March 8th, 2015 - Sydney, Australia - Day 204
Today was moving day, or so we thought. We got up at a reasonable time, had a cup of coffee and once the kids were awake we headed down to the Cafe on Johnston for our last family breakfast at our favorite coffee shop.
Lea had not been awake for any of our previous visits and so Suzanne had not met her yet. We insisted she make it for this visit and she agreed. So we strolled in to a reception as regulars. Suzanne really has a way of making everyone feeling special.
We had a great breakfast and said our good-bye’s to COJ and Suzanne. Once we were back at the apartment we hustled to get packed up and were out the door at 10:00. We decided to head to the airport even though our flight was not until 2:00 and the cab ride would only take 25 minutes. We made it there quickly and strolled over to check in without a care in the world. We were three and a half hours early, or so we thought.
When we got up to the agent I handed over our passports and waited for her to pull up our reservation. She looked up at me and asked “your final destination is Cairns?”.
“Yep” I replied, starting to get a little worried.
“Are you having trouble finding the reservation?” I asked.
“No, the system is just acting up a little bit.” she replied. This calmed me down - those crazy computers, always making things difficult. But just for kicks I thought I would pull up the reservation on my phone. It took me a few seconds to find it and then BOOM - wrong day. Our flight was not booked until tomorrow. Then I really started to panic. We would not have a place to stay for the night. So I pulled up our AirBnB reservation and BOOM - there is was plain as day - we were not supposed to leave until tomorrow. In fact everything was booked perfectly, we had just shown up to the airport a day early. I sheepishly said “oops, we are here a day early”. The agent was nice and did not make me feel too stupid. Stacie cracked up, she thought it was the funniest thing ever, the kids were not amused. They were excited about getting to Port Douglas and another day walking around Sydney was not their idea of a nice ad hoc itinerary change. However, Stacie set the tone and soon we were all laughing about our mistake. The funny thing is we all knew our stay in Sydney was 5 nights, but somewhere along the way we had convinced ourselves we were leaving Sunday instead of Monday. On this trip we have all lost our sense of time. We frequently ask each other what day of the week it is, we almost never know the date, and usually have very little idea what time it is. However, we have never been confused about our days of travel. I guess we really have hit the phase where we are so mellow we don’t take anything too seriously.
We made it back to the house and threw our packed bags back in our rooms. The kids needed a little time to decompress after the change, so they went to their rooms. Stacie and I sat in the lounge and planned the day. Yesterday we were kicking ourselves that we had not made it to Manly Beach. We figured serendipity really wanted us to go there, so we decided to make Manly our destination for the day.
After about an hour’s rest we rustled up the kids and headed back to the bus. We made our way down to Circular Quay and quickly found the ferry to Manly. The ferry ride over nice and we were treated to a beautiful view of how Sydney spends their Sunday afternoons - sailing. Boats were everywhere in the harbor. Everything from small schooners to Americas Cup contenders.
We got off the boat and wandered through the town. Manly is a really cute little beach town with tons of really cool restaurants and boutiques.
We strolled through the town ducking in and out of shops looking for sunglasses for Lea and I. After trying on about a hundred pairs we found Lea something she loved. All geared up with new shades we headed down to the beach.
We played some frisbee and the kids stuck their toes in the water. After an hour or so on the beach we were all getting hungry so we strolled back down the beach and found a cool restaurant with a view of the water. We had a nice meal and another good conversation, excited about our upcoming stay in Port Douglas. We are going to really try to get into the beach vibe up there and Manly had been a great intro.
We made it back to the house with another ferry and bus trip and hit the sack pretty early because we knew we had a REAL travel day tomorrow.