Early start today – up and dressed and quick juice/drink and out of the house by 8:45

Drive to the docks to take the harbour cruise. Got there early and checked out the shops and places to eat. Found a place with giant calamari rings, but no one else was interested.

Chatted with the guy dressed as Captain Hook (we were on the “Captain Hook Cruise Company” tour – and then Heather read up on Captain Hook’s plan to kidnap Hawaiian king which led to his immediate demise (not a nice guy). Heather scheduled us on the special premium version of Harbour Tour – special entrance from people on regular tour. And we got a glass of sparkling wine (at 10am) and a sample of savories and sweet desserts. And for the same price as the regular tour since Heather booked online. The savories and sweets were pre-packaged, but it was nice – cheese and crackers, plus three bite-sized muffins and cakes. We also had access to the rest of the food available on the cruise – coffee, tea, and Anzac biscuits. The biscuits were really good – so we decided to buy more to bring home!

Our harbour tour guide, Bob, was pretty funny and provided a great commentary on the city. Ryan fact-checked the shapes of several islands that he described (Goat Island), but we didn’t call him on it, We saw the entire harbour, including going under Harbour Bridge, passing the Opera House and even got close to the inlet where our AirBnB is located.

After the tour, drove to Newtown, a suburb of Sydney with lots of little shops and restaurants. Reminded us of Carrboro. We stopped in a few shops and use wandered around.

After Newtown, we drove near Chinatown to go to Paddy’s Market – a huge fruit/vegetable/stuff market. Ryan and I dropped off Holly and Heather and went in search of parking. Sydney has lots of narrow streets, streets that look like sidewalks, one-way streets – bottom line, Ryan and missed a turn on a street that looked like a sidewalk and ended up driving around the corner and driving to the parking deck The downstairs area was filled with variety of stands selling fruits, vegetables and all kinds of souvenirs, costumes and all kinds of stuff. We wandered a little and headed upstairs which was a more traditional shopping mall. We found a nice shop and finally brought some souvenirs!

From downtown, we headed back to the world-famous Bondi Beach. On the way from the parking lot, we walked through Bondi Beach Pavilion (very common on each beach), where they were setting up chairs for an event. And the guy setting up the chairs displayed a major league butt-crack. Very impressive. Bondi Beach was a much larger/deeper beach that the others that we visited. Lots of folks surfing – very pretty.

We had collected a lot leftovers, so we decided not to eat out for a change and just had leftovers for dinner.