TD's Australian Adventure, finally.: Sydney on the Rocks.

Free Day! We did not have anything planned for the day so we decided to check out The Rocks, the original downtown Sydney circa 1788. As it happens they were having their weekend street fair. Jen and I have had some difficulty finding items that yell out and say "buy me" during our time here, well, besides candy.

Australia has some awesome candy. I'm madly in love with their Party Mixes, basically a mixed bag of gummies and pretty much any of their chocolate since it all seems to be of the Cadbury variety, and I'm a Cadbury fiend, especially around Easter.

Anyhow, off the candy tangent and back to the Rocks. The street fair was great and they had all sorts of items available, but again no luck on the buying front. Its a good and a bad thing. I'm not spending any money but I'm also not bringing home any souvenirs of our great Australian journey. Two more days left to buy some randomness, we'll see what I stumble upon, probably just more candy, but delicious candy at that.

From the Rocks we headed for a closer look at the Opera House. Turns out it was free family day, and the queue to get in was 8 blocks long. Needless to say we did not go into the Opera House, nor set foot on the steps. We did however walk around it toward the Royal Botanic Garden. The garden is Sydney's equivalent to Central Park, but cleaner, greener, on an amazing harbor, and just better. Sorry NYC. The garden is stunning and well maintained. We took Gram out on one of the docks between it and the Opera House, and to some nice scenic spots in the actual garden. We know she would love it.

From the garden we headed to Wooloomooloo. Yes, you read that right. Wooloomooloo is a suburb near the Royal Botanic Gardens and the Docklands. We headed this way to get lunch at Harry's Famous Pies. They are known for their Tiger pie (beef pie) and their Hot Dog de Wheels, which is a hot dog with chili, onions, smashed peas, cheese sauce and tomato sauce. We all went for the dog. Jen and Mandy both had the Hot Dog de Wheels and I went for the hot dog with smooshed peas and mash. There was some miscommunications on my part, and I somehow ended up with no dog, so it was just peas and mash in a bun, see pic. I did go back for the dog, but I ended up not eating it after all and just eating the mash filled bun. I have weird texture issues with boiled/steamed hot dogs, I only really like grilled or fried hot dogs, I'll save you the details because its just one of my weird food issues. But delicious either way. Harry's is also a celebrity hot spot, not because we visited, but because it has been there for 50 years.

We headed back toward downtown Sydney cutting through the RBG again. It was here that we spotted what they call flying foxes, sounds cool right? Turns out not really, we call them bats. If you weren't paying attention you would completely miss them. You would think they were just some obnoxious birds that sound like the monkeys from the Wizard of Oz, but you would be wrong. I took some quick pics, they were pretty large suckers (pun intended) and creepy, so we didn't stick around for too long. The picture I took is from 25 feet below them, the black dots are the bats.

We ended up back at the Rocks to check in with our bike tour for tomorrow and to scope out a breakfast place that is supposed to have some killer pancakes. As we were looking for the pancake place we stumbled upon a cute pub just under the Harbor Bridge. I stopped to take a picture of the nice brilliant blue tiled wall they had and we decided to take a bit of a break and grab some refreshments alfresco. We decided to head over to Mossman Bay by ferry once we were finished with our drinks. As we got up to leave the barman asked us where we were from, etc, etc. Well after our nice chat and once he'd shown us the whole place (there are multiple stories and some awesome views) he asked us to come back for dinner tomorrow. He told us we should go to Watson's Bay instead of Mossman. He told us we could see the ocean from there and that there were some great restaurants. We said our goodbyes to our new friend George and then kind of looked at each other as if saying "hmmm." Mandy asked us what we should do, Mossman or Watson's. Jen and I looked at each other and said in unison, "Looks like Gram wants to go to Watson's." It just seemed like too odd an occurrence, since we had planned on going to Mossman and as we were getting up to leave this man stops us, takes the time to show us around his cool old pub, and then tells us we must go to Watson's. Well, we did.

It was a 30 minute ferry ride to Watson's and beautiful all the way there. We located the little city map once we got off the ferry so we could decide where to go. There were three realistic choices for places to go to in the time we had before we needed to catch the next ferry. One was a nude beach (uh, no). So we were down to two. The first thing I read was GAP and then I read the other name, which I can't recall now. Then I read GAP again, and then it hit me GAP, Gram And Paps. Well X marks the spot so we headed toward the GAP. We could not have picked a more beautiful place to say our final Australian farewell to Gram and Paps. In fact, we didn't, we just did what we seemed to have been told. The GAP is basically where the ocean meets Sydney Harbor. From our vantage point we could see the northern bluff and we were standing on the southern bluff. These huge cliffs are just separated enough to form this breathtaking gateway into Sydney Harbor. We just stood there awestruck for awhile, this sense of peace seemed to wash over us. We said our goodbyes and headed back down toward the restaurants. It was really unbelievable how our plans had completely changed, but put us right where we needed to be. It was the cherry on Gram's hot fudge sundae of a journey, and Pappy didn't fare too badly either.

All smiles with a couple happy tears. -T