The Focus

We stayed at a beautiful apartment called the Focus. The apartments (versus hotel rooms) we have been able to stay in have been an amazing blessing. Since they have kitchens we have been able to cook so many of our own meals. With some of us having mild food issues and the price of food here in Australia being much higher than in America, it was an incredible blessing! So here is our ‘place’

… and here are a few shots of our view!! CRAZY!
Each room had it's own balcony!

The beach- Surfer’s Paradise seems to be like the “Orlando” or “Daytona” ,or maybe a cross between the two, of Australia. There are lots of theme parks, sea world, and a happening night life! But, since it was winter and very chilly here most days, we pretty much had the beach to ourselves. The beaches are eroding away because the tides have been high and the waves pretty intense.

We walked on the beach almost every day, and built sandcastles (or sand 'things') and looked for shells and rocks. And then went to swim in the heated pool and hang out in the whirlpool and lay in the sunshine. It was a rough couple of weeks, but we made it through.

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!!