When this blogger loses the moment and needs to catch up with posts long after they happened, describing days chronologically doesn’t work so well. After Boxing Day in Sydney, the great times continued as I’ll show in the next few posts organized by themes: playing in water, playing on land, New Year, and great food in the antipodes.
All four Cindy and the Kennymen were gifted surf lessons by Colette and Colman. Thank you! It was so much fun. We had a great time trying all the different components of surfing and each managed to stand up and catch a wave in a few times! Here we are getting ready and meeting our awesome teacher at Maroubra.
This beginning surfer thought it was a huge amount of fun. It’s also really hard work and the combination of waves plus surf board are a lot harder to control than surfers make it look! For a more relaxing way to enjoy the water at Maroubra, we swam several times at the rock pool. Going for a swim is a really refreshing part of any day in Sydney! And Maroubra has very cool rock formations all around the pool.
We went on several coast walks from our home base at Coogee to nearby destinations. One favorite was to walk from Coogee to Gordon’s Bay for a swim. Seen below, Gordon’s Bay is a very calm and sheltered bay, with great swimming and fish watching for those of us with goggles / snorkel gear.
After Gordon’s Bay, we also walked along the coast to Clovelly, another great swimming spot. Clovelly is a long, narrow inlet, with a sand beach to the right of the picture below. We also had fun entering the water from the stairs here, midway in the inlet, and playing in the swells that are much stronger here than at the beach. It was a lot like being in the wave pool at a water park (Midwestern response!)
One day, we met our Chicago friends Liz and David, who are living in Sydney for 6 months, at Rose Bay on the harbour side, for kayaking.
My underwater camera got all clouded up, but here’s Liz on a stand up paddle board.
Rose Bay is a very cool place to play in the water because it’s calm and out of the way of the ferries and other boat traffic, yet not too far from the Opera House and Harbour Bridge, making the views quite lovely.
After fun in the water, we took a ferry to Watson’s Bay, which is located right where the harbour and Tasman Sea meet. We went up to a lovely viewing point to start our coast walk south.
In addition to the two goofy guys in the pic below (David and Liam we are looking at you), you can see the Harbour on the left and the Tasman Sea on the right. Thank you, btw, Colman, for politely letting me know that Sydney is on the Tasman Sea, not the Pacific Ocean 🙂
Rose Bay is really big, and while I said that it was protected from ferry traffic, there are ferries and also sea planes that take off from the side that is closer to the Opera House. We were far away from the “runways” fortunately!
Liam on the fast ferry from Rose Bay to Watson’s Bay.
