We were up and out shortly after 9am. We drove back into Sydney to the dock for a walk and to see the "large fiddle". We stopped at the tourist information centre and got information about Old Sydney and other things to do in the area. The tourist guide mentioned that a cruise ship would be docking about 10am, so all the shops would be open by then. One of the last things we wanted to do was to be surrounded by hundreds of cruise people, so we decided we would just head out of town. But first, we did drive through the historic district to see the many centuries old buildings.
We took the highway to North Sydney, retracing our tracks from last night, and thinking that we would pick up gas there. We didn't realize that the highway bypassed North Sydney. I asked Erg where the closest gas station was, so she took us through a convulted route to a gas station. Then we had to backtrack to the highway. The fun part was that there was a gas station on the highway just a few km down the road. Go figure, eh?
while we were at the tourist area, I picked up a brochure on Bird Island Tours, a tour boat that goes out to Bird Island and puffins, seals, and other birds. We decided the take the off road to see if they had any open tours. We turned off exit 16 and followed the road 8 km until we reached the site. As it turned out, the next tour was completely sold out to a cruise ship - probably the one we tried to avoid earlier. But they did have one at 5:15pm. We decided that maybe we needed a down day, so decided to book the tour and a cottage on site.
Bob did some laundry, and I relaxed. We basically had a "do nothing" day until the tour.
The tour was very interesting. It was a family owned company that had been doing tours since 1972. The commentary was interesting and we learned a lot about the birds in the area. It was quite clear the guide was not impressed with the number of bald eagles in the area as they were scaring away some of the smaller birds. We saw several puffin in the water, although none on land. We also saw lots and lots of seals, and other small birds, as well as bald eagles. We quite enjoyed the tour.
We settled back in our cottage around 9pm and I downloaded some 476 photos and geotagged them, but was too tired to choose and edit the ones to post. That's for another day.
Hotel: Cottage at Bird Island
Temp: Sunny and hot
Distance: 51km
Mileage: 10.1 L/100 km
No comments:
Post a Comment