At the ferry terminal a unicycling juggler played with fire.
Queen Victoria Statue – Holy Hand Grenade?
Our hotel is right in the middle of downtown. That means office workers, shopping and traffic.
Flinders’ cat named “Trim”
Ed’s friend Rick recently wrote an insightful piece about Matthew Flinders, his imprisonment and writings about his cat, Trim. Thoughts of Trim kept him sane while in captivity and it was touching to see a statue to Flinders and his work mapping the Australian coastline for the Royal Navy accompanied by a small statue of his cat.
Statue of King Neptune
Once at sea we will cross many arbitrary lines of demarcation and we absolutely expect a visit or two from King Neptune. The king is personified in a statue near the southern entrance to the botanical gardens. (Andrew: need a link here to the gardens, and general cleanup of capitalization and name in prose and picture captions).
Finch in the Sydney Botanical Gardens
This stopover in Sydney is part of a larger mission. So we don’t plan to pursue wildlife on this trip. Sure if a kangaroo hops by we’ll take a picture. In the meantime there are birds. Huge flocks of loudly squawking birds of all colors. Little birds with luminescent yellow eyes. Plain black and white birds with quite unplain and otherworldly warbling trills.
Michelle in her rose garden, Sydney Botanical Gardens
As newlyweds we visited Kensington Gardens in London and took a similar picture of Michelle sniffing a rose in that rose garden. The one in Sydney did not disappoint. Even this late in the season there were still several varieties with aromatic blooms.
Cockateel in the Sydney Botanical Gardens
These birds provided a raucous chorus to an otherwise quiet afternoon stroll north through the gardens enroute the harbor. They yelled at each other from neighboring trees. They chased each other across the compound, sometimes in pairs, sometimes singly and low, but always with power set for maximum speed. They can move. And that movement commands attention as these colorless 10 kilogram aviators pass a mere meter overhead.
Michelle and Ed at the Sydney Opera House
Truly an iconic building, we ended up approaching from the backside.
Sydney Opera House tiles
The Strand indoor shopping & food
Ed waiting for dinner with a cappuccino
Of course, Ed at the Sydney George Street Apple Store!
