December 30 - January 1

Melbourne to Sydney
Virgin Blue 833
Departs Tuesday, Dec. 30 - 10:15 AM
Arrives Sunday, Dec. 30 - 11:35 AM

Things to see and do:

Before we begin, we’d just like to take a moment to thank everyone who has sent us e-mail and comments. If you haven’t already noticed there’s a link over there on the lower left-hand side that says “Contact.” Because it takes us so long to come up with the updates’ content, we haven’t had a chance to respond to any of your feedback, but we read everything and we really appreciate it!

Tuesday, December 30

We left Melbourne and headed to Sydney to meet up with our other two friends Cliff and David Ray (who typically goes by D.Ray). Cliff and D.Ray had a very long trip, from Houston to Salt Lake City to Los Angeles to Fiji to Sydney. We’re tired and we just flew an hour from Melbourne. They must be beat! We remark at how surprising it is that two sets of folks can arrive at a destination, with one set traveling half-way around the world, and everyone arrives within 30 minutes of each other. Anyway, we arrived at the domestic terminal and they were arriving at the international terminal. Come to find out, the two terminals are 4.5 miles apart from each other and there is no free method of transportation to get from one to the other. We end up paying about $6.50 each for a train ticket. Crazy!

We all meet up and we suspect that Cliff and D.Ray are glad to get off that last plane! We grab a cab and set off for our Luxurious Best Western Motor Lodge rooms in Lidcombe. We’re staying out in one of the Sydney suburbs because we had a very hard time finding an affordable place for just two nights. This specific leg is pretty short because we just wanted to stay in Sydney long enough to experience New Year’s Eve. The lodging options were few (we only booked rooms back in July!) and they were all very expensive and most wanted about 4 nights stay. Off to Lidcombe we go! The good part about it is that it the B/W Motor Lodge is very close to a train station (about 30 minutes to Sydney) and this is going to prove very beneficial to our New Year’s Eve plans, since we don’t have a car for this leg.

We get situated and let Cliff and D.Ray take showers. Then we hop a train to Sydney to scope out locations for New Year’s Eve. On the flight from Melbourne to Sydney, Travis sits next to some Sydney locals who give him a lot of hints and tips for fireworks viewing. We think we know what to do.

The New Year’s Eve plans for Sydney are something else! They spend about $5 million (AU) on the fireworks and city officials suspect there will be well over a million people watching them from the Sydney Harbour area. Are we really prepared for this???

We found a New Year’s Eve guide at the train station and study up on it and then walk around the Sydney Opera House looking for potential spots. We’re not fully satisfied and start looking for a restaurant we earlier read about in one of our guide books. In getting somewhat lost in finding the restaurant we stumbled upon the Sydney Observatory and notice that it’s perched fairly high on a hill overlooking the harbor west of the bridge. There’s a pretty good grassy park with it that even has a few big shade trees. If all plans out tomorrow, that’s where we’ll be! We never find the restaurant and finally give up and eat dinner at one of the many pubs in The Rocks area.

Wednesday, December 31 (New Year’s Eve)

We leave the B/W Motor Lodge a little before noon. We suspect that the good spots will start to go fairly quickly and we’ll need to stake out our claim fairly early in the day. We get to the train station, and for some reason, they continued to have train delays. The train schedules continued to show that our train had a 9 minute arrival time that ended up being closer to an hour. It frustrated us greatly. It took us almost an hour and half to get to Sydney. Our New Year’s Eve events are not starting out well. We eat lunch at a German restaurant and head up to the observatory. There are a few people there and some of the nice shady areas are taken, but there is plenty of space available. Good news for us!! We arrived about 2:00. Now what do we do for the next 10 or so hours??? Well, some naps were taken, some books were read, some music was listened to, some dominoes were played, and a scavenger hunt of sorts occurred looking for refreshments and buying a bag of $6 ice (what we’ll pay for some things is simply amazing).

We remark at how easily the city assembles food vendors and port-a-cans for something like this. Houston typically sets things up days in advance. In Sydney, there was nothing set-up yesterday. Today not only are there banks of port-a-cans, but there are also food vendors set up on the observatory hill. More good news for us! One of the topics of conversation is the attendant for the port-a-cans. They actually have a worker making continuous cleaning rounds through the women’s port-a-cans. Not only had we never seen this before, but it must not be common in Sydney either, because others are commenting on it too.

As the day rolls on, the shade rolled over us, which was really nice. There’s a nice breeze. People continue to fill up the park. There are some antique aircraft fly-bys which are nice and the fire boat cruises through the harbor with its water cannons full blast. Those do a nice job of keeping our minds off the fact that we’ve been sitting for hours and still have hours to go.

Sydney actually has two sets of fireworks. The first performance is set for 9:00 and is for families or anyone who doesn’t want to stay up too late. The big performance (12 minutes in length!) is scheduled for midnight, of course. They will be launching fireworks from 6 barges in the harbor plus the bridge, all of which will be synchronized.

They do the 9:00 fireworks and the park is pretty filled-up. You can get to the port-a-cans, but it’s not the easiest thing in the world. The fireworks are nice, but everyone is geared up for the major event.

After the first set of fireworks, the city has a parade of 55 or so boats that are covered in rope lights in various shapes (sharks, whales, jelly fish, schooners, brigadoons, sea-planes, etc.) It was a good diversion.

Midnight arrives and the park is chock-a-block full of people. You can just about forget about making a restroom run now!

The fireworks are absolutely amazing. You can see for yourself in the video below (the video is 12 minutes long). And we got to watch them with 1,499,996 of our closest friends (city officials think that 1.5 million actually watched them)!!!

Travis believes that they’re the best fireworks he’s ever seen and he claims to have seen some good ones (4th of July in NYC, the ones in Houston that former Mayor Brown arranged for his last summer in office , the annual summer river festival in LeClaire, Iowa, and the 4th of July over Mount Rushmore).

The fireworks end promptly at 12:12 and then we begin to wonder how long it’s going to take us to get back to the motel. There are people everywhere!! D.Ray had actually attempted to leave early and head back to the motel only to give up before he even got half-way to the train stop. We consult with our local travel documents and decide that it may be in our best interest to try another station. We’re cautiously optimistic.

We finally get to the train station and what a zoo it is. Luckily we already had our train ticket. We somehow find the correct train and crowd our way in. Crowded it was indeed! Sardines could learn a trick or two from us. We get to the second stop and even more people get in. Oh my!

We amble along our route and eventually get to Lidcombe and wedge ourselves off the train. What a relief! We get back to the motel about 1:30, which means that our return journey ended up being 1 hour and 15 minutes, which is much shorter than we would have expected it to be. We’re all really glad to be back at the motel and we’re really exhausted. It’s off to bed we go because we’ve arranged for a 9:00 am taxi for a 10:35 am flight to the upper east coast city of Cairns.

We had an outstanding New Year’s Eve and we hope that you did too!