48 Hours in Sydney

I'm almost caught up on my blogs!! I spent last weekend in Sydney with a few people from work...another bout of fun!! I was lucky to arrive in time for a really nice (if overrated) sushi dinner at sushi e, which was club meets lounge meets food establishment. (My flight was delayed and didn't get in until after 9pm....we were about to take off but had to go back to the gate because of an engine problem....amazing we got out at all considering the engineers were on strike....not sure who fixed the problem!)

On Saturday D&L and I drove out to Manly, which is sort of a suburb of Sydney that gave us great views of the skyline. There was a nice walking path along the coast providing many photo ops. 

We drove across the Sydney Harbour Bridge...

...And set up D's tripod and timer to get a snap of all of us

This gives you an idea of the caliber of people I get to spend time with

Here we are again...

...And again!

And here is just the view

We then met another colleague, N, who had taken the ferry over from Sydney and had drinks at the Manly Wharf. Nothing like a 1pm bottle of prosecco.

N&L at Manly Wharf

We ran to get to this fountain so we could run through it...but it was off by the time we got there. Very sad faces.

Our master plan for the day was to go the zoo for the afternoon to see kangaroos and check out a food festival. We figured since the food festival was on until 7 the zoo would be open at least that late. Right? Wrong. The zoo closed at 5. We had about 20 minutes to literally run in (at least we didn't have to pay), find a few Australian animals, snap some photos, and run back out. But I got my up-close view of kangaroos and wallabies, and some other animals I had never seen before and will have to revisit to properly observe.

L&N at the food festival 

A red kangaroo!

An unknown but very cool Australian critter

Wallabies! They are in an area where you can just walk around with them. No fence between you! 

Saturday night was dinner at The Winery which was a great scene, lovely wine, and decent food. We were joined by more friends for dinner. Then we headed out to check out the nightlife scene. Shocked when last call was 1am at the first club, we hopped in a cab and headed to Kings Cross for the real party. Mitch would be proud of my 3am night at Kit n Kaboodle (not recommended).

Sunday I took advantage of D's offer to go hiking in the Blue Mountains, about a 1.5 hour beautiful drive. He found a path for us that went down a "Giant Stairway" (which was actually pretty painful), across the valley, and then we were able to take a cable car up and walk back across the top of the mountain. It was beautiful.

"The Three Sisters" rock formation we drove to see and hiked from

Wasn't this happy by the end of the Giant Stairway 

Another view of the Three Sisters

Rather than take the cable car up we had an option to take this railway up. I got a picture in the model car before we headed to the more boring but safer looking cable car

One of several waterfalls we came across 

This one's for grandpa. A koala!! 

By the time we got back to the city we were pretty tired. The Rugby World Cup semifinals were on and Australia was playing. Too tired to head out to a bar, we just went to the airport and watched from the Quantus lounge (where the beer was free). Unfortunately by the time we got there Australia was way behind and it wasn't a very cheery scene.

And that's how I spent a relatively un-touristy 48 hours in Sydney!

One last photo - me and the Three Sisters!!