The Hughes Zoo

Our holiday adventure officially started on 9/9/09, the day after Will’s first birthday. It was a tingly Spring morning in Canberra, and Jeremy and I had jobbies. We walked to the bus stop, walked straight onto the bus we needed, and 20 minutes later jumped out at Braddon, where we picked up the hire care. Rather than the base model falcodore I was expecting, we were given an electric blue SV6 wagon, so things were off to a good start.

With a small amount of fiddling everything was packed into the car, and we hit the road at about 1pm. When we got to the outskirts of Sydney we decided it might be an idea to look at a map - luckily 98% of the trip was dead simple. The last 2% ended up taking us quite a while After much cursing and many temper fits (all mine), we were in the hotel. I ran off to return the hire car before the place closed, and Ange worked on unpacking and getting the boys to bed. Despite having to battle peak city traffic, the maze of one way streets around the Harbour, and the half hour walk back, I got by far the easier deal.

The walk back to the hotel instantly relaxed me - even though Sydney feels quite different to Melbourne there’s something about a city at night that I find fundamentally comforting. By the time I got back to the hotel I was dreading returning to Canberra in another 6 weeks.

In complete contrast to the day before, our first full day in Sydney was bliss. We purposefully had no plans at all for the day, so after breakfast on the Harbour we went to a park and the boys played for most of the morning. I spent the day feeling like I was reliving childhood holidays - the country hicks dragging their kids into nice restaurants. Although at least this time we weren’t all in tracksuits
After lunch we walked all over the place, and spent a good hour or so going round in circles on the monorail, much to Jeremy’s delight.  Both the boys were a bit edgy, especially in the afternoon, but it was a fantastic day.

On Friday we had some jobs to do in the morning, then had morning tea at a cafe in the Queen Victoria Building. On and off for the rest of the day we were at the Aquarium, which was awesome. Except when we were stuck in one of the underwater viewing tunnels with 2 classes of primary school kids, which overwhelmed us all, particularly Jeremy. The boys were still a bit unsettled, but were starting to get used to being out of their normal routine.

Mark came around for beer and footy on Friday night, and both the boys were ecstatic to see him again. Ange went back to have a peaceful look at the Aquarium, while we caught up on the last few years. It was a fantastic night.

Photos for the day

Tags: cruise, Sydney

This entry was posted on Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 11:55 pm and is filed under cruise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.