Let the holidays begin!

Our two days in Sydney were spent visiting both the old and the new. It’s always a dilemma when you arrive somewhere after such a long flight...do you go right to bed, or try to stay up for hours in attempts to get back into a normal sleep pattern? Well, we opted to stay up and wander around. First we checked out where our cruise boarded and found it to be a very short luggage drag away from the hotel....great....no need to pay a taxi. Did I mention how EXPENSIVE everything is here in Australia?? Our once dreams of retiring and disappearing in Australia will not likely come to pass. Afraid our pension $$ wouldn’t carry us far here. Food and drink seem quite high....but of course, there is that whole "no tipping" thing, so the higher salaries of wait staff is already factored into the cost of the food and drink. For instance, a bar on the waterfront advertised $10 steak..."hmmm, deal" we said and in we went for lunch. We’d toast our arrival with a bottle of Magners (an Irish Cider that we can’t get in the Maritimes)...price for the meal...$36. In effort to win some of that money back, we headed off to the Star City Casino. Kier had great luck there back in 2007....but change is inevitable, and the casino was nothing like it once was. Being die hard slot players, the plethora of table games all but eliminated most of our preferred machines, so we left shortly after arrival with only a few less dollars in our pockets. We did have a fun evening visiting the State Theatre for the comedian Dylan Moran. He is from Dublin, so with our fondness for Ireland, we really enjoyed his comedy. Plus the theatre was a beautiful old building with lots of character. A great way to spend our last evening in Sydney before heading out tomorrow.



Kier in the balcony





State Theatre for Dylan Moran





                                                           

WHAT I LEARNED TODAY:  Jet lag STILL sucks. We’re still waking up every day at 3:30...don’t know how long this is going to last????  But hopefully the soft swaying of the cruise ship starting tomorrow will stop the insomnia/jet lag.