Short entry this week1 as we are in the midst of both a week-long trip to Brisbane and a two-week visit of D's parents.
D's Mom & Dad arrived bright and early last Wednesday morning, having lost (as all USA to Sydney travellers do) the calendar day immediately preceding their arrival. Despite this, they valiently and determinedly stayed awake for most but not all of the first sixteen hours after their 6:15am arrival. To assist in this endeavor, we dragged them to Taronga Zoo, Sydney's major zoo overlooking the harbour and the Opera House. The zoo trip was cleverly designed to keep them both busy and in the sunlight... and to fulfill D's mom's wish to "see kangaroos and wallabies and koala bears."2 In all these respects it was successful.
The following day we sent them off to the crack-of-dawn tour of the Sydney Fish Markets, mostly because we knew that they would be up much earlier than they thought they would be. We then met them for brekkie and wandered down to the nearby Paddy's Market, so as to ensure that they would not miss the "cheap and tacky souvenir" side of visiting Australia. Friday we sent them off with minimal information on Sydney's bus system3 and told them to meet us for dinner at one of those quintessential fast food places you find all over Australia... Pizza Hut. From there, we traipsed down to the Opera House for a performance of Bangarra Dance Theatre.
Three days in, we figured they had seen most of the key features of Sydney4 so we left. Rented a car and made our way (slowly) north, eventually hoping to get to Brisbane. We did, last night, after winding our way up the inland roads, stopping to see kangaroos on the side of the road and the two-headed wallabies in the national parks.5 The inland road had both the advantage and the disadvantage of being remote... the advantage being that there were numerous kangaroos and waterfalls and lots of beautiful tableland countryside and national parks, and the disadvantage being that there were many many kilometres between recognizable centres of commerce.6
The most stunning of our experiences on this trip has to have been our stop at a mountain lookout Saturday night three hours after sunset. The stars stretched from horizon to horizon, with so little light pollution that we could see the dark black splotches of gas clouds in the Milky Way galaxy.7 The second most stunning of our experiences was having brekkie this morning (after a truly horrible night of sleep) under "The Big Prawn" in Ballina, NSW, although the stunning-ness of this second-place winner was altogether different from the stunning-ness of the first. Of course, today we spent the day on a boat in Moreton Bay watching Southern Pacific Humpback whales, which none of us had ever seen before, and that was pretty stunning, too... more along the lines of the stars than along the lines of the Big Prawn.
This car is getting a little crowded, though...
;)
- D
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NOTES
1In addition to being posted late...
2D has more than once tried to explain that koalas are
not actually bears nor are they related to bears and so the term "koala bear" has been
replaced with "koala," but Mom still calls them "koala bears."
3"Here's your brown pass, look for busses 435, 436, 437,
438, 439, or 440. Coming back home, press the stop button when you pass the Coles
sign. Have fun!"
4"Opera House is over there, Harbour Bridge is over
there, that's a roo and that's a wallaby, and you have to pay cash at the market."
5I'm not making this up, there was a wallaby with a
second head growing out of her tummy, and both heads were eating grass while we stood
there. I have the pictures to prove it!
6And by "centres of commerce," I mean "stores."
7At least, that's what Chad told us they were, and we
believed him.
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