Happy New Year

Happy New Year! After waiting around a few days to see if the car showed up we were tired of feeling like we were in purgatory, found a ride share through gum tree to Sydney and booked it up here to spend new years. We found the ride while we were in the process of cooking pizza that was leaving in a couple hours, which gave us just enough time to jump in the ocean while the dough was rising, some back, cook the pizza and go. Pretty spur of the moment, it was exciting. We decided that having everything stolen wasn’t going to put too much of a damper on our travels, we’re still going to make the best of it. We drove all night packed into a tiny car with three other people and arrived in double bay around lunchtime. Mallory has some friends around there that she met sailing in Airlie Beach. We Met up with Paul who was nice enough to let us crash his apartment for a couple days. We spent new years eve with him and some of his mates at a private sailing club right on the harbour. They didn’t feel like going out on a sailboat, so after hanging out drinking with them for a couple hours Mal and I took out one of the clubs little row boats to watch the fireworks at midnight. It was really peaceful being on the water, away from the noisy crowds that lined the banks. We anchored to a lit buoy so as not to be run over by all the bigger boats cruising around that may not see us in our tiny craft. The fireworks show was fantastic. The city organized a synchronized show that sent off fireworks from four different places on the water, off the main bridge, as well as several of the main high-rise buildings downtown. Pretty cool.

We are now on a train from Sydney to the Blue Mountains. It’s about time we got out of the city. Neither of us can handle it for too long. We are going to explore around for the weekend until we can come back and meet with the US embassy to try and get Mal a passport to replace the one that was in the car. It’s really cool that it’s so easy and cheap to hop on a train out of Sydney and get to some beautiful wide open spaces in a matter of a couple hours. That’s a pretty short trip by Australian standards. As usual, we’re not really sure what we’ll be doing or where we’ll be going once we get to the town of Wentworth Falls, but we’ll figure it out from there.