Day 10 - Melbourne
After a late start, we drove back up to Melbourne. We spent the afternoon checking out the downtown area. Melbourne was certainly getting into the
Christmas spirit, but it was a little disconcerting to be seeing a Christmas tree with temperatures in the low 30-s C (not F). My sister-in-law collects Nativity sets, so this was one of my wife’s missions for the afternoon. Nativity sets are certainly harder to find in Australia than the US, but she was successful. We headed up to the top of the Rialto Tower to get a view of the city, then after taking part of Lonely Planet’s recommended walking tour of downtown Melbourne, we headed over to the Old Melbourne Gaol just outside of the CBD. It’s a very interesting museum - the exhibits are all within individual jail cells, and a lot of them tell the stories of prisoners. Sadly, it sounds like some of them got a rather raw deal under the judicial system of the time (but hey, that happened in a lot of places).
Accommodations in Melbourne were at the Marque Hotel down in St. Kilda. I’d describe the hotel as a photographic negative of a W Hotel. They’re both trendy-looking hotels, but the Marque is decorated in light colors as opposed to dark. It also had the advantage of being substantially less expensive than a W (~US$125/night). True, you don’t get *wood points for it, but I’d still strongly recommend it for people visiting Melbourne if you can't/don't want to stay in the CBD.
A quick e-mail/web check revealed some bad news. Our return flight was sharing the same flight number all the way through to Chicago, with a plane change in SFO. With an equipment change in the SFO-ORD flight (again!), we’d lost our seats together upstairs on the SYD-SFO segment. Stupid UA. I called into reservations, and a helpful Aussie agent managed to get us back into the upper deck in 13A/H, which at least gave us hope that someone would sympathetically switch seats for us. The whole reason we did C tickets was to sit upstairs in the 744 - there was actually better availability for Saver F tickets when we reserved the flights.
Dinner that night was at Monroe’s, a nice little restaurant right up Fitzroy St. from the hotel. Enjoyed a rather good paella (learning in the process about the heads-on method of serving prawns in Australia - I had to hide it from my wife!) and a couple of cold ones before retiring to the hotel for the night.
Day 11 - Melbourne and Philip Island
Before it got too hot and muggy in the city, we paid a visit to the Royal Botanic Gardens. It’s really a very nice park to walk through…just seeing all of the
oddly different foliage just reinforced that we were half a world away from Chicago. We spent a couple of hours walking around the gardens, then set off on our drive to Philip Island. Sure, the fairy penguins are touristy, but it’s something unique to Australia. We spent some time in the afternoon at the koala preserve on the island, and had a chance to get up close and personal with a
few of them as they napped away the afternoon. We did get a little surprise, though - one of the koalas
came down out of her tree mid-day and went off in search of a new one. According to the rangers, this is a bit uncommon, so we did get to see one ambling down the trail to her next meal. We were cautioned to stay well back as she got off the tree. Koalas aren’t too bright - they will sometimes mistake a person’s legs for a tree trunk…given the claws they’ve got, it would not be a good feeling!
Koala disembarking from its tree...
After dinner, we made our way to the south end of the island for the nightly Penguin Parade. For the uninitiated, Philip Island is home to fairy penguins, which look a lot like regular penguins, but are only around 12” tall fully grown. Every night around dusk, they swim up to the beach in packs. Once there’s a critical mass of them, they march up the beach, dodging enemy seagulls like GIs in “Saving Private Ryan”. As they’re massing on the beach, sometimes a seagull will menace a small mass of penguins and they’ll scamper back to the water. Eventually, the little fellows all made their way back to their burrow homes, where the young were waiting for their dinner. Unfortunately, they don’t allow flash photography, and there’s no way you can get a tripod set up in those crowds, so no pictures here.
Here's what the fairy penguins look like, from a wildlife park we visited later...
Day 12 - Road Trip the Second…Ow!
Today was designated as our last big driving day to make our way back to Sydney. The nav system in the car decided to start us off on the CityLink tollway, so my wife had to make the call to buy us a daypass to avoid getting slapped with a fine. After that, we rejoined the Hume for the ~900km trip back to Sydney. The first half of the drive was a repeat for us, having previously driven the stretch from Wodonga to Melbourne a few days back. As previously established, I’m not a huge fan of some of the design decisions Australian traffic engineers have made…having the Hume zigzag through Albury, mostly in 50 km/h zones was a bit annoying. As we approached Golburn, the weather started to turn inclement. Unfortunately, things quickly went from bad to worse - visibility dropped to around 30 meters and we got into a
golf-ball sized hail storm. Not what you want to run into in the Jag. Made it to the shoulder to wait it out, but unfortunately, we couldn’t find an overpass to hide under before it got too bad. Knocked the plastic covers off the side mirrors and dented the hood, roof, and trunk lid all to heck. Fortunately, we weren’t the worst off from this…at the next service area we stopped and saw a few cars that were dented worse, and some broken windows, to boot.
I just recently received the damages paperwork from Hertz, and I can now tell you that the total cost to repair a severely hail-damaged Jag is A$15,000 - about $5500 in parts and $9500 in labour. $2500 transponder key?
1993gt40[/b]. 
Nevertheless, we successfully made it into Sydney around dinnertime, and made our way downtown to the Sheraton Four Points. By now, I was pretty beat from driving, so we settled for room service dinner and called it a night.
Day 13 - Sydney from on high
Our first full day in Sydney began with a late-morning climb up to the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Many people have discussed the cost of doing the bridge climb (>A$100 each), but my wife and I thought it was well worth it. We had a perfect day to do the climb - clear skies, comfortable temperatures, and a light breeze. The views up on top are tremendous - looking down at boat traffic in the harbour, the views of the city center to the south and the
Opera House just below us …all amazing. Again, unfortunately, you’re not allowed to bring your own camera up to the top with you - I could have had a field day up there with the views of the skyline and harbour. I would have loved to do a panorama up there like I’ve done in Colorado and Chicago. (browse my gallery if you want to see those!)
Our next mission while in Sydney was to let my wife loose for some shopping.
So, we spent the afternoon walking around The Rocks. Her primary focus was on finding a nice opal (her promised wedding gift from me). I think Iost track of all of the stores we went into and all of the opals we looked at. We returned to the Four Points to freshen up a little before meeting some friends of my wife's family who live in the Sydney area for dinner and drinks. Dinner was at a great restaurant in The Rocks (where I again had to hide the heads of the BBQ prawns from my wife), followed by a few rounds of (admittedly overpriced) drinks at the bar up top in the Shangri-La hotel. Fortunately, we got a table by the windows, so the excellent views of Sydney Harbour offset the A$16 drinks.
Day 14 - Sydney and surroundings, and an almost trip to the Opera House
We started off the day heading west of Sydney to one of the wildlife parks in the outer suburbs out towards Paramatta. Got an opportunity to get up close and personal with some koalas, emus, and kangaroos
(this guy's mocking me because he got the whole cup of feed!).
Ha ha ha...stupid American tourist!
From there, we drove back east to Manly to check out the waterfront. Unfortunately, it had turned gray and drizzly, so we didn't get to see a whole lot. We did a little shopping and found a bookstore to stock up on reading material for the next day's trip back. Then, back to Darling Harbour, where we got set to head to the Opera House to see Handel's
Messiah. We figured we'd leave about an hour before showtime, catch a cab over, and grab a quick snack before the show started.
Think again.
Got downstairs and the cab line was obscene, with no available cabs coming into the pick-up lane. After 15 minutes, we abandoned the stationary cab line and dashed across the street to the car park (by now, the rain had picked up to a bona-fide shower). Unfortunately, every bloke in Sydney had the exact same idea -
total gridlock throughout the Sydney CBD. The "as-the-crow-flies" distance of ~1km to the Opera House took 75 minutes. Then, adding insult to injury, every car park I could find within 8 blocks was full, and we were still in a monsoon-like downpour.
After circling around the area for way too long, we eventually gave up, figuring we'd already blown past the intermission. Ironically, traffic on the return trip was much more sane, and it only took 30 minutes to go 1km. :| So, we found dinner near the hotel and decided to call it a night. Guess we'll have to take in the Opera House on our next trip to Australia
Day 15 - The longest day
We spent our last morning in Sydney checking out a street market in The Rocks (my wife) and shooting a few more pictures around Sydney Harbour (me). Naturally, my wife found another opal that she liked. So, her birthday gift was now covered with just one more swipe and signature.
Sydney Harbour Bridge from The Rocks
The Opera House
Like some other airports I frequent, Sydney Airport has a small problem - when you want to return the rental car, there's no easily visible gas station nearby. We ended up wasting about 15 minutes making our way around Mascot and the airport area until we finally managed to find a station to top off the Jag.
As we pulled into the rental car returns lot, I noted that we'd covered nearly 3700 km in our 15 days. Hertz was able to get us on our way relatively quickly, even considering the damage from the hail storm - my wallet just ended up feeling about A$1500 lighter. :|
We checked in and made our way through departure control without a hitch. Like many over at the TS&S forum have noted, security procedures at SYD are much more sane than nearly any airport in the US.
Since I don't fly a lot internationally, I don't have a good basis for comparison, but I've got to say I rather liked the international departures area of the Sydney airport. Bright, open, decent shopping opportunities, etc. I took the opportunity to liberate the last of my A$ on some wines, since we hadn't been able to make room in the schedule for any winery tours. (again, next trip to Australia!)
Next stop was the RCC to settle in for a little bit and fire off some postcards to our families back home. Seems like our routine is always to do postcards while we're at the airport waiting to go home – our last 4 vacations, we’ve done this. We also took the opportunity to see if it were possible to get switched back to seats together upstairs, since UA had screwed the pooch on our seat assignments with the equipment change on the SFO-ORD leg of our flight. Fortunately, the woman in 13B was kind enough to switch with me, so we were able to fly together. Then, she ended up switching with the gentleman in 13G, so we had the flight attendants handling the upstairs cabin confused when meal requests were taken, since the manifest didn't get updated.
UA870 SYD-SFO
747-400, seats 13AB
Unlike on the flight down, we wouldn't have minded a cancellation of this flight for mechanical reasons - we would have gladly taken and extra night in Sydney. However, this flight took to the skies ontime, and we settled in for the trip back to the US. Shortly after takeoff, dinner was served. I had the barramundi, which was quite good. After watching a movie on the laptop, we tucked in for a decent 6 hours of sleep, which had us waking up at roughly 3am Chicago time. I was hoping to squeeze in a couple extra hours, but I couldn't fall back asleep, so I plowed through a Clancy novel for the remainder of the flight.
And, thanks to the beauty of the international date line, you arrive in San Francisco before you left Sydney.
We were able to quickly clear Customs and Immigration and then proceeded to avail ourselves of the Arrivals Lounge. Needless to say, being able to freshen up after a long flight is absolutely wonderful! The wait was a little long (seems a couple of other international flights arrived around the same time), but well worth it.
UA870 SFO-ORD
767-300, seats 6AB
This was the accursed segment was the source of our seating woes for the Sydney flight. There’s not much to say about this flight…it was the typical UA domestic First service. Empower wasn’t working.
There’s always a certain amount of letdown whenever you come home from a great vacation…and then you couple it with jetlag. It was a bit of a jolt to go from 80s in Sydney to 30s in Chicago when we got home.
But, we had an amazing time Down Under, and we’re looking forward to the next great airfare deal that gives us an excuse to come back. Either that, or I’ll have to work on scoring an ex-pat assignment, since my company has a few facilities in NSW and VIC.
G’day!
