  The standard tourist piccies – Sydney Harbour Bridge and Opera House  The monorail, which goes round… and round… and round…   Riding the ferry back to Neutral Bay – Susannah, Isaac, me and Jeremy |
We got up bright and early to go to the airport. Our destination: Sy-d-ney, to stay with my sister, Susannah, for a few days.
It was an 8:30 flight. An 8:30am flight means getting to the airport by about 8am to check-in. Getting to the airport by 8am means leaving the house by 7:15am. And leaving the house by 7:15am, when you’ve got yourself plus two small children to get organised, means waking up close to around 6am. And getting up at 6am is not a lot of fun, if you ask me.
But we managed it, and by 9:40 (about ten minutes early) were touching down in Sydney. Susannah and her boyfriend Adrian were there to meet us, and drove us back to their flat in North Sydney, taking us over the Harbour Bridge in the process, for maximum sightseeing points.
After being given the customary guided tour of the new flat, we spent a few minutes in the park across the street, before heading out on an excursion. First stop, the ferry wharf at the end of an alarmingly hilly street in Neutral Bay, for a ferry ride across the harbour to Circular Quay. Which isn’t circular, but is a quay. We strolled around and looked at the Opera House and the Harbour. Sydney Harbour on a sunny day really does warrant full marks for picturesqueness.
Then we went up into the station and caught a train to Town Hall. We walked a block down bustling, busy Park Street (which for some unknown reason reminded me of New York – not that I’ve ever been to New York, but you see enough of it watching Seinfeld or Letterman…) to the monorail station, which was undergoing renovations, and boy, you could tell, it was a mass of uncovered messy concrete and signs apologising for any inconvenience. In fact most of the inconvenience was caused by the signs apologising for any inconvenience being in the way. But no matter: Isaac had been dying to go on the monorail, and we caught it all the way around, then headed by train and ferry and car back to the flat.
During the afternoon, I’d made and received an inordinate number of phone calls about arrangements for dinner, and having got these finalised, I went off to dinner with friends for the evening (and amazingly, didn’t even get at all lost along the way), leaving Susannah to handle babysitting the kids, which she did admirably.
