Phase 1: Complete

Thursday, July 5.

Good news! We have internet (at least for the next 3 days), which means we can continue to ramble on and upload amusing photos. You're welcome. :)

It would appear we have successfully converted to Australian time - sleeping in until 630 this morning. We wandered downstairs for breakfast, an incredibly large array, with surprising twists on American dishes, such as Cocoa Pops (in place of chocolate rice krispies cereal) and Australian honey for dry toast.

By 9am we had packed up all of our things, sent a few important emails, and were checked out of the hotel. Though it was lightly drizzling, we opted to walk the 20 or so blocks from our hotel to our next adventure for a 10am tour. You get three guesses to figure out where we went.

Hint 1:

 Hint 2:

 Hint 3:

 Hope that last one helped you guess correctly - we went to the Sydney Opera House. It was absolutely stunning - no pictures seemed to do it justice, especially since some of the prettiest areas were not allowed to be photographed. We were so impressed by the building that we actually went to the ticket office to get a list of shows so that we may be able to see a play or opera on the tail end of our trip - and good news - there is no dress code so we could go in our travel clothes.

After walking through the Opera House, we headed over to the Royal Botanical Gardens right behind it to get more views of Sydney Harbor and to enjoy lunch, especially since we were able to leave our bags at the coat check in the Opera House.

Here are a few pictures we took - we were lucky that the rain had stopped by then and the sun had even started to come out.

Thats the Opera House in the background along with the Sydney bridge, which we will be climbing in a few short weeks. Sorry its not the best picture of the area, but its a pretty good picture of us.

After we were done walking through the gardens, we returned to the Opera House, picked up our bags, bought tickets for the public train, and headed to the airport to catch our flight to Cairns. Three hours and many uncompleted crosswords later, we landed in Cairns and made our way to our hotel.

Tomorrow we start our SCUBA class - don't think we'll have many pictures, but we'll try to upload at least some stories of our first experience.