Bush Walks and other Adventures

We split our time in Australia between the Blue Mountains and Sydney. We started off taking a train to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains and then a taxi to the apartment we had rented. We were pleasantly surprised to find the apartment was actually a whole house. After living out of hotels and hostels for the prior month it was so nice to stay in a house with different rooms and a real kitchen! The downside of the house was it was located a bit out of town. When I had inquired about renting it I had asked if we needed a car or if there was public transportation available. The owner had given me directions on public transportation and said it would take 20 minutes to walk to the town. Once we were in our house I took a few of the kids on the 20 minute walk to town to find the grocery store. Forty minutes and many hills later we arrived in the town. So much for the 20 minute walk to town! We loaded up on food and then took a taxi back to our house. I looked into renting a car, but there wasn't one available in the area that would hold 6 passengers so we opted for expensive taxi rides and long walks for a few days.


Our house had a back deck that overlooked a field where we saw a fox and several beautiful birds. But we really wanted to see kangaroos or wallabies. I was in the house googling where to see them in the area and Seth was outside setting up his hammock on the deck to watch for wildlife. Just then a wallaby hopped out from the bushes and sat in the field long enough for us to all see him before bounding back into the bushes. We saw it (or another one) a few days later. On our last night there, we drove (with some new friends) out into the country a bit and saw lots of wild Kangaroos on the side of the road. We even saw a dead one on the side of the road. So we could mark seeing Kangaroos in Australia off our bucket list.

While in the Blue Mountains we did several bush walks. We thought we had just been hiking until we learned that in Australia a hike is a bush walk. We also learned that a lolly is candy, supper is refreshments, a mate is a friend, a ute is a utility truck, and uni is university. But mostly we learned that we loved Australia and especially the Blue Mountains area.