Back to Sydney

We were up and out early. It was a cattle station breakfast of beans, ham, eggs and toast, to keep us going. One thing about our travel that has been difficult is that there aren’t any major highways, and consequently no rest areas. So we’ve been having to find places where 40 people can go to the bathroom at once, and it takes a long time at each stop. In addition we have some folks with medical issues and often have to make unscheduled stops, wandering through narrow roads that have got to be a challenge for the driver. We had an unscheduled stop in Orange, in a wine growing region, where there were two gas stations close together enough that we could use both restrooms.

Mostly today we had to get from Parkes to Sydney, about 360 kilometres or 5 hours. We had a stop scheduled at Scenic World, a small park located inside Blue Mountain National Park. It boasts the steepest railway in the world (it’s pretty steep!) and two gondolas, one that goes up and down into the valley and one that goes across the a canyon to the other side. We spilt into 3 groups – one group stayed on the bus, one did the down-and-up on the gondola and the across gondola, and one that did the train down, gondola up and then the across gondola – that was our group. Sasha the bus driver drove each group to the restaurant for lunch. 

Unfortunately we were late getting to Scenic World because of the bathroom stops, and then it was very crowded so we had to wait a long time for each of the rides, and it was after two before we got to lunch. We weren’t back on the bus until 3:15, and then we had another unscheduled stop, so we didn’t get to Sydney until after 6. Dinner was in the hotel at 6:30 and combined glacial service with good but not great food (better that any that we’ve had outside Sydney though), so we didn’t get back to our rooms (we got the same one we’d had before)  until almost 9 and still had to shower and pack for our very early departure the next day. And, I was getting a sore throat.