Wandering Around Sydney with my Bestie Testie ;)

Tanya FINALLY arrived, and the first thing on the agenda was to crack open a bottle of wine and catch up. The next morning I woke up to a tiny headache, but nothing too serious, and we had some lost time to make up for, so we got started on our day pretty early.

I knew that Tanya would obviously want to see the Sydney Opera House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, so we made our way though the Royal Botanical Gardens and down to the water. The weather was fantastic, so we just decided to explore the whole day. After spending some time at the harbor, we decided to take a ferry to Manly by Tanya's Aussie co-worker's recommendation. The ferry trip was very nice, and when we got to Manly, we took a walk to the main beach and along the water to another smaller cove called Shelly Beach where we spent a good hour or so relaxing. As indicated by the name, it was a nice spot to find some shells =)

Still wanting to take a walk across the Harbour Bridge, we walked back to the wharf and took the ferry back to Circular Quay (pronounced key apparently - glad I didn't say that one out loud before learning better). Not really sure how to get to the bridge, we just decided to walk along the water toward The Rocks until we happened upon a pedestrian access to the bridge. We kept seeing signs pointing to The Rocks, but for some reason, it felt like we weren't quite there. Finally we realized that The Rocks must be the whole area that we were in, and proceeded to find the bridge access.

The walk across the bridge had a nice view of the harbor, but felt a bit caged in. It's been a few years since I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, but I don't remember it being so caged in like this one was. I guess the Aussies want to take extra precautions to prevent jumpers. They even had a security guard, who I was tempted to take a photo with in honor of my volunteer bridge marshall work, haha.

When we got to the other end of the bridge we took the train back to the city to get some dinner at Darling Harbour. When we got off the train, we didn't really know where we were going, so we just started walking toward the water and ended up in Chinatown. Using the maps app on my phone, we followed the general direction toward the water, but ended up getting a little bit lost in the industrial area and eventually ended up at Darling Harbour. By this time, we were pretty hungry, and there were lots of restaurants along the harbor to choose from. We ended up eating at a place called Olivio's, which was really yummy, and a pretty good deal as well $35 for an appetizer, main, and a glass of wine.

When dinner was over, we walked across a little bridge at Darling and discovered that it was pretty much a straight shot to our hotel, which funny enough was only a couple of blocks away from the place where we got off the train before getting lost.

Here's a map of the route we took, a total of about 8.75 miles walked. Good way to make up for lost time =)

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