The Blue Mountains

We took a train about two hours from Sydney to the Blue Mountains. It was a cold (about 4 degrees Celsius) and foggy day, but we were all still excited to go on a hike through the famous Blue Mountains!

This is where we stopped to eat our lunch halfway through our hike. We had lemon chicken wraps. I was the first one to bite into my wrap (anyone surprised?) and was shocked and dismayed to find some strange things in my wrap....
The first thing I tasted was a potato....oh, and not just a regular potato...but there was potato salad in our wraps!
there was some grilled chicken, artichoke hearts, sundried tomatoes...
It was weird, but edible!

Most of their trees in Australia don't leave their leaves, they loose their bark!

One of four water falls that we saw on our hike.

The second waterfall.

The third waterfall.

The initial view we got of the blue mountains.

Sydney

After a short, but miserable flight (has anyone ever had the joy of vomiting on an airplane?) we arrived in Sydney. It was very different, it was cold and rainy and not so tropical. We had to take a train and then a ferry to get to our lodging. Then we had to walk up about 100 steps and two huge hills all with our 50 pounds suitcases, in the rain. It was not a nice experience. When we got to our hotel we found that we had very small rooms with a double bed, plus a twin sized mattress on the floor. There were about 15 rooms per floor and a separate bathroom with four toilets and three showers...for the entire floor. It was lacking to say the least. After a lot of whining and complaining we all got over it and went out for a walk with our guide. We got to see the Sydney Harbor Bridge, and the Opera House which we were very close to. We got really good food and started the second part of our trip!

Palm Cove

Our last day in Cairns we had a free day. We decided to take a bus to a local beach.
It was so pretty!

This is me standing right in front of the chapel below. So this is the view looking out of the glass windows of the chapel. And the next two pictures below are taken from right in front of the chapel! Not the temple, but still pretty!!

This is a wedding chapel right on the beach!

The grocery store

I may be wrong, but do we have pictures of cows and chickens in our meat section?

Is that a different monkey on the coco pops?

Most of the people I went to Australia with could not use their cell phones while overseas. The travel company gave us phone cards we could use to talk on the phone or use in the internet. The easiest way to use these was to go to the local grocery store where they had six computers and two phones. Sometimes it took a while to get to use the phone and sometimes we ended up waiting while people were talking on the phone. These are just some of the fun things we saw that were different in the Australian grocery store!

Red Bull in a glass bottle? and that was $3.49 for one bottle!

Where is the red bag for the nacho cheese doritos?

RICE BUBBLES? Really?

Not sure how LCMs stands for Rice Krispie Treats?!?

Rain Forest

On our third day in Australia we went to the Kuranda rain forest.

We got to see some awesome animals!