Saturday, December 15 Sydney - Two plans

      We slept in until 8:30, very late for us here in Oz.  After breakfast down in the kitchen and showers, we divided into two groups, with Ryan and me going to the Maritime Museum and Kristy and Diana headed off somewhere else.  I not sure what they did, I'll have to read about it in the blog Kristy is keeping when she gets it posted.  You can follow her at Kristy's Fantastic and Fantastical Adventures and Misadventures.

Ryan is a great companion for visiting any museums dealing with
planes, boats, trains, cars, etc.   Gets Diana off the hook.  She'll visit a few, but
unlike Ryan and me, she can get saturated pretty quickly by all the hardware.

Tight sleeping quarters on the submarine

Ryan doing sonar duty.  His grandfather (my dad) was a sonar man
on a destroyer in the Pacific in WWII 

We Burts believe in good dental hygiene

The best way to decide who gets to eat first

There's gotta be some good music on here somewhere

The young cadet's training is almost complete

Very impressive Ryan, they've promoted you to captain!

We also go to tour a replica of the Endeavor, which  James Cook sailed to
explore New Zealand and Australia.  There were too many ropes for this young
sailor to master.

     Staying until the museum closed, we walked to the Opera House to meet up with the girls, then walked across the Harbor Bridge, which gave us spectacular views of Sydney and surrounding suburbs.

     We had dinner at a little restaurant at the base of the bridge on the other side from Sydney.  Kristy and Ryan had burgers and fries, Diana grilled fish and fries, and I had Thai octopus and Greek salad.  Our hungry tummies filled up, we walked back onto the bridge, expecting to see fireworks.  Unfortunately, I read the notice wrong on the Sydney city website and they were on a different harbor than the one we overlooked.  However, the night views were beautiful and we could watch the crowds of people out partying and walking the sidewalks of the city from high up on the bridge.

This photo fits just to the left ...

...  of this one

     We walked through the central business district to get back to our room.  Crazy number of people out celebrating Saturday night.

We weren't drinking, but if this photo looks a little funny to you,
maybe you have been

     We got to bed about 11 pm, and while the other three sleep I'm just finishing this posting up at 1 am.  We've got a big day planned tomorrow, hope I can keep up.