I have a good night’s sleep and wake up feeling all the better for it. Today we go to Sydney but first there’s work to be done. Obviously this can’t start before tea arrives so I chivvy Mike along from my bed.
Tea and breakfast done, I head, with a huge pile of bags, to the laundry and put three loads on then go for a shower – this time with the proper products!
When I get back to the boat and hang everything out to dry, I discover that Mike has fixed the windlass with the new parts that have been made, so, for a while anyway, we have a fully working boat (as long as you don’t count the light system which has a mind of its own!). I wonder how long this will last?
We get a taxi to the airport and are told that our flight is on time. It isn’t, as it turns out, because heavy rain in Sydney holds it up. We go through some pretty impressive turbulence and very thick cloud (so no views) and emerge two hours later to a very damp Sydney, but at least it has stopped actually raining.
Photo: Boarding our Virgin Blue flight to Sydney
Our luggage arrives quickly and less than an hour later we are at the Oaks Goldsborough Apartments. The building is a converted wool warehouse and is great. We appear to have been upgraded from a studio to a one-bedroom apartment, which is fine by us.
I call Johanne and arrange to meet them at their hotel, the Crowne Plaza at 7 pm, and after a quick freshen up (during which Mike manages to find English cricket on the TV) we leave. As we do, a guy comes out of the apartment next door and walks with us. He is a professor of structural engineering at Darwin university, but from Newcastle. Small world. Here for a convention or something, he offers to show us the way which we are grateful for. We walk through Darling Harbour, past the Convention Centre and Imax and then we are there.
Just as we get to out of the lift, Johanne emerges from their room as if she could sense us coming and we have a big hug. Their room is fantastic, and a voyeur’s dream given the lit up office blocks all around it. They take us up to the hotel’s Club Bar where they can get free drinks and snacks – they can take one of us in for free and pay for the other one. It’s really good value as the wine is really good and there is a mountain of smoked salmon to get through that no one else seems to be interested in.
Photo: Johanne and I toasting seeing each other again
Photo: Isabella and Steve
Photo: Steve and Mike hold hands (in a blokey way of course!) – ah, bless!
By the time we leave we are quite stuffed! Isabella, though, needs feeding as she doesn’t fancy anything they have there. She wants Chinese, and as we need to pick up Jutta’s jumper from the hotel she stayed at in Chinatown last week, it’s a good way to do both.
By the time we have found our way to Chinatown, we are all ready to eat again. Note – must go on a diet – SOON! We find a restaurant that we like the look of and order far too much … and eat it all.
Photo: Isabella tucks in
We manage to find the Citigate hotel, but although they told me on the phone that they had her jumper, today it is nowhere to be seen and there is no one in lost property. I am told to come back tomorrow. We walk the Suttons back to their hotel then attempt to find our way back to ours. We can see it in the distance but it is a convoluted route as there are a series of flyovers, main roads and a monorail between the harbour front and the Goldsborough. We decide to have a good look round the waterfront first though.
Photos: Darling Harbour at night
I take some photos of the harbour. It is beautiful but I am not sure how to use the camera properly to capture it, hence pretty crappy results that are above. Still I will keep trying. I’m sure Moe will teach me when I eventually catch up with Tucanon.
It’s midnight before we get back to our hotel apartment, and we both collapse into bed, exhausted and happy.
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