We woke early and grabbed our things. We checked out and headed over to wait for our coach. It was a little late but it arrived and took us on our way. Our driver kept chatting about how at the next hotel we might find a husband for his coworker who was apparently unmarried. We asked a little about it and it seemed like the joking was striking her a little bit less funny. Haha.
The tour got underway and our driver was jokey and talkative for the first hour. Stephen was a funny fella and made the tour pretty enjoyable. The drive out to the blue mountains took about 2 hours and we eventually arrived at our first destination. Echo lookout point gave a very nice view of the “Three Sisters” which are 3 large pillar rocks that are pretty. The valley was also a very pretty site to behold. When we first arrived, there were clouds still lying in the valley but that went away over the course of the day, which is too bad. There was supposed to be an aboriginal dance but one of the elder’s died the night before and so it was cancelled. Houses in the blue mountains are only about 600k. Not bad for that kind of view!
We continued onto the aptly if not-so-cleverly named Scenic World. The ‘rides’ there were kind of goofy. There was a skyway tram which gave a decent view of the valley but it ate up a large chunk of our time there. When we took the tram back we barely had enough time to take the steepest railway train down into the valley. It was a 52 degree incline. It’s lowered down the rails with a couple steel cables. At the bottom the views from beneath canopy were amazing. This is why we were disappointed in the tramway, the undercanopy was so much more amazing.
We then had lunch in a cute city named Leura. Best meal we have had here so far! Service here is great, the waitress even offered us some sunscreen as we were sitting outside. She was honest too – when I started to order the soup, she warned me, telling me it wasn’t that great today.
After a long drive and nap we ended up at Featherdale Wildlife park where we spent the majority of the time petting wallabys and kangaroos. They had all sorts of Aussie animals (mostly birds) to take pictures with/of. Then it was a quick stop at Olympic Park to change buses to get to the airport. I left my phone on the first bus but luckily the driver found it before he took off. I’m guessing it fell out of my pocket. Our driver to the airport spent quite some time talking about food. For some reason he decided that silly Americans probably have never heard of foods like mashed potatoes, butter, cream, pumpkins, etc. so after each food he mentioned he would ask us if we had heard of it before… not kidding.
There and back again 