March 24 - Australia: Sydney, New South Wales
We avoided any potential wine hangovers and slept in until 8:00ish. After showering and getting ready, we disassembled the tent and hit the road toward Sydney.
Nothing very exciting about the drive. It only took us about 2.5 hours. The shocker is that there is no freeway directly into Sydney. The freeway turns into some four-lane local roads which have stoplights every 50 feet. I can't imagine what rush hour is like in this town! Good thing it's a Sunday.
Sydney Information Center
After driving around for some time in downtown Sydney, we finally located the main Tourist Information Center in the very colorful and lively Darling Harbour. At the Info Center, we were given a list of self-contained apartments in Coogee Beach (pronounced "KuhJee"), where our friends from last night told us we could find some affordable places. As it turns out, the apartments at the beach were more expensive than the ones in the city! So we ended up making arrangements at "The Grantham" on Potts Point. They have some nice studio apartments for a good deal. (Although a "good deal" is all relative when you're in a city). At least we don't have to pay for parking! We're in a cute studio on the top floor - Room #804 - with great view of the apartment building next door and if we stick our heads out of the window, a terrific view of the Sydney skyline.
So our main goal for the week is to find a buyer for the truck. This means that the truck has to be washed and waxed and thoroughly cleaned. Unloading everything out of the truck took us four different elevator trips! That's a lot of stuff. Then we hit the streets to find a car wash or someplace for a "self-wash". What we ended up finding was a parking garage that does cleaning and detailing, which is what we wanted. Unfortunately, it was 5:00PM and they were closed. So we'll try again tomorrow morning and then will spend the rest of the morning waxing the truck. Then we'll hit the streets to find a used car dealer who'll give us a deal.
Organize and Dinner
The rest of the afternoon was spent sorting through three weeks of accumulated stuff and trying to figure out what goes to the US and what gets trashed. We have eight cans of coconut milk and no other Thai ingredients. But we refuse to make a special trip to the grocery store until we finish off the pasta, cans of soup, and other odds and end of food we have. We also determined that we'll have to ship a box of PADI books home. Now that we're the proud owners of a case and a half of Aussie wine, we have too much to bring on the plane with us. Oh, and I should mention that none of the wine will be ready to drink within the next three years, by the way.
The "stuff organization" took us a while, but we were both happier when it was done. We feel much more confident about what's flying back to the US with us and how we're going to check it on the plane. So the next big step is to get rid of some of this food. As part of that goal, we made a big pot (well, wok-full) of pasta sauce for the next few days. As we were waiting for it to cook, we looked out the window and saw a MASSIVE flock/school/herd/gaggle of bats flying across the sky. It was a really incredible sight with dusk in the background.
Bats Over Sydney