Friday, December 15, 202
We made it! We exited into the arrivals hall at the Sydney airport and there was a guy holding up a sign saying "Carl & Anne Crawford" Yippee! We were in the right place! This was our driver to take us to the Amora Jamison Hotel, our home for the night here in Sydney.
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| Lobby of the Amora Jamison Hotel, Sydney |
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| Carl & Anne outside the Amora Jamison |
He dropped us off right at the door and he and the bellman brought our luggage in and we went straight to the front desk and lo and behold our room was ready for occupancy! We're in room 1909 (- up on the 19th floor - with quite a view). First thing I wanted to do was strip out of my travel clothes and take a nice hot shower). I know it's Dec. 15 (and we lost a day coming across the interantional dateline) but there's also a serious time difference between Shippensburg and Australia so my body has NO idea what time it is. I only know that I need to stay up until at least 8 p.m. before crashing to sleep tonight.
While we were in our room getting freshened up the phone rang. Apparently, we missed "Melissa" our tour guide for the Australia portion of the trip when we came into the hotel. She said she had some info for us and told us the little welcome reception for our tour group will be at 4:.30 p.m. today. We came back down to the hotel lobby after we freshened up to meet Melissa and get our info. Seems there are more changes afoot for our tour! We originally were scheduled to be in Sydney 2 days (and get our Sydney tour on day 2) but now, we have only this one night in Sydney (on this end of the tour) and will be leaving in the morning for a flight to Uluru to see Ayers Rock. We have to have our luggage outside our door by 6:30 a.m. and will leave the hotel at 7:30 a.m.! This is a big change. We'll come back to Sydney earlier at the end of the week to do our Sydney tour. The reason for that is to be sure we're back in time to get on the ship on December 22! Oh - and our tour group is going to be fairly small - only 17 people! A nice small group.
So, after getting our info from Melissa, we headed out for a walking tour for the afternoon (to keep us from just coming back to our room and collapsing). We're close to Sydney Harbor (about a 4-5 block walk away). We walked down George Street and stopped at the Fortune of War Pub (oldest pub in Sydney) at their outside tables for lunch. We both had fish & chips and a nice cold hard cider.
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Anne having her fish & chips at the Fortune of War Pub
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From there we walked down along the circular quay to Sydney Harbor and got some fine views of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Sydney Opera House (that we'll get to tour at the end of the week). We finished up with a walk through the Sydney Botanical Gardens (very pretty) and then walked back to the hotel. That's it for today except for our little tour group reception and repacking everything to leave again in the morning. Ugh - another plane flight tomorrow!
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| The Sydney Harbor Bridge |
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| The Sydney Opera House |
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