Day 24, July 20 - Kangaroo Island To Sydney

Boarding the plane to Sydney
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Today was strictly a travel day. At the kid’s request, we woke up at 7:00am to the sound of AC/DC’s Highway To Hell playing on Frank’s Blackberry. We left the campground at 8:00am for the hour long drive to Penneshaw to catch our ferry back to the mainland. We were quite early for our ferry, so we thought we would try to find a car wash to clean the muddy evidence off of the campervan. There was no actual car wash in this tiny town, but a local fisherman (at least he looked like a fisherman) had us follow him to see if we could get our campervan washed at his buddy’s place. These Australians are the friendliest people you could meet, willing to go out of their way for a total stranger. Unfortunately his buddy wasn’t able to help us, but he was very apologetic about the whole situation even though he had nothing to be sorry for. We then drove down to the ferry terminal, had breakfast in the campervan and finished packing and cleaning the campervan so that it was ready for us to drop off later in the day. The weather today was totally miserable…pouring rain and very windy. After the experience Frank had on the ferry four days ago, he was not looking forward to the boat ride back to the mainland. While on the island we actually read in the newspaper that last weekend Sealink Ferries took the unprecedented step of shutting down ferry services for 48 hours due to the rough waters. Looking at the ocean on this day, we were nervous the same thing might happen, but alas we boarded the ferry at 10:30am for the hour long trip to Cape Jervis. The ride today was much nastier than last time, swaying back and forth and crashing into the massive waves. The ferry staff was walking up and down the aisles every five minutes with wet towels helping several people that were throwing up. It was unreal. We sat closer to the back of the vessel this time and sea sickness didn’t seem to affect us as much as last time even though the ride was much worse. The kids were thrilled with the big waves. We arrived in Cape Jervis at 11:30am and started the drive to Adelaide. Halfway to Adelaide we finally found a car wash and hosed down the campervan removing the red layer of mud that was caked onto it. We arrived at the Britz depot in Adelaide at around 3:00pm and returned the campervan without any problems. The airport was just across the street so we went there, checked in our luggage and had supper. Before long we were boarding our Virgin Blue flight to Sydney (via a back door on the tarmac) and took off at 6:15pm. The flight lasted only 1 ½ hours, so before long we were in Sydney. We hopped into a maxi taxi (we need extra large taxis because of the amount of luggage we have) and rode down to our hotel for the night, the Star City Hotel and Casino a few blocks from Darling Harbour. We arrived at the hotel at around 9:00pm as we lost a half hour due to the time change from South Australia to New South Wales. The kids had a bath and went to bed at 10:00pm. Renee ventured down to the casino for about an hour, but unfortunately didn’t win the jackpot to pay for our vacation. The slot machines in this casino were different than the ones in the casinos back home and Renee didn’t like them very much. Lights out at 11:00pm.