Tripping - in more ways than one!

Have you ever noticed that no matter how well you plan your departure to the airport, you always wind up sitting around for the last hour after checking all of the powerpoints, spraying the house with flyspray and packing your bags. And speaking of packing your bags, why is it that no matter how carefully you pack on top the things you will need at the beginning of the trip on top, they always seem to migrate to the bottom of the bag. So, there you are, spending one night in Sydney, and your toothbrush is at the bottom of your large bag which you vowed not to open until you reached your final destination.

Anyway, after reaching Sydney and finding our toothbrushes, we went for a walk down to the Opera House. No matter how many times we see it, we are always amazed at the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge and the buzz of Circular Quay. This time, however, because of a minor accident we learned some interesting things about the area. We were walking along when Virginia tripped and fell. We were immediately surrounded by young men (later Virgina told me it was almost worth falling over for). It reminded us that with all our complaints of rudeness and a general "don't give a damn" attitude, the great majority of people are caring and kind. The young men got Virginia a chair from a nearby restaurant, some ice to put on her scraped arm, and hovered around to make sure she was all right. The other thing we found of interest, was the high level of security. When Virginia tripped, among the young men who rushed to her rescue, were two security guards. Apparently the area is literally awash with the plain-clothes security personnel. They are very unobtrusive but very efficient. They also told us that the entire area is covered by CCTV cameras and the whole incident had been captured by them.

On recent trips to Sydney, we have stayed in the Wynyard area. We find the underground station there fascinating. It is almost like a small city with everything you could possibly want. We bought our breakfast stuff for tomorrow, I got a haircut, and we wandered. Since we only had the afternoon in Sydney, we didn't do a lot other than walking. Tomorrow we will take a walk in the morning and then go out to the airport to fly to Singapore.