Trip with Mom & Dad: Day 13: Sydney Day 1

January 8, 2014

Today we left Cairns and flew south to Sydney to spend a couple days there sight seeing and hanging out with our good friend, Lisa Pelayo (see post from October 2013 to learn about "substitute" Lisa).

In keeping with the theme of our trip, of course it was raining when we arrived in Sydney. I actually can't believe it was hot and sunny in Cairns come to think of it. But for all of you have heard about the heat wave that was going on in Australia during January, apparently we picked the two days when it was "cold" for this time of year. Only around 20C (or 68F).

Anyway, Miss Lisa kindly picked us up from the airport and drove us through the city to see a few things. As I mentioned, it was raining so we didn't do a ton at this point in time. Plus it was late afternoon since it took us most of the day to fly back down to Sydney. We couldn't take an early flight because Brian and I needed to wait as close to 24 hours after scuba diving as possible. Tid bit for the day: if you fly to soon after diving, you can do damage to your ear drums due to the extreme changes in pressure from the altitude.

Here are a couple of the pictures we took today.

St. Mary's Cathedral

Sydney Opera House

I was so happy stopped for a picture in front of the opera house. It was my number one site I wanted to see while we were in Sydney. Too bad there wasn't an opera playing while we were here :(

Sydney Harbour Bridge

The Sydney Harbour Bridge is the largest (but not longest) steel arch bridge in the world. I had no idea! It reaches 134 meters (440 feet) above the harbor!

We were pretty tired at this point and Dad wasn't feeling too great so we went to the hotel and checked in. Ah to be in a city with Marriott's. We had really good air conditioning - too bad we didn't have this place in Cairns haha.

Dad decided to call it a night, but me, Brian and Mom went out to dinner with Lisa.  She took us to this cute little Thai restaurant and she ordered us all her favorite dishes from there. Mom hadn't been to a Thai restaurant before so we introduced her to a whole new cuisine, including curries! I think she really liked it. I thought the food was wonderful.

Thank you Miss Lisa for organizing a wonderful first afternoon in Sydney! We called it a night at this point because we planned to go to the temple early tomorrow morning. Hooray!