First week with the Aussies

Sorry for the lack of posts after the race. It is a lot harder to do blog posts when living out of a van. Yes, my life as a wander hobo has begun. It has been a little difficult to get used to having the van. So far in this trip I have gone mostly by rail, which is sometimes a pain, but has the advantage that you don't have to pay to park your train. On Monday morning Dzido and I were trying to find a place to watch football (good old times difference meant the NFL playoffs were in at 10am Monday morning) when we found a place downtown, bu realized that we needed somewhere to park. The best we could do was metered parking, which costs 8 dollars for 2 hours. But the game was good, though the Pats lost, so it was worth the money.

This Picture if from our trip to the zoo. It is a beautiful zoo. It has one of the nicest views of Sydney. It also has something called the Australian Walk About where you can actually walk through the cages with the animals. We were walking across a path when we got cut off by an emu!! I real emu! Those things are big and rather scary, so rather than force the right of way, I just let him go ahead of me.

More proof that the world is extremely small- Dzido and I went to a campsite north of Sydney for a day just to get near a beach. We went to buy some groceries, when who did I see in the store? The woman that I shared a hotel room with in Hawii. She was staying with some friends near by until she headed north to meet up with her husbands family. Apparenly she got on the next flight. Sydney has 4 million people in it but we ran into each other. Crazy.

The last two days Dzido and I have been up in the Blue Mountains that are west of Sydney. This is where the camper van and the freedom that it provides, has been very helpful. We drove up through some beautiful rolling hills. They are called the Blue Mountains because they acually do appear blue. The oil produced by the millions of eucalyptus trees reacts with sunlight and makes everything seen at a distance appear blue.

Unfortunately we got a bit of rain while we were in the montains. It was interesting because you could look into the valleys and actually see the clouds coming towards you. I am sure you are wondering- what do you do when you are in a camper and its raining? Well mostly we just drove around. The real challenge came when we wanted to cook and couldn't open the windows. We have a little gas stove in the camper, so when we were making breakfast (eggs of course) it got very hot very quickly.

Today we are back in Sydney since it is raining and we can't go to the beach. Tomorrow is Australia Day and we wanted to be in Sydney for that, so we should have a good time there. Sydney is an amazin city. There are parks and trees everywhere and the streets are so clean.

The streets are wide and the buildings are beautifully designed. With a few exceptions they seemed to have skipped tha bad design phase of the 70s and 80s and went straight to nice big glass structures. The Aussie people are also so nice, I am started to wonder why Canadians have the reputaion for being nice. We could learn a thing or two from these Aussies!

Here is something interesting- I found a website where you can list all of the countries you have been to and it tells you how much of the world you have visited. This is my map. After almost 8 months I have only visited 11% of the world! This calls for more travels...

And just so you are not wondering- my supply of clean underwear is dwindling- will have to do laundry soon.