She’s Back In Town!

Hi!

It’s been nearly a month!  How quickly time flies.

We’ve had a big (huge) Christmas/holiday so far.  We went from here:

through here:

to here:

and back again!

I don’t like posting from the road when we are away – we live in a small town and I suppose I’m not keen on letting people know the house is empty, go help yourselves while we are gone (I’ve never understood that!).  We’ve been back a week now and life is returning slowly to normal, we have three more weeks of summer holidays and then it’s back to the school routine.

Miss Eldest Daughter starts high school this year and when we were invited to spend Christmas with family in Coogee, Sydney, we decided it would be a great way to round off her primary school days with a special holiday.  We never go away at Christmas, most of our family is here and anyway, travelling at Christmas time is always mental but we took the plunge this year.

We drove, which wasn’t for the feint hearted because it took close to two days and it was miles and miles and miles of this:

And that is actually one of the more interesting photos I took out of the window on the first day.  Australia is a BIG place, which many, many interesting things to see along the way, but none of them are located between our house and our first stop of the night, West Wyalong.

(I know there are really, but crossing the Hay Plains via Mildura is very, very flat, and grey, and no trees!)

Eventually, we started seeing scenery like this:

Which we all agreed was much more interesting, even if DH very nearly caused us to run out of petrol because ‘you don’t need to keep reminding me to get petrol’ turned into ‘why didn’t you remind me to get petrol?’.

For those of you who don’t know Sydney, there are many little coves along the shoreline of the inner-ish city, including most famously Bondi Beach.  Bondi is very, very popular and therefore very, very busy.  Our family member used to live at Coogee which is five minutes down the road, and has much more of a village feel, so that’s where we stayed.

We got to look at views like this most days:

Which is not too shabby, really.  Sydney is stupidly expensive to live in, our taxi driver told us that our apartment we were renting would be worth $2 million alone, so whilst it’s an excellent place to visit, I just couldn’t afford to live there and I don’t know how young families manage.

But Sydney sure is beautiful.

We took a bus into town most days, and did the touristy things, including the mandatory trip on a Sydney ferry.  Sydney in Summer over Christmas/New Years was full to overflowing with tourists, and whilst everyone was very, very nice, this little country mouse did feel a bit overwhelmed at times.  I am very much a stay at home girl, I believe.

We were lucky enough to be given tickets to Taronga Zoo for Christmas, which was awesome, it’s been thirty years since I last went. 

Also visited the Sydney Aquarium, and saw this lovely Dugong – she was a show stealer, I must tell you.

And we found Nemo!

We took a stroll through the Queen Victoria Building which was very, very nice.  We have a similar one in Adelaide, the Adelaide Arcade.  Again – chockas full of people.  So many people.  People, people, people.

We were also shouted tickets to the Cricket at the Sydney Cricket Ground which was smaller than I imagined – you see these things on television and they seem so expansive, the SCG was lovely (for a cricket ground!)

Everywhere you turn in the centre of Sydney are amazing, old buildings – lovely green trees.  I really was impressed.

On New Year’s Eve we watched the 9.30 fireworks with a few of our closest friends at Coogee Beach. 

(then we went home and I went to bed because I am old and then I was woken up by the Sydney Harbour fireworks at midnight – couldn’t see them but my gosh, could you hear them!  I was never going to try and watch them in real life, 1.5 million people go into the heart of the city and that was just wayyyyy too many for me! but I did end up watching them on tellie, while listening to them outside).

And then twelve more hours of driving, driving, driving seeing grey, brown, tan (it’s summer, there is no green right now) and then we were back here:

And all is right with the world.

We had two weeks away in the end, which I realised was the longest I have been on holidays with the DH and kids EVER.

And we loved our time away, it was truly lovely.  And one day we’ll go back, this time to stay right in the heart of Sydney so we can do all the inner touristy things.  But we’ll go back in the winter, and when it’s not school holidays.  That’s the plan at least.

I hope you had an excellent Christmas/New Year’s break, I hope you’ve all been sewing and inventing – and I shall see you soon!