Today was a pretty hard start to our honeymoon. This morning we left home with the girls and Laura, who, along with my parents, will be looking after the girls for the next week and a half, and we headed into the Coffs Harbour airport. Sharon and I, while both being excited about the trip, felt really sad about leaving our 2 beautiful girls behind. There were tears when w said our goodbyes, surprisingly enough there were none from Molly. Sharon and I had a hard time holding it together though, especially for Maddi who wasn’t keen at all for us to go. I really wanted to just bring the girls with us there and then, but we needed this. We needed to have time together as a newly married couple, with no children, to recharge before getting back into being parents. Being rested and relaxed will really help both Sharon and I to be the best parents that we can be.
Our flight landed in Sydney just after 11:15am and after we collected our baggage we took a 20 minute train ride and a 15 minute tram ride to get to the hotel we were to stay in overnight. The view from our 5th floor room overlooked the Chinese Garden in Darling Harbour.
Once we had unpacked and had a bit of a relax we jumped on a free bus and we headed for Circular Quay for a quick lunch before we boarded a cruise boat for an hour long cruise of Sydney Harbour. Our little harbour cruise took us down around past the Opera House and Garden Island, Fort Dennison and down towards Taronga Zoo back up around Mosman and taking in a river view of Admiralty House and Kirribilli House where the Governor General and Prime Minister respectively when they are in Sydney. We then went just west of the Sydney Harbour Bridge up towards Luna Park before turning south back across the river towards “Pier 31”, which is where Maddi’s favourite TV show, Dance Academy was filmed. It is also the Sydney base for Russell Crowe and his family. From there we headed back into dock at Circular Quay where we disembarked and hopped on a bus and headed back to the hotel.
For dinner we went for a short walk up into Chinatown, where we found a rather good restaurant. Or I should say one of the restaurant staff stopped us on the street and told us what the prices and deals were for the evening and basically talked us into eating there. We followed her direction and went to the upstairs part of the restaurant where we were shown to a table by the window which allowed us to see a little of the street below and here the buzz of the crowd as it ebbed and flowed by. We ordered up our meal and we were really impressed by what we had. The food there was so full of flavour, I can’t describe it. I do regret not getting the business card, but we now where it is for the future.
After dinner we went for a little walk through Chinatown and then for a longer walk around Darling Harbour for an evening stroll to walk off our awesome dinner. Darling Harbour at night is pretty spectacular. There’s fair sized park for kids of various ages and at night the trees are light up by tiny lights that give it a very romantic feel.
The building immediately overlooking the park has its wall change both colour and patterns which was pretty cool. We followed the water feature down towards the harbour itself and found our way to the Maritime Museum, and saw the HMAS Vampire, the sister ship to the HMAS Canberra (the Canberra was tragically sunk after a collision with Australia’s only ever aircraft carrier, the HMAS Melbourne), and an old Oberon Class submarine. We are so looking forward to taking the girls to the Maritime Museum on our return to Australia.
More to follow...
