Sydney, Australia:: Part 1

I have been meaning to post a blog entry on our amazing trip to Australia but as soon as we got home Uncle Ben came to visit us in Japan for two weeks and I just didn't have time to sort thru the 3,000 (yes 3,000!) pictures I took. So here I am very late on this post, so lets just jump into it. The girls and I met Nate in Sydney Australia for 6 days. Right now it's Sydney's off season (winter, but the temps were still in the upper 70's the entire time) so it ended up being the perfect time to go because there wasn't tons of tourist to compete with.

Our hotel was in a fantastic location (The Rocks) so lots of the great sights were within walking distance, and we had an amazing view of the river and the Opera House from our hotel window.  The first night we celebrated our anniversary with tickets to a performance at the Opera House. We had great seats and really enjoyed the show-- it wasn't "opera" but a ball room performance with lots of incredible dancing, so fun! The Opera House has a really cool outdoor bar/resturant next to it called Opera Bar its a great place to grab drinks and food before and after the show with great views of the city.

The next day we took a double decker bus tour of the city. You can jump on and off and it lasts for 24 hrs so we toured the downtown late that afternoon and then the next morning we rode the bus to Bondi Beach.

Getting our earphones all set up for the tour!

It was hard to take pictures from the top of the bus so I don't have many but here is one I got!

The hotel gave the girls kangaroo stuffed animals when we checked in and they went everywhere with us!

Bondi Beach was one of my favorite things we did. The tour taught us Bondi means "water crashing on rocks", the waves were huge! It wasn't swimming weather but the girls loved running in the sand.

Then we took the beach trail around the cliffs from Bondi to Bronte Beach. The views from the cliffs were incredible.  I could have spent all day hiking the trails, it goes much further than what we walked with the girls.

At the start of the walk there is this saltwater pool at the Bondi Iceburg club. The waves crashing into the pool was incredible to watch as the people swam.

The churning water made so much white foam.

Reagan crashed at the restaurant after the hike. Beach air wears a girl out!

We played all afternoon at Bondi until we almost missed the last tour bus headed back!

I think she might turn into a mermaid. We had to drag her from the waves to the bus.

On the way home we watched the sunset and saw more of beautiful Sydney from the top of the bus.