We are nearing the end of our trip now and so yet again we were up and packing on a beautiful day. For some reason the cicadas were singing loudly everywhere in the morning. We said our goodbyes and popped back to the visitors centre as I had a few questions about the nature we had seen yesterday. Then on to Altitude cafe in Blackheath for our last flat white and Anzac biscuit there.
We were ultimately heading to our final accommodation in Australia in a suburb of Sydney called Manly but only after we had seen a few more sights in the Blue Mountains. We took a different road back down and this time it was much more what we had expected the are to look like with a clear winding road through the eucalyptus forest and none of the massive transport lorries on the main road. We stopped at the Blue Mountains Botanical Gardens which like the ones we visited in Adelaide and Sydney were beautifully laid out and free.
There were signs warning of the possibility of seeing wild snakes but sadly that's all there was to see - the signs. We did see a Bush Turkey scavenging around the cafe though along with a blue Jenny wren and his mate.
Then we drove downhill and out of the Blue Mountains, through a place called Richmond and in towards Sydney. This should have been fairly straightforward to get to Manly but the SayNav decided otherwise. Despite my colourful language she continued to misdirect us to the extent that we ended up driving over the Harbour bridge and back AGAIN in heavy traffic. Ignoring the Satnav this time we used the method of actually reading road signs and this old fashioned method got us easily to Manly.
Luckily the owner of our apartment was there to meet us and talk us through the complicated car parking arrangements and show us around the apartment which took over an hour - she was very thorough! When we eventually were alone and had found our way back to the car for the rest of our luggage, we headed out straight away to stock up on supplies from our favourite supermarket Coles.
A final very annoying thing was putting a load of washing on, timing it to allow a tumble at $3 a load but returning to discover the door open, the timer down to 5 minutes but the clothes quite wet. Colin reckons someone took our load out to do their own for free and couldn't even be bothered to turn the machine back on again. I was fuming and so we have to get another $3 dollar coins and this time we will hang around for an hour to keep it under observation!!
