September 18

**This sign made my day! The Wildlife place was heaps of fun**
Yesterday was such an awesome day! Lindsay's flight was a couple of hours late, and I was so excited to see her when she got off the plane. Her flight was terrible though, poor girl had so many delays on the three planes she had to take. We went straight to the hostel and got our room settled then to the Aquarium for most of the afternoon. We saw some pretty amazing sharks, seals, sting rays and tropical fish. We took a walk down to the Opera house and to see the Harbour bridge. We had Thai food for dinner, then back to the hostel for a card game, then sleep.
...
We were up early this morning and started sorting out what we would like to do for the rest of our stay. After a lot of deliberation, we decided to book a 'hop on, hop off' bus tour. This bus will take us all the way up the eastern coast to Cairns, which is in north east Australia and right by the Great Barrier Reef. We will be able to get on the bus and off as many times as we would like and stay as long as we want in each place, all for one prepaid price. We've got 6 months to take this trip, so we can stop off in a town/city for as long as we want, to work for a little while and then move on whenever we want to. It feels good to have this concrete plan, and I'm excited for the adventure. We're going to head out to Bondi beach tomorrow morning for a couple of days, and then we're going to get on the bus on Saturday morning to head to a place called Coffs Harbour. The bus ride is going to take 8 hours... we leave at 6:30 in the morning. How exciting!
In the afternoon, we went to see the contemporary art museum. This one was VERY different from the place I went to last week. For one exhibit, there were some sticks glued to the wall and some rocks placed on the floor. Another was some apple crates in the middle of the floor. We didn't stay long, we must not have had the 'eye' for that kind of thing, haha. After, we headed for a 'Wildlife Adventure'. This place was great! I forgot my camera.. too bad. There were kangaroos & Wallabees, wambats, koalas, parrots, snakes, spiders, etc. We saw all of Australia's most poisonous spiders and snakes, scary! In the Koala part, there was a mother and baby (don't remember the name of them.. cub?) sitting in a tree hugging, asleep. So cute! The snakes were pretty gross, the spiders too. After the Wildlife place, we headed back to our room. It was a far walk, we have sore feet. We relaxed for a bit and then went to one of the bars that I've been to for a glass of wine. We ended up getting a bunch of free drink tickets at that place because I had won that pool tournament and didn't use up all of the money on the $50 gift card. An Australian guy and his friends were talking to us and we ended up going to another bar called The Gaff. I've been there before too! It was a fun night and we were back home a little after midnight.