After a short flight to China with a four-hour layover and then a longer (8 hour!) flight, we arrived in Sydney.  Although, we were very excited to visit Australia we were really using this as a long layover before we get to New Zealand, and purely for our travel stats we couldn’t pass up a Country/Continent.

Due to our short amount of time here, we had to act as professional tourists, hitting up every necessary tourist destination in the area. We spent the first afternoon in Sydney exploring the Central Business District, which consisted of walking across the Harbour Bridge, viewing the Opera House, the Harbour area, The Rocks district and Chinatown. Sounds like a lot of area to cover but it was all very close together and walkable.

Our second day we spent celebrating Adena’s Bday!  We went to Bondi Beach, a famous beach town for the day.  This was monumental for Adena, being a winter baby, this was her first time celebrating on the beach!!  Later that evening thanks to some bday gifts we were able to get tickets to a play at the opera house.

Our third day we also took advantage of some more bday gifts and made our way to Featherdale, a wildlife sanctuary just outside of the city.  At the sanctuary we were able to pet Kuala bears, and hand feed kangaroos as well as see many other native species such as wombats and dingos.

We are very excited to leave for Christchurch NZ tomorrow as we are renting a Vanagon for two weeks to travel up and down the South Island… Stay tuned!