BEER ME please…


After breakfast we got dressed in our workout clothes and I’ll preface this with I’m not very fit, I’m far from it. When we lived in Virginia I would go to our gym in our building to buy sodas before work, as they were 1USD. My wife on the other hand enjoys walking up 17 flights of stairs to get to our apartment here. Sooooo with that being stated, we were off for a nice and I was told easy bike ride in Manly.

We started by taking a nice walk to Circular Quay:



We scanned our Opal card and jumped on the ferry. We were sort of late and got stuck inside on the side not facing the harbor, so no pictures on the way out. The trip takes 25-30 minutes and they sell snacks/water/Gatorade on board, which were needed as I had a pretty dehydrated from the night before.

We landed in Manly and quickly found our bike shop, we had a rough idea of where we wanted to go, here is that rough idea - https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Manl...33.8229979!3e1

You see, a short easy-ish looking ride, I mean, how hard could biking 4 km be? The bike rental guy said, Oh there is one hill that everyone walks up and after the arch it’s smooth sailing. I was trying to be positive and actually was looking forward to the ride. As soon as I sat on the bike was another story, bike seat too small, but not set up properly, whatever, just wasn’t right, but I toughed through it and off we went. We were told to ride along the beach and then turn left; you can see from the map what we did. Riding along the beach was nice, something SFO777 would enjoy if you catch my drift.

It all went pear shaped after that, we either went to far or not far enough but when we turned left there was a giant hill. I thought ok; this must be the hill he was talking about. Tried to ride up, made it 10 feet, hopped off and started to walk. I stopped for some water and looked at my phone, realized we were on the wrong road and needed to turn left on the next road, oh good, another hill. Ok, started walking up that hill, it kept going and going. At this point I’ve paid to walk a bike up hills for about 30 minutes, while I rode it for 10 minutes. This is going well. I kept a positive attitude though, but I was miserable, I was dehydrated and miserable. We kept on going; eventually we got onto the road we needed to be on, and oh good, the hill everyone walks up. Ah after this I can start to actually ride this bike. Gasping for air causes a terrible dry throat, so more water, more gasping, rinse and repeat. Finally we reached the top, when I say we, I mean I, and my wife had been there, laughing at me.

I saw the arch way and that was the entrance to the park, so I jumped back on my bike and tried to ride some more, there was a slight incline but I was gasping a attempting to not walk, it was working, for a little bit, but eventually I needed a break. It was becoming a real wake up call about my health at this point. My wife asked if we should turn back as she knew I was in a bad way. But I’ll be damned if I didn’t walk this bike here not to see what I came for. A few more minutes on the bike and it was getting worse, I had to stop; now if you’ve worked out hard enough sometimes things happen like losing breakfast all over the side of the road.

After that lovely episode, I felt a little better, but eh, I was over it at this point. I stuck with it though; we eventually made it to the lookout.

The views were wonderful:




When we arrived we heard very loud birds, which we later learned, were magpies and that area apparently was their nesting area and they were getting violent. My wife still had her helmet on and she was getting attacked while I couldn’t be bothered because I was about to pass out on the ground from exhaustion. Turns out they are attracted to bright colors, use this as PSA folks.

After the bird attacks and I caught my breath it was time to leave. We topped up our water and now the easy part, riding the bikes back downhill the WHOLE way. So what took almost an hour getting there took about 10 minutes to get back. We dropped our bikes off and well, I needed a beer and thankfully there is a brewery called four pines.

The best beer is the beer in front of you:


Refreshing, wonderful, cold, we had a light snack/lunch even though it was almost 5 at that point. We noticed we could grab the next ferry back to town. This time we sat on the proper side and snapped some pictures on the way back.



We docked and headed back to the PH, we needed to swing by the front desk and exchanged room keys. Our new room was on the second floor and this time we had a view of the opera house.

I’m not leaving the couch view:


Ok, well maybe I’ll go on the balcony:


That night we just crashed, and used deliveroo and ordered from the Spice Room which was a restaurant I wanted to try anyway as we don’t have good Indian food in Sao Paulo (that I know of…hint hint).

Stay tuned because tomorrow I think we’ll go drinking some more. That’s always interesting.