Leaving Australia

This morning, Jack took on a driving tour of the nearby beaches. First we stopped at Terrigal Beach for an overlook of the shoreline then on to Avoca Beach. Again, some beautiful rugged shoreline interspersed with nice sandy beaches.

After our experience in driving through Sydney, we allowed ourselves lots of time for the 100 km drive back to the Airport. This time the GPS routed us through the tunnel under Sydney Harbour, a much faster route through the city. We dropped the car off and were at the airport in lots of time for our 5:40 pm flight to LA & Phoenix.

The Qantas 747 was a much better flight than the Air New Zealand flight we took from San Francisco to Auckland. Good food and service and reasonable seat width and leg loom. We managed to get some sleep on the 13 hour flight before arriving in LA at 2:20 pm (on the same day as we left). We had a 2 hour change over to our flight to Phoenix which included a trip through Customs and Immigration. We got to the gate just as the Phoenix flight was boarding for the short 50 minute flight.

Brian and Linda were there to pick us up at 5:50 pm and we had a nice evening at their house as we wound down from travelling.

We will be spending several days here relaxing and will be arriving home next Wednesday.

This will be the last blog entry for this trip. I have enjoyed reliving each day's activities as I write it and it has forced me to cull the multitude of photos on a daily basis, hopefully reducing that task once I get home.

For those of you who have been following this blog, I have a little guessing contest for you. A prize of a bottle of new Zealand or Australian wine for the closest guess to each the following....

• The number of different beds we have slept in since leaving Niagara-on-the-Lake in January
• Distance driven in NZ and Australia
• Number of camera shutter operations

Either leave a comment on the blog or send me an e-mail with your answers.

Boating in Gosford

We checked out of the Radisson at around 8:00 am and walked for about twenty minutes to pick up our rental car. Quite an experience driving in the CBS of Sydney during morning rush hour....

We managed to get to the Bridge and the motorway heading north. After a short distance, the expressway turned into a four lane road winding its way through the suburbs. After about an hour, we were again on a proper expressway and made our way to Gosford to meet up with Jack, a good friend of Jim & Sharon from Sonoma.

After lunch, we headed down to the Gosford Yacht Club to go on a cruise around Brisbane Water, a fairly large bay connected to the Hawkesbury River.

Jack has an interesting double ended power boat, very seaworthy and diesel powered. Great for puttering around this body of water.

We went out for about a three hour cruise until the big waves at the mouth of the Hawkesbury River forced us to turn around.

We found out the secret of how a small yacht club can have such nice facilities, financed by the Pokie machines!

After the boating adventure we returned to Jack's place and enjoyed talking with Norma, his 92 year old mother and a race horse enthusiast. Some nice wine and food and we were ready for bed.

Bondi Beach

The debate was where to go for our last day in Sydney, The famous Bondi Beach or the Blue Mountains. Bondi was one hour travel and Blue Mountains two hours on the train. The weather forecast sort of made up our mind. Rain was forecast again for mid day and into the early afternoon so we figured that we could get back from Bondi in reasonable time to do something else if the weather deteriorated but would be pretty well stuck with a crappy day if we went to the Blue Mountain.

We hopped on the ferry to Watson's Bay and got a few more looks at the waterfront.

At Watson's Bay we went to the lookout for Gap Bluff before boarding the bus to Bondi Beach.

It was beautiful and sunny when we arrived at Bondi at noon.

Looks like they were expecting some sort of trouble...

We found a Brazilian cafe for lunch and as we were sitting there, Chris noticed some approaching black clouds.

We had time for a brief walk up the main street checking out the shops before it suddenly got cooler and the wind started to pick up. There was a really nice bar right at the main intersection and we thought it would be good to get a good seat before the deluge started. It ended up, we had a good seat to watch the end of the Final Four basketball game.

The rain really came down for about 20 minutes.....

Two beers later the sun was out and people were heading back to the beach. As you can see, not very busy for a school holiday period...

Some of the surfers had never stopped.

We decided to do the coastal cliff walk to Coogee Beach, about 6 km. Just as we started out, this girl asked me to take her picture. Always willing to help out....

The coastal walk was absolutely beautiful. What would normally take a bit over an hour took a little over 2 1/2 hr because of the numerous photo stops.

We ended up pretty tired and caught the bus at Coogee Beach back to the city.

An hour of recuperation in our hotel room and we ventured out to this really cool pizza spot right around the corner for our hotel. Quite a popular place complete with bouncer/doorman! We had a really good pizza in this funky underground restaurant. Another early to bed night as we are off to Gosford for our last day in Aussie. Next time we will allocate at least a week for Sydney, a great city and much more to experience and see.

Manly Beach

It's Easter Monday which is a National Holiday so we got an early start on our trip to Manly Beach. Manly is the "local beach" occupied by families and surfers as opposed to Bondi Beach which is occupied by designer bikinis and budgie smugglers.

The best way to get there is on the Manly Ferry, $14.60 return trip which gives you a great 1/2 hour tour of Sydney Harbour on the way there and back.

We arrived at the Manly Ferry Terminal at 10:00 and it was a few block walk down the Corso to the beach. Even at this time of day it was packed with surfers and swimmers.

We decided to take a bit of a hike (10 km) to the North Head to get some overviews of the shoreline and the harbour.

The beaches from Manly looking north...

The exit from Sydney Harbour, if you have ever seen the Sydney to Hobart yacht race start, this is the headland rounding as the fleet heads into the open ocean...

The "critter of the day" is the Water Dragon....

Didn't see any Bandicoots...

North Head was a fortification that was built during the 2nd WW as a gun position to provide protection for Sydney Harbour. Some huge gun installations. It continued as an artillery training site until it was retired and became a National Park.

A brick for every Australian war casualty...

By the time we were returning to the beach area, it was clouding up and looking like rain. We stopped for lunch near the beach and by the time we had finished, it had started to rain putting an end to the beach action for the day. We waited out the rain at Ben & Jerry's and then made our way back to the ferry for the trip back to the city. Still, the opportunity for a few good views of the city waterfront. Lots of little bays full of marinas.

On the way back, we passed Australia's newest warship, an amphibious assault vessel built last year.

After disembarking the ferry, we made our way back to the hotel and went to the pool and spa to relax.

Supper was a bit of a challenge finding something that was open as most restaurants close on National Holidays. We lucked out and found a Jamie Oliver Italian Restaurant 1/2 block up the street that was open although, without reservations, we had to wait almost an hour to get seated. We had some nice pastas and called it a night.