22 February - Sydney Harbour

We are off to Sydney to return the rental car and see if we can find our way around to the harbour for a tour.

We decided to take the Sydney Harbour H'lites Tour.

We sailed past the Harbour Bridge, which takes 3.5 hours to climb. We were thankful we were not one of the ones climbing it right now as they were being blessed with liquid sunshine as we watched them from the boat.

Building of the Opera House was started in 1973 and took 14 years to complete. It has 1000 rooms and was $95 Million over budget by the time it was completed.

The Queen Elizabeth is visiting in the harbour. She weighs 95,000 tons.

Ships belonging to the Australian Navy fleet are recognized by the letters HMAS, standing for Her Majesty's Australian Ship.

The Queen Mary 2 is also in the harbour. She weighs in at around 147,000 tons. She has the capacity and requires a crew of 10 warships. The Queen Mary is 140 feet longer than the Eiffel tower is tall. She is the longest ocean liner in the world.

Australia has 40 naval ships and only a half admiral. Therefore the Australian Navy has an admiral from Edinburgh.

A white flag on a ship means it is a navy ship. A blue flag is the national flag of Australia, and a red flag means the ship is non-navy, such as the cruise ship on which we were sailing.

It is 260 kilometres all the way around the harbour.

One of the islands within the harbour was blown up, creating a reef within the harbour.

Darling Point is an exclusive suburb. Captain Darling named many of the landmarks after himself before he participated in passing a bylaw forbidding anyone to name public sites and landmarks after themselves.

The average price of a house in this suburb is $7.7 M. The most expensive house cost $18 M to build. Just recently one house sold for $52 M.

This island is known as the picnic island. You may take a guess as to why that would be.

The entrance to the harbour is only 1.5 kilometres wide.

As we passed by the Taronga Zoo our guide explained that three baby elephants have been born in the zoo. The first was a boy, the second died and the third was a girl. Of note is the fact that if a baby elephant dies the mother recuperates faster and is ready to reproduce again sooner if the deceased baby is kept around to stimulate her to reproduce again.

Also, the Tasmanian Devil has a very bad reputation for being vicious, but they do not eat live prey. They will only be enticed to eat you if you are already dead.

70,000 tons of sand and concrete weigh down the base of this lookout tower.

By the time we were getting off the boat it was raining pretty good so we chose not to visit the Rocks, nor the Botanic Gardens (sorry Ames, I really wanted to see them because you spoke of how peaceful you find them to be).

We decided that perhaps by the time we bussed over to Paddy's Market the rain may have subsized. However, after getting on the bus, someone else told us that the Market was closed. So instead we got off and visited the Queen Victoria Building, which is very high end four story shopping mall.

This ended our visit in the city and we navigated our way back to Picton by train, stopping at George's Pub for a schooner.

Judd took Jack out for a drive on some windy country road in some suped up car. It must have been pretty exciting because Jack wants to do it again in the daylight.

Jess and I spent the evening scrapbooking while watching an Australian iconic movie, "The Castle" and then "IT Crowd".