Day 4 was spent riding on tour buses and really enjoying it (I know it’s a surprise to hear that John enjoyed not being the driver!).

After pouring over the tons of brochures we’d been picking up, we decided to take the Bondi and Sydney Explorer tours. (By the way, Bondi is pronounced Bond-eye – who knew?) We walked down to Hyde Park to catch the tour but somehow missed the bus stop so we kept walking until we found the next stop. The stop was outside some of the law courts – I’d forgot that the lawyers for some (all?) cases still dress like they do in England – it was quite entertaining to see one of the fellows running down the street, gown flapping behind him and holding on to his wig.

The Bondi tour (the first one we took) stops at 19 locations – you could hop on and off at any point, the next bus would be along in 30 minutes. The plan was to walk from Bondi Beach to Bronte (the next stop on the tour) but when we got to Bondi, it was too windy for a pleasant walk. We did get off the bus and walk around

Bondi
and on the beach. It was deserted compared to any pictures we’ve seen of it and there were only a few people who were actually surfing. The sand is really fine – it would be fun to walk barefoot on it. When the next bus came along, we hopped back on and rode the rest of the way back to the main station.

Instead of getting right on the next tourbus, we (well I) decided to go and look for a yarn shop that was in the area. Come on, you’re not surprised about that are you? It appeared to be 2 blocks down from where we were and about 5 blocks up – no big deal… Ha! did I mention that just because the street numbers are in the 40’s on one side of the street, they might be in the 10’s on the other side? Weird! Also, the street we were looking for didn’t really start at the harbour – it started about 4 blocks up after separating from another street. It was pretty muggy out at this time, and we were getting a little warm from climbing the hills but we did see some

interesting bits of The Rocks (one of the districts in Sydney – it was the original site of the convict housing)
while we were locating Tapestry Craft. The

sign
was on the street corner but we couldn’t find the store anywhere so John asked someone and they said it was about 150 metres up the road – that worked out to another block and a half. The knitting department was downstairs and was full of yarn – and they had

Knit Picks needles (that won’t mean much to anyone except Lizz and Angela *s*).
I didn’t buy anything there – but I did see a few Australian-made yarns.

Instead of walking back to Stop 1 of the Sydney Explorer tour, we found the nearest stop and waited there. This tour has 27 stops and runs about every 20 minutes. We didn’t get off anywhere on this tour – just rode around and listened to the tour information. Some of the areas were familiar as we had walked through them several times but we did get to cross the Harbour Bridge and go out to some other areas we hadn’t walked to.

Tomorrow we leave for Lakes Entrance – we have a shuttle booked for 7:45 a.m. to take us to the airport to pick up our rental car. The drive to the condo is about 9.5 hours so we’re going to try to get an early start. Probably won’t be any updates for a day or two.

Temperature: 21 C with heavy rain in the morning and then it was just overcast.