The Final Entry

Sunday, July 29

It’s our last day in Australia. We can’t believe it. This month completely flew by. We did so many awesome things. Therefore, as part of our final hours before packing everything up, heading to the airport one last time, going through customs, and getting on our 2pm Sunday flight that lands in San Francisco at 11:45am on Sunday (time travel, woo!), we decided to rank everything we did. For this final blog, we could also tell you about the 13 and a half hour flight home, but the movies weren’t that good (a Zac Efron/Nicholas Sparks sad chick-flick and the Three Stooges remake), Stephen didn’t sleep well because the jerk behind him didn’t turn off his reading light the entire time, and customs in the US turned out to be just a quick stop before my parents picked us up. See? Not so interesting. 

On to the interesting part. Here are the final tallies of everything we saw/did:

27 days

18 public buses

9 flights

9 trains

8 boats

7 different airports

6 tour buses

4 gondolas

739 km driven (by Stephen)

43 hours, 56 minutes on a plane

6 hours, 31 minutes spent underwater by Stephen

10 hours in a car

6 hours, 2 minutes spent underwater by Sabrina

7 hours in (and getting out) of wetsuits

16 kangaroos hand-fed

6 sea turtles swum with

2 zoos visited

1 dog on a motorcycle

1545 pictures taken

43 meters jumped

13 SCUBA hand signals invented

10 passport stamps

9 movies seen

30 Luna bars consumed

14 Clif bars consumed

9 bars

6 dinners that weren't Asian

4 FergBurgers consumed

	SABRINA
RANK	EVENT	LOGIC
1	SCUBA diving in GBR	Takes the #1 spot only because it was a 3-day event
2	Bungee Jumping	Would be #1 if it lasted more than 7 seconds
3	Whitsunday Island Cruise	Best all-day adventure
4	Featherdale Wildlife Sanctuary	Best animal interactions
5	Dart River Jet Boat	Totally out-did expectations, lots of adrenaline
6	Sydney Bridge Climb	Another adrenaline rush; great views
7	Hot Water Beach	Made our own beachside hot-tubs; lot of sand
8	Fraser Island	Way cool – lot of car time though
9	Opera House	Gorgeous; worth staying for a show
10	Blue Mountains	Super fun to hike, main area pretty touristy
11	Kurunda	Great picture opportunities
12	Rotorua Park	Luging was fun but cold
13	Polynesian Spa	Not all the pools were clean
14	Milford Sound	Gorgeous, but too long a day with too much sitting
15	Waitomo Caves	They were caves
16	The Rocks	Reminiscent of Boston - plus drinking
17	Sydney Aquarium	Nothing too special – minus the shark tank
18	Sydney Harbor Cruise	Would have been better to do on our first days in Sydney, not last
19	Whitsunday Jet Ski	Too many s-curves; ended up bruised
20	Sydney Tower Eye	Neat way to see the city at night
21	Cairns Night Zoo	Way overpriced/ over-hyped
	STEPHEN
	EVENT	LOGIC
1	SCUBA diving in GBR	Awesome. Enough said
2	Whitsunday Island Cruise	Relaxing, beautiful, and snorkeling with sea turtles
3	Hot Water Beach	Appeals to the little kid in me. Fun every time.
4	Featherdale Wildlife Sanctuary	Kangaroos roam free all around you!
5	Sydney Bridge Climb	Unique experience you don’t really find anywhere else
6	Rotorua Luge Park	Maybe next time Sabrina can keep up :)
7	Bungee Jumping	Wee! (Skydiving is better though)
8	Dart River Jet Boat	Sustained adrenaline, stunning photos
9	The Rocks	Fun pubs, sound less like a tourist now
10	Fraser Island	Driving on the beach is super fun
11	Opera House	Glad I did the tour, next time I’d take in a show
12	Milford Sound	Views are worth the long drive
13	Kurunda	Vast rainforest, big waterfall, cute town
14	Blue Mountains	Too touristy, but fun “bushwalks”
15	Polynesian Spa	Nice and relaxing but can only do for a  few hours
16	Sydney Harbor Cruise	Great photo op, nothing overwhelming
17	Sydney Tower Eye	Didn’t know what to look for on the 1st day
18	Waitomo Caves	Glow worms over-hyped, not worth the detour
19	Whitsunday Jet Ski	Pricey, bad weather, you could do this anywhere
20	Sydney Aquarium	Same as any other aquarium
21	Cairns Night Zoo	The animals were asleep and awful music

KEY:

GREEN: Would do again in a heartbeat

YELLOW: Would recommend but not do again

RED: Would not do

Swim Like an Olympian

Saturday, July 28

So it turns out we lied in one of our earlier posts. We still had to get up early one more time on this trip. Though it wasn’t ungodly early, we were still woken by our alarm at 7am. I felt like a little kid on Christmas morning – I was up and ready to go in minutes. To Stephen, we were going to a swimming pool, so I think his excitement was just a little less palpable than mine.

We had looked online yesterday and found that the main lap pool opened at 8:30am, and I wanted to make sure we were there before it was super crowded. We also figured out which train we needed to take to get to Olympic Park, and by 7:30, we were on our way. As per usual, we worked on our crosswords and took in the scenery. 

By 8:30, we had made it to Olympic park, very close to where we had been on our Blue Mountain tour. We found the signs for the Aquatic Center and at a fairly quick pace, made a beeline for the entrance.

When we got there, it was packed! Tons of people with small children, and after paying $7 each to swim, I began to panic. According to the white board behind the entrance, the main pool closed at 9am! It was almost 8:45. We got down to the pools, changed into our swim suits, and attempted to put our things in a locker. Minor detail – we needed $2 coins to pay for the locker. We had no coins. Stephen had to go back to the entrance to exchange some bills while I continued to have my small panic attack. By 8:55, our stuff was in the locker and we were headed to the lap pool.

Another detail – there were tons of pools here. After the 2000 olympics, the aquatic center had been somewhat converted into an indoor  water park, with a shallow pool with play structures for small children, jacuzzis for parents, and a short lap pool where close to 50 children were participating in swim lessons. 

There was still the main pool and diving well that only had a few people in it, but if it closed at 9am, I was going to have to move to the small pool, which I was not excited about.

Therefore, Stephen and I headed directly to the lap pool, with the knowledge that the lifeguards could come over any minute and kick us out, but until that moment, we should capitalize on the opportunity as best as possible. 

As luck would have it – no one came to kick us out. For those of you who don’t know, one of my former baby sitters (a Stanford swimmer) – Tommy Wilkins – swam in the 2000 Sydney Olympics and took home the bronze medal, so being here was of particular importance to me. The most exciting part, I think, was convincing a life guard to let me do one start off the blocks, which was way cool. Though Stephen is not part-fish like me, he still had a good time, especially since the score boards were showing the live feed of the opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics. Nothing like swimming in an Olympic pool while watching the Olympics. 

We were in the water for over an hour, swimming, racing each other, and watching the ceremony. It was a lot of fun. We finally got out, only after I was convinced I absorbed enough chlorine to smell like a pool the rest of the day, and took showers in fairly unclean locker rooms.

We then walked around the rest of the Aquatic center, sitting in the stadium seats, standing on the Olympic podium, and comparing our heights and foot sizes to those of Australian Olympian cut-outs spread throughout the center.

 

As we were getting ready to leave, my flip-flops decided they had been through enough, and decided to break. Despite Stephen’s valiant attempts to fix the flip flop, no cure was possible, so we headed into the Olympic village to try to find a drug store that might have a possible solution. We had tried the Aquatic Center gift shop, but they had no flip flops.

Good news – we found a drug store fairly quickly. Bad news – the sold neither flip flops nor things we could use to fix the flip flops. Good news – they did sell other shoes – thin ballet flats that compact to the size of a purse – sold for women who want to wear high heels out but want something comfortable to walk home in. We bought them, they fit, and were the fanciest shoes I on the entire trip.

With both of my feet covered, we then headed to the Olympic torch which had been lit to mark the beginning of the new Olympics. It looked pretty sweet, especially with water flowing from all sides – making it much cooler than when we had originally seen in early July. 

After taking more pictures and walking through the entire village, we hopped on a train back to downtown Sydney, stopped by the hotel to get me good walking shoes, and wandered one last time through downtown, mostly window shopping and people watching. Most interesting person award goes to the six year old Asian boy playing his violin hooked up to an amp in the middle of the outdoor mall to make money. We had vegan pizza for dinner and watched some of the first Olympic events, and headed to bed for the last night in Australia before heading home.