Boomerang, boomerang...

fly little boomerang,

Boomerang, boomerang, as you roam,

Boomerang, boomerang, fly away boomerang,

Boomerang, boomerang, then come home.

If you aren't familiar with the cartoon "Toot & Puddle" that airs on Nick Jr., you probably aren't familiar with this song. I have to admit, I love this cartoon. It ranks right up there with "The Magic School Bus" to me. I love the show because it is an educational AND entertaining cartoon. The words to the theme song struck me this week and are very relevant to our recent trip.

Last Sunday, Daddy Dearest and I came back from a trip to Australia. It was an AMAZING trip! One we will talk about for the rest of our lives. Why Australia? Well, Daddy Dearest worked as a snowboarding instructor in Vail, Colorado when he was in college. While He was living there he made several great friends from Australia. I met these guys on our trip to Vail two years ago. They are great, great people that would do anything for you if in their power. They showed us that while we were visiting. We have been talking about going to visit them since before we got married. We decided that leaving one child with the Grandparents would be easier than leaving two so...we went.

I had a little breakdown the day before we left Bunny but was fine the day we left. We spent almost 20 hours in a plane. Not to mention layover time. After traveling for a very long time we landed in Sydney!!!! We arrived at 8 a.m. that morning. Here is DD after gathering our luggage...

It didn't take long before we found ourselves in the back of a taxi driving on the opposite side of the road and the "cabbie" was driving on the opposite side of the car. It took some getting used to.

Despite a lack of sleep we "dug deep" as Stacey encouraged us to do and hit the ground running. We were staying a block away from Sidney Harbour so we jumped on the "Captain Hook" harbour tour boat for a "Tea Time" harbour cruise. This small town girl has never been on a Ferry before so I was pretty excited. Sad...but true. Here we are boarding...

It was great! We had some great views of the Sydney Bay Bridge and of course the Sydney Opera House...

We were told by our "Captain Hook" tour guide that the dining room scenes from the movie "Australia" were filmed in this house. If you haven't seen this movie it is pretty good. Worth watching for sure.

Here is Daddy Dearest after our tea time, biscuits and cookies.

Unfortunately it rained off and on our first day in Sydney. As a result of this weather the bay was quite choppy. I have never gotten "sea sick" before but I felt awful the rest of the day after that 2 hour ferry ride. I'm sure it didn't help matters that we had spent 20 hours flying. Here we are that night having dinner. We were so tired after our meal we were asleep by 8:30 or 9 that night.

One of my daydreams about this trip was that I would sleep and sleep and sleep. Having never experienced jet lag before I didn't have a clue how it would affect me. I found out the next morning when I woke up at 6:30. I told myself it would get better...unfortunately the latest I ever slept throughout the whole trip was 7:30. So much for catching up on sleep.

Although we didn't have much rest we continued to push on and explore the city. We decided to explore the Botanical Gardens (which were beautiful, but we were running and didn't have our camera) walk around the city and see the Opera House.

Here is yet another picture of the Sydney Bay Bridge. Forgive me for posting so many pictures of this and the Opera House but they were simply magnificent structures.

We paused to take a picture before we got to the Opera House for our tour.

I didn't want to bore you with pictures from inside. It was pretty, but the story of how the Opera House came about was the most interesting part of the tour. Mr. Utson entered the design contest for an opera house. While breaking a lot of the rules of the competition His design was chosen as the winning design after all the designs were reviewed. It wasn't even known if it COULD be built when it was chosen. But He found a way. Much more details, and very interesting story if you are interested in looking it up.

Something kind of fun in the gift shop was ballet shoes that had been used by Australian Ballerinas. I just thought what a neat thing that was. I love to dance, never took dance, but I love to dance and THAT is cool to me. After our tour was over this small town girl saw another first...This is a "Cloakroom". I have seen these in movies but never seen one in person. Small thing but I had to capture it...

Here we are after our tour.

We ate at this cool art gallery/restaurant for lunch. It was a really neat place. Had art everywhere in a great old building that had so much character.

For some reason after having been on solid ground for just over 24 hours (and having gotten over my sea sickness) we decided we should go to eat in the Sydney Tower. This tower had a revolving restaurant. I don't think we were quite ready for the movement of the restaurant though. It was very slow but detectable none the less. We had Great food, a wonderful view (seen below) and left with queasy stomachs. We had a good time though.

The gold tower in the picture below is Sydney Tower where we ate...

Wednesday morning we woke up early...again and decided we needed to see our Bunny. Thank goodness for Skype. I don't think I would have made it without seeing that sweet face for two weeks! Here she is...having a great time with Grandy and Papa.

After getting our Bunny fix we decided to go to Taronga Zoo. What a great zoo!!! I have to stop here and let you know that before I came to Australia I wanted to do a few things. 1. See the Opera House 2. Hold a Koala and 3. See Kangaroos in the wild. With number 1 "ticked" off the list we were moving on to number 2. That is why we went to the zoo. Of course we saw lions and tigers and a bear and koalas but they wouldn't let you hold them. So, we moved on and had a good time anyway. I did eventually get to hold a koala. More about that later.

This day was a little cool so I had on a orange and white striped, long sleeve shirt. This tiger thought us kindred spirits because of that I think. He walked right up to the window when I walked up and stayed there and just watched me for a minute. What a beautiful animal.

My...what big EARS you have...

So...this is Ted. He was lovingly named this (randomly) by Daddy Dearest. I'm sure my friend Stephanie as well as her husband...Ted will appreciate this very much. He is pretty cute!!!

This old monkey was frozen like this for a while. It was like someone told him a really funny joke, he began laughing and then became catatonic.

What a site this was...The zoo was across from Sydney Bay. This view is next to the mountain goat observatory.

Yes...I CAN hear you now.

Here are some Kangaroos...

And some "flying fox" a.k.a. HUGE bats. These were hanging and squeaking their heads off in the Botanical Gardens close to the Opera House. There were hundreds of them there! I couldn't believe how big they were and how many there were. Then we saw them at the zoo too.

We had a great time at the zoo but were exhausted. We posed for one last picture and caught the ferry to go back for a nap.

After a nap we were off to the Capital Theatre to see the musical WICKED.

It was FANTASTIC!!!! Thank you so much Stacey for suggesting we see this.

Thursday was a relaxing day. We made our way to Chinatown...

We ate a great lunch in Darling Harbour. Darling Harbour was probably our favorite place in the city. Restaurants lined the harbour, a mall, a museum, an IMAX theatre. It was a great area!

We finished up our afternoon with a bottle of wine while we sat under one of the beautiful trees in the Botanical Garden. It was a BEAUTIFUL day!!!! And we were anxious to meet up with our friends!!!

Stacey met us in the gardens after finishing work early. We got ready and went to Bondi beach to eat at Iceburg Restaurant. It was a beautiful beach. We got to see people surfing for the first time. We had some great food and wine while enjoying some great company!!!! We realized that night was the two year anniversary of mine and Daddy Dearests' engagement in Vail. The same trip that I met Josh and Stacey! We had a great time reminiscing about that trip and the wonderful gift of strawberries and Champagne they sent the night we got engaged. Josh and Stacey told us about their wedding in Fiji. BEAUTIFUL pictures. It was such a great night catching up. We were so excited to spend the upcoming weekend in Newcastle with them and some other friends.

After getting back to the hotel, and packing for the second time we hit the hay in hopes of resting up for our seaplane flight the next morning to Newcastle. More to come on that...