Ok, I have been meaning to update you all on my recent trip to Australia. It would be a very LONG read if I try and do it all at one time, so I am going to break it up into 3 as we visited 3 cities on our tour.
We left Kansas City around noon on Saturday, August 4th. We flew from KC to Dallas, Dallas to LA and then LA to Sydney. Because of the time change (and international dateline), we arrived in Sydney on Monday, August 6th at 7:30 am. It was a long trip getting there and when we did arrive, it was morning so our guide, Jason, told us that we HAD to try and stay awake until 8:00 pm that night. I didn't think that would be much of a problem as we were all very excited to finally be in Australia and there was so much to do. By 5:00 pm that night, we were all starting to look a bit cross-eyed and delirious.
Once we made it out of customs and the airport, Jason had arranged for us to take a short bus tour of the city. It was very cool to see so much at one time. It was funny watching people drive on the wrong side of the road .. yes, Americans drive on the correct side! We stopped at a few different places to take some pictures and then made our way to Bondi Beach. This beach is a HUGE tourist attraction and it is also where a great deal of Baywatch was filmed. We walked along the beach for awhile and then had lunch in a small cafe. By the end of Monday, we were all quite tired and ready for bed so it was an early night.
I slept pretty good all night that first night, but was up at about 4:30 am the next morning. I got up and went with Bonnie (our head coach) on a walk around the area. We were staying right near the harbour so we had great views of the Sydney Opera house, the famous bridge and the water. It was great!! Later that day, we toured the opera house and spent time seeing the various theatres. It was much more plain that I thought it would be, but still very neat. Following the tour, we took a cab over to the Sydney Aquarium and toured it for awhile. It was your standard aquarium, but still very neat. We had our first game later that night ... it was a semi-pro team show up (much better than expected) and we were still very jet-lagged so we did not play well.
We spent time Tuesday doing more sightseeing and went out to Manley Beach. To get to the beach, we took a ferry across the harbour. It was still located in Sydney, but outside of the harbour (connected to the ocean). Manley Beach is alot like Miami Beach .. the shops just aren't as high end as down in Miami. Lots of little stores, though, to browse through. It was winter in Australia as well while we were there so we didn't have to fight the summer beach traffic. We saw lots of bikinis and speedos, though, as winter was still 70+ degrees there.
We got up early on Wednesday, then, so that we could catch a flight to Brisbane ... more details to follow.
1 comment:
Great work.
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