My feet are BURNING

The past two days have been great and exhausting!!

Yesterday, we met up with our new Dutch friend Mijke (Micah) who stayed in the bed next to us in our first hostel. We took a ferry to a city called Manly. As we drove up on the ferry, we began to wonder why everyone told us that it was such an amazing place. Here are some pics from the trip there....

And here is why we did NOT understand what the big hype about Manly was...

However, when we got off the ferry, we figured out that we actually had to walk (what's up with that?) to the REAL Manly beach, which looks more like this...

We spent the day in the clouds, swam for a bit, and then headed back (after getting some gelato, of course). On the way home, we saw a seal sitting on a buoy!

When we landed back in Sydney, we walked for a bit through the Botanic Gardens. If you want to experience something similar to the scene in Wizard of Oz when all of the monkeys go flying from the castle, just hang out in the Botanic Gardens around dusk. This is a picture that I took about an hour before dusk....

My mom would have FLIPPED out. I was pretty creeped out, too, but how COOL in a creepy way is that?! Bats galore, mmmmm.

Then we went to the IMAX. The biggest one in the world. This was after walking about three miles. In flip flops and swimsuits... towels in tow. Check out this building!!!

We fell into bed after that... getting home at 10 felt SO late!

Today was a TRIP. We woke up at 6, ran to the train station, missed our 6:54 train, freaked out because it takes 5 min to get into town and then another 5 to walk to the place we were leaving from, and we had to be there by 720. We just sat there, freaking out inside, when we realized we didn't have the vouchers for our trip. We just had to pray that it would be ok. A train came along and we just hopped on it, hoping for the best. We got to the next stop, but the dang train refused to tell us what the next stop was until AFTER the doors were closed, so we had to just trust that it would go to the central station.... and it did! We RAN (it was now 705 and we told our friend we'd meet her at her hostel a few doors down from our departure at 700) to get there in time, luckily they accepted everything without an issue, and then we got to sit for almost half an hour while they were working through some kinks with the booking. Go figure.

Well, anyway, it all made up for it when we met Smoky, our tour guide. What a character. This guy has wrestled crocodiles, lived in a tree (with a lesbian couple on the floor below him and a guy who used parts of volkswagens to make his room on the floor above him), driven bus when they hit a kangaroo that landed in the back of the bus where a German wrestler had to fight it, worked with lions, tigers, and bears (oh my!) in Africa, this man has done it ALL! He gave us a great tour through the mountains... I sweat a LOT, we laughed a LOT, and I broke in my new tennies by hiking through the rain and mud. YES!!!

The end of our hike included a train ride at a 52 degree angle up the mountain. It looked incredibly frightening, but actually turned out to be a ton of fun!

I'm so tired that I can't think of anything particularly funny that happened... tomorrow we're heading to wine country and we're hopefully going to see some more kangaroos (that's right, we saw some today in the wild!), koalas, all kinds of good stuff! :) I'm stoked!