Trip to the Olympic Park

One of the first things we did in sydney was visit the Olympic Park. It amazes me the entire thing was built for the olympics, but it was, and it was amazing to see. I wanted to also see the Saltmarshes in the park, so we did some hiking out of the main urban area.

Let's get to the pics.

Here is the Anz Stadium in all its glory. This thing was huge. I can't even begin to explain how big it was.

Here we have the train station. This was also custom built for the olympics. The train comes in underground, so you don't have any tracks visible to people in the park. 

Of course, the cauldron that was lit for the games. It looks like a spaceship to me. ;) Seriously though, it was very cool to see it in person. We watched the opening ceremony with this exact cauldron being lit... Talk about surreal. 

After a quick game of giant chess... (three foot tall pieces) Ok, not so quick, but I won though. :) We headed to the outer edges of the park. This part was the more rustic area, lots of landscapes and creation to look at. 

This was called the "Brick Pit". Basically it consisted of a huge circular walkway around and above a body of water. It served as a conservation center for the local frogs which lived in the area. As you can see, it is very tall and very large.

Another site we walked to, was the bird wetlands. It was amazing to see hundreds of birds in some places, and water only a foot or so deep, strechting out hundreds of yards.

A little family of ducks right here... :)

A cool surprise and little side path led us to Shipwreck cove. At first I was like "Woah! Real shipwrecks!"
But then I read the sign.
It seems, people used to just wreck ships they no longer needed in this bay. So, there were a few ships remaining from the wrecks.

I almost fell into the bay getting this pic... not even joking. 0_0 The rocks were covered in some rather slippery brown silt. So glad I didn't fall in!

The last thing we saw before going back to the stadium... Were the Saltmarshes. I think they put the boardwalk at the end of the trail because everyone wanted to see it... We walked over 6 miles to get here, yeah, the park was that big. ;)

This place was one of the coolest places we have visited in my opinion. It was for one, dead quiet, except for the distant sound of cars on the highway.

For those of you who know the smell... It smelled like mosquitoes. If that makes any sense. It was  a warm, damp, and moist atmosphere. Add a little salt to that air, and you get what it was like. To me, it was such a calming and relaxing place.

The trees were not tall, but the walk was made so you walked under them. You can see from the shadows there were not many gaps in the trees at all. 99% of the walk was in the shade

And that was our trip to Sydney olympic park. It was a long day, (we walked over 10 miles) but very cool to see all kinds of olympic history here. Will definitely be remembering this trip for a long time.

Austin

Parramatta

The stay in Sydney suburb of Parramatta was so wonderful!!

We were so blessed during our week in Parramatta. We got to stay in this wonderful apartment…

Photo courtesy of www.stayz.com.au 

 I’ll only show a few pics of the rooms- you may be getting weary of seeing our lodging.
Here is the main living area:

Two boy slept here: 

The whole apartment was wonderful and Margarie was so helpful in giving recommendations about things to do. She took great care of us. Thanks Margarie!

So this was home base but we were very close to lots things to do and lots of public transit. Now in the small town where I grew up, there is no public transit…. And in the small town we live in, we have never used the bus… but here we used public transit of one form or another almost every day. The Tall One and the Older became masters of the schedules… the rest of us were a little slow on the uptake, but did finally get it figured out.

Thanks so much to Stephani at the information desk in Parramatta for introducing us to the system and making it understandable to us - YOU ROCK!!

So our public transportation options were:
A) The free shuttle- this took you all around the city of Parramatta. It ran on a loop and came every 10 minutes. This was great to get us to the train station or the wharf. 

Picture courtesy of www.busaustralia.com

B) The River Cat- this awesome boat took us up the Parramatta River to the Sydney Harbor. We saw some amazing views and got some incredible pictures from this boat.   Here we are: 

The River cat picture courtesy of university of Woolongong  http://www.uow.edu.au/informatics/maths/research/groups/asearc/research/4thAnnResCon/2010arcuowscampus/index.html

C) The Train- We only rode the train one day, but it was pretty fun as it was a new experience for us. We saw some homeschoolers from the area who were out on a field trip, how fun is that. 

The train took us to Sydney Central, right downtown. Wait till you hear about the adventures that day. Totally cool! 

D) And finally, the Ferry- which took us over to Manly beach. The ferry was huge with lots of people and lots of fun. 

  Ferry picture courtesy of http://www.withincooee.com/new-south-wales/sydney/

Riding on public transit was really fun for us, as we don’t get to do it very often. I must say the other folks who rode regularly didn’t seem nearly as excited as we were about the ride. Hee hee

Stay tuned, coming pretty quickly will be the wonderful places we went while riding on the Sydney and surrounding areas public transit system.

P.S.  there were also busses in Sydney, but we were concerned we would end up on the wrong bus, so we stuck to the trains and waterways.

And FYI… if you ever travel to Sydney, on Sunday they have these wonderful family fun day passes. These handy little passes allow everyone to ride any public transit all day for a greatly reduced rate!! You can save big bucks!!