Day 5, July 1 - Sydney

The main strip in Bondi
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The day started when everyone woke up at 5:30am...getting close to adjusting to normal hours. Spent a few hours in the hotel room eating breakfast. We ate breakfast in the hotel room because we had bought some groceries the day before. After checking out and putting our baggage in the hotel storage, we walked down to Circular Quay. The goal today was to visit the world famous Bondi Beach. As it was still too cold to go to the beach, we caught a public transit bus at around 8:30am and took a half hour ride through the city to Bondi Junction. We walked around a large shopping mall for about an hour and then caught another bus to Bondi Beach. We spent a few hours at the beach walking in the water and playing in the sand. We didn’t really “experience” Bondi as we would have liked. Much like the day before at Manly Beach, it was too cold to actually swim…it is winter here after all. This time the water was bearable, but the weather wasn’t very warm. It was very cool and windy and didn’t really warm up all day long despite being a sunny day. With that said, the beach wasn’t all that busy and there were very few people in the water except for a few die hard surfers. The waves weren’t very big considering it is supposed to be a huge surfing beach, certainly not what we expected. The Bondi experience must be so much different in the summer. We had lunch on the main street by the beach and then headed for a walk. We walked the 3.5km coastal trail between Bondi and Bronte beaches. The trail follows the ridge of a cliff all along the ocean. It was breathtaking! We even saw a few whales in the distance. Once at Bronte Beach, we spent about an hour playing in the sand and finding seashells. The wind got so strong that we felt like we were in a windstorm so we decided to start our trek back to the hotel. We took a bus to get back to the main station at Bondi Junction and then decided to try the subway rail system back to Circular Quay. It was much quicker than the bus. We had an hour to kill before heading to the airport so we grabbed a snack and sat by the harbour to get a last glimpse of the opera house. We took a cab back to the airport and had supper at the food court there. The kids were exhausted and our plane was an hour late. Ryan was really tired and was quite a handful for a few hours crying and arguing about everything. This was to be expected as it has been a whirlwind few days for us. We finally got on our Qantas flight to Darwin at 8:40pm and the kids fell asleep the second we got on. We all slept through the whole flight (over 4 hours), the lone exception being Renee who woke up for a period of really bad turbulence which was a little scary. Got into Darwin at 1:00am and woke up the kids. They were pretty cranky and tired. The time change from Sydney to Darwin was a half hour earlier. We waited for our luggage for a good half hour and then waited for a cab for the same amount of time. The Darwin airport is not very big and the taxis can’t handle the volume of travelers. Since our airplane was late, two planes arrived at the same time which compounded the problem. We got to the Crown Plaza Hotel at 2:00am and went to sleep immediately for a short night.

Bondi Beach
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Getting internet access has been difficult thus far. The hotels charge 55¢ per minute which adds up very quickly. There haven’t been any wireless networks consistently available anywhere. Posting pictures takes quite sometime, so if we post just the blog, you will know that our access is somewhat restricted. Once we get a reliable internet connection, we’ll be sure to post pictures for every day, so check back if the first time you visit there is only the blog. Today we were able to get internet access at the Britz depot and posted some pictures.