Pre-Christmas Sydney Trip

It was a beautiful sunny summer day in Melbourne as we set off for Sydney for an early Christmas with our youngest son and his fiancée.

Even though Jay would be down for Christmas with the rest of the family Kaede was going to be working. A few days in Sydney spending time with them was something we had been looking forward to since August when we had stopped in The Entrance on our way south at the end of winter. Unfortunately that had been a disaster as we had about 70mm of rain in three days which limited what the four of us could do. This time we hoped for better but the forecast wasn’t great. Time would tell what the weather would really be.

We boarded pretty much on time.

With a window seat I had a good view of the towns and countryside below as we headed off towards Sydney.

About half way there small clumps of cloud appeared

and soon we had a view of cloud only. Fortunately as we began to descend the plane broke through and we had a great view below

which eventually offered us the classic, if somewhat distant, view of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House.

Upon disembarking we collected our luggage and made our way to the train station. We quickly uploaded some more credit onto our Opal Cards and jumped aboard the next train. At Central we swapped onto another train which took us over the harbour bridge to Milsons Point station. It was a short walk down to the reception for the Milsons Point Apartments. The helpful receptionist soon had us in our third floor apartment pointing out a few of the features of the apartment,

one of them being a nice view to Lavender Bay. I suspect if we had been on one of the higher floors on the other side of the building we would have had a bridge and harbour view.

About 18:00 Jay arrived at our apartment. We sat around and chatted for a while. Around 19:00 Kaede rang Jay to let us know she was finished work also, so we set off for a ten minute walk to North Sydney, passing the lovely old town clock

before reaching Miji Japanese Bar and Grill. We ordered some drinks while we waited for Kaede to arrive. You will note the image of Mt Fuji blown into the bottom of my Japanese beer.

Once Kaede arrived we ordered a number of different yakatori sticks to start with; chicken, shitake mushroom and chicken meatball varieties. Our main course was one of our favourites, Okonomiyaki. We ordered two to share, both pork flavoured.

Dinner over we paid our bill and came out of the restaurant. Just as we were about to head down the escalator a lady asked if we could take a Christmas photo of her with her family which we agreed to. She then took a few snaps for us.

Once we parted ways Karen and I began our return walk, only to find street roadworks happening. As a result our route back ended up being quite convoluted as we had to cross roads a few times to avoid workers and machinery to remain safely on a path.