Today’s plan was to head west to the Blue Mountains. The weather wasn’t as warm as yesterday and it was overcast. The forecast looked promising and the clouds were due give-way to some sun.
We headed down to breakfast, it was just warm enough to eat “al fresco’ so we had a repeat of yesterdays breakfast, but given the size of the sausages we cut down from 2 to 1.
Next off we made our way to Kings Cross station in search of an Opal card. The transport system here appears to be cashless with all transactions being conducted by tap cards. Surprisingly the transport company does not sell Opal cards, luckily the newsagents in the station did! One good thing about the system is that on Sunday the maximum amount debited from the cards balance is $2.70 Aus or $2.50 Cdn (aprrox. 25c US!!!) Considering it was to be a 2 hour trip each way this was fantastic value for money. Other days of the week the maximum amount debited is $15 which means you can use all the city buses and trains that you want and not spend more than $15. Pretty good value. Anyway that was the good news part.
The train was comfortable, but the track was all welded so no comforting clankedy-clank sounds as we traveled. The suburbs seemed to go on forever, but we finally broke out into the countryside and the hills, unfortunately the further west we went, the lower the cloud got. By the time we god to our destination at Katoomba we were well into the cloud. This was bad news as the plan was to take a bus and aerial tram tour around the area for its views. Given the visibility (or lack thereof) we decided not to splurge out on tickets, rather we walked around the town.
We also tried for our first Geocache of the trip, but we couldn’t it! Good news 1 Bad news 2!
We found a “bombed” tree at one of the churches, if you don’t know what a bombed tree is then e-Mail Lyn.
We stopped for lunch and as we looked out of the window we became convinced that the weather was not going to clear, so we made the decision to head back to Sydney. A disappointing trip, but at least it only cost us $2.70 each. You can’t win them all!!
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