Our First Lazy Day

As many of you know, we are not great city explorers and (most) museums don’t interest us, so today was to be a lazy wander around the suburbs day with an ulterior motive or two.

We decided to go further afield from the hotel for breakfast as their prices were a little steep; we settled for a Chinese run pavement patio place. The food was good and the prices far more reasonable. The one thing we miss over here is the bottomless coffee concept of home at breakfast time, ah the sacrifices we make when traveling!

Back to the hotel to collect our stuff and finalise the route, then off we went to Kings Cross station where we needed to top up the Opal cards before heading out. Lyn had found a crafts store she wanted to visit, and I had been put in contact with a company that specialises in parts for the MGB. A project before next summer is to rebuild the carburetors, this company had the required kits for less than half the price I’d have to pay to get them from the USA. Conveniently their location was about two train stops from where Lyn wanted to go.

It took about 40 minutes to get there, with a 15 minute walk through a residential area at the end. One thing I have noticed here is there seem to be many ethnic areas rather then the more integrated society we are used to in Ottawa. This are was very much an Arab area with the shops selling produce to match. So far, even in the ‘burbs, we haven’t seen any new housing areas, most of the houses appear to have been built in the 50’s or 60’s. There are some apartment buildings going up, but nowhere near as fast as we are used to back home. It’ll be interesting to see if their population is growing or declining.

Once I had my goodies we trekked back to the station and headed off to out next destination. The store Lyn wanted was in a large shopping centre so we got to check that out as well. Lunch was first on the agenda so it was off to the 5* (not) food court. Lyn then spent a while in the stores while I played on the phone. Given the cheapness of data over here for the cell phones it seemed a waste not to use it.

After shopping was finished we headed back on the train for our final journey, one disadvantage for tourists using the Opal card is that any unused money cannot be refunded. This morning we were in the position of having $7 on the card but needed $9 for the trips so we had to top up. Topping up left us with $8 on the card at the end of the day. Opal will not make $8 profit off each of us, we’ll leave the cards at reception for some deserving tourists!

Back at the hotel we lounged around for a while, and then headed out to try to find a local geocache. Again we had no luck, but we couldn’t do too much searching as there were a lot of people around.

The geocache was centred around one of Sydney’s many sculptures, this one was the El Alamein Fountain designed by Robert Woodward as a memorial to the Australian Imperial Forces 9th Division and commemorates the Battle of El Alamein, Egypt, in World War II.

Around the edge of the fountain were a number of Australian Ibis, two of them appeared to be acting aggressively towards each other, but after a while we discovered one was a (large) chick, still been fed by parents.

In the background of the picture above is another sculpture, Angled Wheels of Fortune.

Tomorrow we head off to Brisbane for a couple of days.