Without Further Adieu

I present to you our time in Sydney.

 It's only taken me 3 weeks to get around to finish posting about our vacation. So many other fun things have happened since then, but I know if I write about those first then I'll never wrap up our australian adventure. So lest I forget our wonderful time in Sydney, here is a detailed account of our time spent there:  

I think I left off with us checking into our hotel. Once we did that, we set out walking to try and find the Opera House. We had no idea where we were going except for Matt's internal compass leading the way. We ran into an elderly couple strolling ever so slowly by us. We would pass them and then stop to look at something or take pictures and then they would take the lead only for us to pass them again. Finally we struck up a conversation and learned the man was a retired doctor in Sydney, that they had lived in the states for a few years, and had traveled to Los Angeles quite a bit. He gave us super detailed instructions on where we needed to go in Sydney, how much time it would take us to get there and even wrote up a list for us on a map of what points we needed to hit before we left to go home. His wife was trying the whole time to get him to stop bothering us, which he wasn't, but she thought he was taking up too much of our time. In actuality we were really glad we had met them since after that we knew exactly where we needed to go and what we wanted to do. Now I wish I would have taken a picture with them, but I did keep the list he wrote for us so I can eventually scrapbook it. 

This was taken right after we had met the doc. 

We made it to the Opera House and explored there for quite a while. 

Once it got dark we decided to start walking back to the hotel, but had some fun changing the camera's shutter speed all along the way.

The next morning we left the hotel around 9 am in search of breakfast. We wanted to find a decent sized one so we would only have top buy one more meal during the day since food was so expensive. We meandered through the downtown area with our stroller amongst all the women and men in suits hustling to get to work. There we discovered a little breakfast joint with a HUGE breakfast platter! Massive. And delicious. We each got one, but we would have been better off just sharing. 

After breakfast we decided to walk through the botanical gardens. 

At one point Matt looked up into the trees and saw these.

Vampire fans eat your heart out....

there were hundreds of bats sleeping just a few yards above our heads. 

The gardens were amazing and we spent a few hours just walking through them taking oodles of photos. 

What a goofy goober. 

After trekking through every last street in the downtown area, every single path that wound amongst the botanical gardens and every inch around the opera house we hopped on a ferry to take us to Manly Beach. 

There we walked along the beach soaking it all in while savoring lots and lots of double coated chocolate Tim Tams that we bought earlier that day at a 7/11. Sustenance for all of our walking. 

Once we had our fill of all the sights that Manly Beach had to offer we boarded the ferry back.

 Sawyer was such a trooper the whole entire day. 9 hours of being out and about all while in the stroller for the majority of it and he was still a happy little man. 

Right after these photos were taken of him giggling, I put him back in the stroller and a group of Japanese kids around the ages of 14-15 saw him and thought he was the neatest thing they'd seen since Pokemon. They were making all sorts of silly faces at him, some a little more scary then they were silly, and getting the biggest kick of it when he would so much as crack one corner of his mouth up at an attempted half smile. We almost missed our exit off the ferry because they were so enthralled with him and wouldn't budge. I'm sure Sawyer still has their faces engrained in his brain since all of them were mere inches from his the whole time. 

We saw an incredible sunset on the ferry before we disembarked and got some awesome photos of it with the Harbour Bridge. Once we got back we were still itching to explore one last area. Across the harbor was Luna Park with all sorts of rides and carnival like attractions. We took a ferry over to check it out because who doesn't like an amusement park, right? Well, once we arrived to the other side this is what it looked like. 

Deserted.

We were the only ones there.

Which is why it was even more creepy when we came upon the entrance to the park and were all alone, with a big menacing clown face. Aaaah! The entrance wasn't even closed off so if we'd really felt like freaking ourselves out we could have stepped right in to explore all the empty rides. I already felt like we were in really scary horror flick just walking past it!

I wouldn't want anyone to have nightmares by leaving that image as the last one on here so I'll end with this photo below. Going to the other side wasn't a huge bust because Matt was able to take some really cool photos like this one and it was neat to see the whole Sydney cityscape all lit up. 

We got back to our hotel that evening around 9. We'd been going nonstop for twelve hours! Marathon training has been a breeze compared to the workout we had that day. I actually welcomed the thought of spending 12+ hours on the plane the following day because I could give my poor aching feet and legs a nice long break.
The next morning we left to go back home.
 Our whole vacation was amazing and exploring Sydney the last few days was the icing on the cake. Perfect, delectable, finger licking good icing.