Sydney and on to the Gold Coast!

Lots has happened since my last post so I will try to use my summarizing skills from those English classes I used to love so much.

Friday morning Caleb, Taylor and I passed the car onto the girls as they dropped us off at the Newcastle train station. We hopped on the train with all of our stuff from Newcastle to Sydney to start our exploration out of Newcastle. Our next move was to the Gold Coast but since we were so close we decided to do the Sydney thing for the weekend before we left. Plane tickets being cheaper out of Sydney also impacted this decision. We knew beforehand that a weekend was only enough time to skim the city of Sydney so we hit it full force to see as much as we could in the short amount of time.

Looking at hostels I saw that most of the hostels in sydney had several hundred beds so I figured we would have no problem finding a place when we got there. I was wrong, Taylor and I walked around to 5 hostels before we found one with a 4 bed girls room open. They agreed to rent it to us if we booked the whole room. Apparently there was a 'future' music festival and gay mardi gras festivals in town for the weekend. After we secured a place to stay, we headed to Darling harbor. We went to a Kelly Slater in Tahiti Imax movie that was awesome! The imax is the biggest screen in the world and it was in 3D. It literally felt like you were standing on the beach with them.

Our next stop friday night was the aquarium. It was right on Darling Harbor and some of the exhibits were actually below water level in the harbor. It was also really cool. It was wild to walk in their underwater tunnels and be walking right beside massive turtles and sharks and rays as they swam.

Look at the size of this shark!

Taylor had this thing on point. I think that is a manatee.

Saturday we took a bus out to the beaches and walked from Coogee beach to Bondi Beach. It was georgeous just like all of the beaches here. I think this picture is Gordon's Bay.

Bondi Beach was PACKED. Even after I had seen pictures I was amazed. We spent a few hours there and got in the water for a while.

After Bondi, we got back into town and walked to see the Opera House. We got there just at sunset so we only got a glimpse before we headed back to the hostel for the night.

I will get some pictures for sunday and put it in another post. Like I said, it was busy.