Wednesday, January 2 Sydney - Goodbye, Ryan

     Finding a place to stay near Sydney so close after the New Year had been one of the tricky chores we'd worked on while staying with our Kiwi friends in Brisbane.  Diana persevered and found an opening at the Royal National Park, which looks quite close on a map. In fact, it's only about 11 km from the Sydney airport, as the kookaburra flies, although its more like 43 km as the wallaby walks.
     But driving there the evening before showed that a red line on a map is more easily traversed by a finger than a winding, narrow, hilly road is traveled in a car loaded with six people and all their possessions.  We pulled into the campground at around 8:45 pm, lucky that the ranger hadn't locked the gate yet.  He said it would take around an hour and a half to get to the airport, which in LC terms means more like two hours.
     With Ryan's flight at 11:45 am, he wanted us to leave by 8.  We've got a scheme to get the gang going; if you are so much as a minute late for a departure or a meeting time, you have to put $1 in the ice cream cone kitty.  Works amazingly well.  Diana was a couple minutes late for the 8 am departure, but we made it to the airport in plenty of time.

Bye Ryan, we're going to miss you!

     After saying our goodbyes we headed into the city for the day, the first time Kelly and Dan would get to see Sydney.

Our first stop was a quick trip to the roof-top terrace at Sydney Central Backpackers,
 the hostel where we stayed when we first arrived, and also with Kristy and Ryan.
Notice the Opera house and Harbor Bridge in the background

      We walked through the Royal Botanical Gardens, checked out the Opera House up close, meandered over to Darling Harbor and then took the train back to where we had parked the car.

Dan and Kelly

     We got a bit lost trying to find our way back to the campground, but made it before gate closing time.