June 28, 2018
Since I woke up at 3:30 a.m. this morning, I decided to treat myself and lay in bed until 4:45 playing around on my phone. Woke the sleepy head up next to me and had him get up so that we could go to the gym. I figured we might as well since we were up so early and there wasn’t anything else to do at this hour. My body was trying to tell me that it wanted no part of working out, because I couldn’t get myself into any sort of workout that I could stick with this morning. I tried the elliptical and that only lasted about 7 minutes, then I moved onto the treadmill, which lasted 20 minutes and that was forced. I then moved onto the weights and did a couple of machines for a few reps each and I decided that I had had enough. Pretty exhausting while still fighting major jet lag. At least that is going to be my excuse for today.
After my rough workout (notice I said my, someone else didn’t seem to have the same problems that I did, lol) I went back to the room and got ready for the day so that we could go downstairs and eat breakfast. I barely ate anything, I was getting so tired that I was actually falling asleep at the table and had to abandon Rich and go back up to the room and lay down. 30 minutes later, I am awoken to the sound of a phone ringing and Rich snoring and it was time to get up, because our walking tour was at 9 a.m. and it was close to time.
We met our guide in the hotel lobby, a middle aged woman, nice enough, but a little nervous, because come to find out this was her first tour ever. She obviously had a list of places she was to take us though and she was going to make sure we touched on ever single one of those places, no matter what. 10 miles later, at a very, very fast pace, mind you, we were exhausted and telling her that we wanted to end the tour, we could not take anymore. She had ran us all around the city, briefly stopping at places, about half of them under construction and closed to the public, which turned out to be a good thing, because we ended the tour ourselves and we still ran over by almost 45 minutes. I honestly think if some of these places would have been open for viewing, we would have been out all day and we had another tour scheduled for 5 p.m. and I had wanted to rest in between. We are only on the second day of our vacation at this point and already I just want to sit in the hotel room and relax.
We did see some very neat things on the tour though, way too much to mention, but some of the highlights were The Royal Botanic Gardens, which were beautiful; walking up all of the steps and going inside the Sydney Opera House and learning some history behind the building of it; visiting to the Rum Hospital; walking the path to Mrs. Macquarie’s Point to take pictures in front of the Opera House and Harbour Bridge; seeing the Convict Houses and the absolute best part was climbing to the Harbour Bridge Pylon and seeing the views! They were incredible. It was a lot of steps to get up there though. We thought we were in relatively good shape going into this tour, but the way she ran us around without even batting an eye made us wonder if it is all in our imaginations!
Finally at 1:45, she left us at an area of town called Barangaroo, on the water, with dozens of restaurants. We walked up and down until we smelled some amazing Indian food and decided to eat there. It was one of the busiest restaurants, so we figured it was probably as good as it smelled. It was called Spiced by Billu’s. The service could have been better, but the food was pretty good overall. Once we finished up we walked back to the hotel, stopping at Khatmando to do a little shopping and Rich bought a couple of things, but I was in a hurry to get back, so I could try and get a little rest before our Sunset Cruise at 5. We were losing precious time, plus my feet were killing me at this point.
Our private Sunset Cruise was picking us up at the Sydney Harbour, which was only a 5 minute walk from our hotel room, so we headed down there at around 5:40. We got there at about 5:45, just in time for it to start raining. Not ideal weather conditions for going out boating, but if we were to have rain, we decided that it was better when we were going to be on a boat where we could be under cover than when we were on a 5 hour walking tour around Sydney. Anyway, the yacht was there, so the captain and owner of the boat introduced himself and his co-captain to us and we boarded. When we were told that we were going on a private yacht, I was super stoked, and the entire night ended up not being that bad, but the boat was pretty run down. It wasn’t anything like the beautiful yachts that I see on tv, when we watch the tv show “Selling Yachts”. Nothing like that at all. It actually reminded me more of a big fishing boat. It was kind of dirty and old. Either way, it didn’t matter really, we were there to enjoy the sunset over the harbour bridge from the water and have a nice BBQ dinner.
We started out on the water and the rain was still coming down, but it was fairly light, so we headed out to the middle of the bay, where he showed us various beaches, etc. and then we turned the boat around so that we could watch the sunset over the Harbour Bridge. It was absolutely gorgeous! Unfortunately, I had left my good camera in the hotel, because I didn’t realize there was going to be the sunset photo op, I just figured it would get dark and the camera wouldn’t be used. Missed opportunity, I learned my lesson, never leave the camera! After the beautiful sunset, we drove around the harbour and they pointed out houses of famous people, the house where Tom Cruise filmed Mission Impossible, the house where The Great Gatsby with Leonardo Decaprio was filmed and also where Nicole Kidman grew up. We actually anchored the boat in front of that area and waited for our dinner. This is the time where if it were nice we could go paddle boarding or kayaking or fishing, but since it is winter, it was quite cold and now the rain is really coming down hard. We decide to just go inside and wait for our dinner. This is when we find out now that the captain is going to grill it for us himself on his little mini grill thing that he pulls out of the cabinet. Okay I guess. We are learning faster and faster that this is not a high end yacht cruise (not that we are high maintenance and need that, it was just a little deceiving, or actually a lot, from what we were sold by our travel agent). When we walk down to the table, it is set, with one of those picnic table clothes, but instead of a red and white checkered plastic table cloth, ours was blue and white. There was lettuce torn up in a bowl in the middle of the table with only thousand island dressing as an option, a plate with some cheese and grapes and a plate with a few slices of regular white sandwich bread. By now, I am just going to go with the humor in this and take it with a grain of salt that we have paid high dollar for the redneck yacht version of a sunset cruise! LOL
About 10 minutes later, the captain brings our dinner down, and since he bragged about what a great grill master he was, we were thinking that at least our food would be something to look forward to, but the steaks that we requested (when he asked) be medium rare, were well done and pretty dry, and the salmon, although pretty decently cooked, must have been expensive, because we each only got a piece the size of a iPod Nano. At this point, we just need to go with the flow, starving and all. I told you, that’s a common theme with me.
After dinner, the conversation was good, we sat and talked with the captain and co-captain for awhile and they were both really nice, down to earth people, so we did enjoy the time that we got to talk to them. We then pulled anchor and went for a very, very cold, wet ride around the other side of the harbour, this time seeing where the new casino was being built, where Russel Crowe lived (right on the harbour) and where Russel docked his boat. His boat was there and we were told that it never moves. Now that looked like a boat that I would want to take a Sunset Cruise on. By this time, it is about 8 pm. and even though we have this “yacht” for another hour, we decide that we have had enough cold and rain and we are tired and we need to call it a night. We had them drop us off at the dock right outside our hotel door in the back and we jumped out and went inside and called it a night. Definitely worth it for the sunset, but I think I could have used the other two and a half hours to grab a nice meal and catch up on sleep.
Day two definitely wasn’t dull, so we better get some rest because tomorrow is a full day of wine tours!
