Starbucks on Darling Harbor - click picture for a close up
19 March 2004, Friday
We had a buffet breakfast at the hotel. Eggs, bacon, sausage, cereal, fruit.
This morning we were splitting up and going in different directions. Some were going downtown to shop. Some were going downtown to meet with an Australian crystal seller that Dennis had arranged (he's in the jewelry business). Some were going to the Maritime Museum. Some were going to the Sydney Aquarium. I was going to the Aquarium. While Cheryl, Terry and Rich finished their coffee at the hotel, I walked on down to Darling Harbor and had my coffee at the Starbucks.
I sat out front and sipped my latte and enjoyed the view until they arrived. I really marveled at the similarity to Seattle and the great weather.
We paid our admission and I bought a program guide. They had various covers. They didn't have one with a platypus on it, but I got one with a seal. Once inside the aquarium, one of the first exhibits was the platypus. We hadn't seen any in the wild, because they sleep during the day. This tank was teeming with life. It was about half full of water and you could see above and below the water line. The left half was dark, the right half was light. There were fish and lots of crawfish. There were big water lizards, a couple floating with just their heads out of the water. There were pond turtles. But there weren't any platypus. I read some of the graphics about the little creatures. They showed where the weird little animals were likely to hang out and encouraged you to keep watching and eventually one would pop out. I waited a while. You had to let your eyes adjust to the darkness of the dark side of the tank. Still no platypus. The other three in my small group went on ahead to check out the rest of the exhibits. I lingered a bit longer. Finally, I moved on.
There were lots of fish tanks with large and small fish. Some were from the rivers, some were from the ocean. There was a huge barramundi. There were crocodiles.
The fur seal exhibit had tunnels where they could swim overhead.
There were also sharks and stingrays. Some rather large! There was a coral reef tank with colorful fish and creatures, some of which we had seen on our first day in Australia. The layout is sort of like a figure eight. Part way through the exhibits, you find your self back near the start. So I popped back over to the platypus tank to see if anything had changed. No platypus.
Via radio, I found out from Terry that they were in the gift shop. I could get to the gift shop from where I was pretty easily, but they encouraged me to take my time going through the rest of the exhibits. They were going to go on to grab some lunch and wander over to the meeting place for the next event.
I went on through the rest of the beautiful fish tanks, then back to the platypus. They had a touch tank with an aquarium employee working there and I went there several times to ask about the platypus, but there were always lots of kids around it. I finally found someone who worked there and she told me she thought there were two platypus in there and she was surprised they weren't out. She said the touch tank guy would know more! I went back to the exhibit. There were some other folks that would patiently wait for a little while, then give up and move on. I read the rest of the graphics. The ones where it told about the platypus being nocturnal and sleeping in burrows in the river bank during the day. This exhibit had burrows. And apparently that's where the platypus were. I wondered why the aquarium didn't have cutaway burrows so we could see the creatures even when they were sleeping. I had spent probably an hour total waiting for them to come out. Oh well.
Our admission allowed us to return anytime that day. They were open until 9 p.m. I decided to stop back by later if I had time to see if they were out then and reluctantly left. We were to meet at the Queen Victoria Building to catch the coach for our tour of the Sydney Opera House. It wasn't a very long walk. I stopped at a shop on the way for a bottle of water and a slice of banana bread and made the meeting place with maybe five minutes to spare.
At the Opera House, while we were waiting for our tour to start, I noticed a snack bar that had hot dogs. I got one. Pickles, tomato sauce (catsup), mustard. The first thing you notice is that they cut the buns the wrong way. Instead of horizontally, they cut it vertically. Then I noticed the mustard was all wrong. They used Chinese hot mustard. And, boy, some of those bites were very hot!
Finally, our tour started. We learned about how the Sydney Opera House (SOH) was built. We learned about how this design was originally rejected, then a new committee member came on board and picked this out of the "No" pile. They had to do a little modifying to make the design work, but it turned out just fine.
We walked up and down a couple hundred of steps. We went into both buildings and saw the main concert halls. It was quite interesting.
Then it was back to the hotel. I considered asking Graham to drop me off at the aquarium so I could see if the platys were out yet, but I wouldn't have time to get back to the hotel to freshen up to go to the NSW Corvette club BBQ.
We left the hotel and met up with most of the Vettes at a gas station south of town. We visited a bit while waiting for a couple more expected cars to arrive. They were going to let as many of us ride with them as possible to the actual BBQ site. Because I got to ride in one of the Queensland Vettes, I stepped back to give others a chance. But no one wanted to ride in the Trans Am. They asked twice and no one volunteered, so I did. (There was one Trans Am and one Mustang. These folks weren't members of the Corvette club, but they met them at car shows and just hang around.) Graham followed in the coach with the rest of our group and some of their group who gave up their seats in their cars.
The TransAm was a white 1995 with nitrous. The owner admitted he hadn't used the nitro yet. Hadn't had the opportunity. I suggested he get that car out on the local drag strip! We all had a nice ride and a nice visit. The BBQ site was at a park on a beach in Wollongong, which is a bit south of Sydney. The food was great. They had a pot luck and they were cooking hot dogs on a grill. It was the first time we had fried chicken since before we left the States. They had a couple of raffles and some of our folks won stuff.
After eating, one of the Aussie Vette club members pointed out the Southern Cross to me. I had looked for it from time to time, but for some reason, every time it was night and I thought about it, there were building to the south of me. This time, the beach was to the south. And I got to see it. There are actually two star formations that look like the Southern Cross. This used to confuse boaters who were navigating by the stars. Only the true Southern Cross has a couple of pointer stars pointing to it.
Some of our group brought hats and shirts to trade for their hats and shirts. They were also selling hats and shirts. They gave us all a stubby holder (can holder, they have short beer bottles called stubbys) with a spark plug company logo on them.
We bid them all farewell and headed back to Sydney, the hotel and bed.
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