Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

I have enough time and energy to report on our 60+ hours as tourists in Sydney in a very narrow way only. We landed on Thursday afternoon, collected our luggage, bought our transit cards and rode the lovely, modern train for about 15 minutes into the city. The Museum Station in downtown Sydney reminded me of stops on the London Tube: big, winding, hot...and never before had I needed to depend on elevators. I think it took us 3, maybe 4, to reach the surface. We walked less than half a mile through the Big City to reach our hotel. The kids did remarkably well on their first non-taxi navigation of a city. I have a very favorable opinion of the Radisson Hotel and Suites near Darling Harbor. It's a familiar kind of hotel/apartment combination and our suite was clearly a converted apartment. The location was perfect and on Thursday evening we walked to the very-nearby Tumbalong Park in Darling Quarter where our kids devoured a really nice playground. We had a lovely harborside dinne...

The first time we visited Sydney, it was for one night (and a total of about 12 hours). The third time will be three nights. The second time? You guessed it: two nights. In terms of play by play, we arrived by plane after a 90 minute flight from Gold Coast airport. The only notable thing about this has to do with time zones. Sydney is in New South Wales and Gold Coast (specifically Coolangatta) is in Queensland, which sits on top of NSW the way Washington sits on top of Oregon. Nevertheless, Queensland has its own time zone, one hour earlier than/behind NSW. Thus, we left Byron Bay at noon and arrived in Coolangatta an hour later at - drumroll, please - noon. After a bit of lunch by the beach we flew for 1.5 hours and landed 2.5 hours later in Sydney. It's hard to say whether or not we had jet lag but we were definitely confused. (I hadn't realized we jumped a time zone when we drove 2 hours from Brisbane to Byron a few days earlier.) NB: Screen shot taken at 12:44 with ...

This post is probably not interesting to anybody except my future self. Feel free to skip this one if you visit this site to see pictures of our cute kids. I don't mind. Tuesday, December 10, 2019 (Santiago, Chile). Wake up with alarm. Elise's back hurts. A lot. Finish packing, showers, etc. Breakfast at excellent hotel buffet.  Discover flight is two hours delay. Reschedule airport shuttle. Kids watch more TV. Easy shuttle to airport. Easy time checking bags, going through customs, etc. except that Lily's visa is invalid on account of a typo in her passport number that I didn't catch. The application fee is mysteriously waived so, you know, whatever. The kids are getting pretty good at this. Even have time to change remaining Argentine pesos into Chilean pesos to spend on souvenirs.  Fail to mail postcards from Chile because 'open" post office in the airport is unstaffed (as warned). Eat lunch at Ruby Tuesday in Santiago Airport because, well, w...