic
beaches.” I personally hate this beach because it’s always packed with
tourists, and today wasn’t any different…in fact, it was worse because it was
New Year’s. It took us an hour ‘n a half just to find a car park, which we had
to pay for (as you do everywhere in Sydney), and by the time we walked to the
beach and found a decent spot, it was basically time to go pay the meter again. I think we only stayed at the beach for an hour after paying the meter twice. Paying for parking over the next week would not have been ideal. At the end of the day we decided to park my car on a random side street near
Bondi Junction, for free, and buy an unlimited train, bus, ferry, and light
rail pass to use for the next seven days. It was the best $63 I have ever
spent!
Day 2 (December 31):
It’s New Year’s Eve. Kelley and I woke up around 8am to go find a spot to watch
the New Year’s fireworks. Yesterday we got some advice about “the best” vantage
points where we would be able to see both the Opera House and the Harbour
Bridge. We decided to check out two different spots, one with a capacity of
13,000 and the other with a capacity of 3,000. Both were in the Botanical
Gardens, too, about a thirty-minute walk from the hostel we were staying in.
The first spot we walked to opened
at 10am, but by the time we had gotten there it already had thousands of people
lined up in long winding lines just waiting for the gates to open. Kelley and I didn’t want none of that, so we
decided to try our second option. This one only had about one hundred to two
hundred people lined up waiting, so we figured it wouldn’t be too long before
the gates opened and we could find a decent spot to set up camp. Once the gates
opened it only took about twenty minutes to go through security and find a good
spot to sit. We picked a shaded spot, since it was only 10am, about ninety-five
degrees, and we still had THIRTEEN HOURS ‘til the fireworks. The shade didn’t
last long, but fortunately I had randomly packed an umbrella just in case (this
was my first ever time to use an umbrella to protect me from the shade…I love
the sun, and getting tan, but lemme tell ya, it. was. hot).
There were a few other festivities
going on throughout the evening; these started around 6pm: tugboat spray wars, Australian
anthem, family fireworks (which we couldn’t see at all, so we thought we had
wasted ten hours of our lives and were going to miss the best fireworks so ever),
LED shows, sailboats lit up in lights, etc. Most of these we couldn’t see
without getting up, so Kelley and I just hung out talking, alternating turns on
taking walks to feel even the slightest breeze. There were clear lines drawn in
the grass so that walkways could be kept clear, security was strict too, you
could not stand in these walkways during any of the festivities. However, just
like at any concert, once the show starts, everyone rushes to the front. So
obviously, once the midnight fireworks were set to begin, Kelley and I made our
way to the front and had THE BEST VIEW of the Harbour Bridge to our left, and
the Opera House to our right! 
Day 3 (January 1):
We spent the day with Kelley’s family friend Scott, and his daughter. We rode
the ferry to Manly, and walked along the beach, and went for a little hike
along the coastline. We planned to eat dinner at a nearby pub, and watch the
ball drop in New York (4pm Sydney time), but nobody was advertising anything
but sports on their TV. We ate dinner, and celebrated anyway…and we celebrated
again when it was midnight in Chicago, IL (where Scott and his daughter are
from), Amarillo, TX (where I’m from), and Cupertino, CA (where Kelley’s from).
Basically we celebrated the New Year three different times; there are just so
many time zones!
After
spending time at Manly Beach we all rode the ferry back to Sydney, explored the
harbour area for a bit, went back to Scott’s hotel for a snack and a drink, and
then took a walk across the Harbour Bridge. I bought myself a Jawbone UP band for
Christmas (which tracks things like steps, calories burned, sleep, etc.) and when
I synced it to my phone to see how many steps I had taken that day, it showed
just over 30,000 steps! Kelley and I had walked the equivalent of a half
marathon! And our feet could tell.
Day 4 (January 2): One of Kelley’s goals while in Australia was to get a picture with a koala. So today we went to Toronga Zoo, the biggest zoo in Sydney (I think). She bought a ticket to get a picture with Charlie the koala, but that wasn’t until 1:30pm. We spent approximately three hours walking around, looking at all the different animals. And obviously, there were heaps of different kinds: kangaroos, koalas, elephants, giraffes, zebras, reptiles, spiders, lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my! There was everything you could imagine! By the time it was our turn to take a picture with Charlie, it was so hot, we were so tired, and had walked so much; we were just ready to go eat and sit still for the rest of the day. So we opted to go back to Pott’s Point and bar hop around the area until bedtime.
Day 5 (January 3):
Today was filled with even more walking. Kelley and I spent the day exploring the nearby
suburbs of Glebe and Newtown (apparently these were more like
"college towns" with the University of Sydney being just around the corner. We walked to the Glebe markets, only getting lost/turned around twice on the way. While scanning through the markets I found myself a black felt hat (which is all the rage now), and Kelley bought a couple of headbands. After the markets we headed back towards Darlinghurst. One of our little obsessions over the week was finding random graffiti on the streets, well, walls of Sydney. It's amazing the talent people have!
Our final adventure on the day was all about relaxation, and air conditioning (since we hadn't had any up to this point). We popped in a cinema to watch the movie Imitation Game. It. was. fantastic. And also one of the only movies Kelley hadn't seen since everything in the Aussie cinemas has already been out for at least a month in American cinemas...I highly recommend this movie though!
Day 6 (January 4):
We woke up at 9:30am, checked out of the hostel at 10am, and were on the train
headed to the Blue Mountains by 10:30am. It was a three-hour train ride to the
Blackheath (the suburb our hotel was in), and fortunately since we got on at
Pott’s Point there were plenty of open seats, which wasn’t the case when the
train stopped to pick everyone else up at the more popular junctions (not many
people got to sit down the whole ride like we did). Kelley and I were very
lucky, as were our feet. Surprisingly nobody got upset that our luggage was taking up two perfectly good seats; it literally couldn't fit anywhere else.
I sat and read Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Denham on the way there. Kelley slept
for most of the first half. We arrived in Blackheath around 2:15pm. Our hotel
was only about a hundred yards from the train station (which we were ecstatic
about because we didn’t have to lug our heavy luggage very far). We checked in,
and then decided to see what the town had to offer. We stopped for lunch first,
at a place called Pancakes on the Mountain. I had salted caramel pecan pancakes
(more like dessert really) and they. were. delicious. We walked in a couple
shops and spoke to some locals about what we should do with the rest of our
day. One shop owner said Blackheath had the best scenic views around, if we
didn’t mind walking. The place we were
hiking to was called Pulpit’s Rock, and it was over five kilometers away!
It had started to get cloudy, so
Kelley and I were expecting some rain (at least on the way back), but we didn’t
mind because we had nothing better to do. I think it took us almost two hours
to walk there, and by the time we were walking up to the lookout it started to
sprinkle and we could see lightning in the distance. It’s funny because, as we
were walking to the lookout I noticed two other cars there to see the views; I
was secretly hoping they would offer us a ride back into town. But as we got
near the people, I did the math and noticed that both cars would be full and
wouldn’t have room for two more. Bummer.
We hopped right in and started making new friends, the girl in the group just so happened to be a photographer for Vogue on a tour of Australia. She had mentioned to us how her hair started sticking up, and how it was the weirdest thing she ever felt, so she googled what it meant. Apparently, according to National Geographic, when your hair sticks up like that “positive charges are going through your body and “ which means you are a couple minutes from getting struck by lightning…we could have died out there! I showed our new friends my selfie, and we all had a laugh, secretly relieved that none of us were electrocuted.
The day was almost over, but Kelley
and I were hungry. It was just past 7pm and everywhere but one pizza place was
closed already. We walked into the restaurant, sat down, put our order in, and
then the lights went out and all power was out! The waitress came back and told
us that our order wasn’t put in in time so our food couldn’t be made. We were
on our way to starving until the power came back on forty-five minutes later
and we walked back to that same pizza place and had the tastiest meal ever :)
Day 7 (January 5): Kelley and I had planned on today being the day we spent all day hiking in and around the Blue Mountains, and enjoying Scenic World while we were there. Well, it turned out to be a foggy day...like, so foggy you couldn't even see ten feet in front of you. So seeing the Three Sisters rock formation, and especially Scenic World, was out of the question because, why waste thirty-five dollars on a view you can't even see!? However, we knew we would be checking out of our hotel tomorrow morning so we still decided to do all the hiking. We hiked for hours, and even did this one thing called "The Giant Staircase." And it was GIANT! Basically nine hundred steps at a pretty steep incline; and we made the mistake of getting lost on the way and having to climb UP the stairs instead of walk down them...rookies...
My favorite meal from the entire
two weeks came at lunch on this day, and we had definitely worked up an appetite on our never-ending hike! The restaurant we ate at was called The
Yellow Deli; it was the cutest most crammed deli I have ever been to. The
little booth we sat at was called Japan (I guess they named all their booths
something different). I had a “Green Drink” healthy smoothie, potato soup, and
a vegetarian sandwich. It. was. bomb.
Day 8 (January 6):
Saving Scenic World for today was perfect. We woke up early, stopped at a cafe for coffee, and even found a shop called The Hattery, which sold all kinds of authentic Australian Akubra hats; which of course I had to have one... There were about fifty different styles and shades of color to choose from, I narrowed it down to three different styles then had Kelly help me pick the winner. I've never had a hat fitted to my head before this. It's literally perfect. And I love it. (Yes, I know it's just a hat...)
So Kelley and I walked to Scenic
World after coffee and finding the perfect hat, and we got there before it opened at 9am. We were the first people in line for the railway, and didn’t have to
wait in any lines for the skyway, walkway, or cableway, either! And, to top it off, there was NO fog! We were in and out of there by about 10:45am.
We knew our train from Blackheath back to Sydney was set to depart at 12:02pm and we couldn’t be late; the next train didn’t leave for another two hours! We wanted to grab lunch before our three-hour train ride and Kelley was looking to try this gourmet sandwich shop we’d seen in town. We had thirty minutes from the time we hopped off the train from Katoomba to grab lunch and our luggage and be back at the platform before it left.
The last thing on our list to do in Sydney was the bridge climb. Yes, you heard me right, we were going to climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge! Kelley and been to Sydney once before when she was ten, and her family had told her she was too young to do the climb, so she vowed that if she ever came back, climbing the bridge was the one thing she had to do...so we did!
"Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work. If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the man who falls and has no one to pick him up."
- Ecclesiastes 4:9-10
XO - Cristin
