Once the ship made it back into port at Sydney, we had two days to explore the city before we headed back home to Katie. We ended up staying in a hotel called the Shangri La right on the waterfront area of Sydney called The Rocks with a view from the room of the Opera House.
Our view from the room.
We decided to do a bit of walking in the downtown area around the hotel and get some more up close picture of the Sydney Harbor bridge.
We decided to stop in and eat at Lowenbrau down on the Rocks on a friend’s recommendation. I know what you’re thinking – you’re in Australia, eat Australian food. I would challenge you to define to me what Australian food is, and you may not use the words “Shrimp” or “Barbi.” Go. Besides, the Weissbier was sensational, and worth the wait.
We also decided to walk around the bay and check out the Sydney observatory. It isn’t operational anymore as the city lights grew up around it and basically blocked out its ability to view the stars, but it had some pretty neat views of the harbor.
As a surprise for our pseudo-Christmas present, I got us tickets to go downtown in Sydney and see “Wicked” at the Capitol Theater. We ate in Chinatown before walking over to the theater, and then did a leisurely stroll over to get our tickets. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t allow cameras in the theater, so no pictures of the AMAZING sets they built. Great show too – the girl who played Elphaba had a sensational voice. Jenny loved the songs and the show as well, so it was the perfect end to a good first day in Sydney.
When we woke up the next morning, it was raining all over Sydney, and we found out that all the bus drivers had gone on strike overnight, so there were no cabs ANYWHERE. Not to be deterred, we trooped onward anyway. We had tickets to take a tour in the Sydney Opera House, and then we decided to wander around downtown Sydney some more.
The Opera House tour was definitely worth it. The pictures don’t do it justice. Getting up close lets you really see what a technical and architectural masterpiece it truly is. The whole seashell structure around it is just a shell, and the theaters within the buildings are separate cocoons within the building build entirely from Australian wood. The tour guides said some gobbeldy gook about it helping the acoustics, but I was too busy snapping pictures to really listen.
It was cold, early, rainy, and no coffee.
So we found out that the architect of the Opera House – Jorn Utzon – was actually fired from the project before he got to see it finished due to cost overruns. Three decades later, the city of Sydney realized that they probably came off as party poopers, and invited him back and had him redesign some additions to the buildings. Pretty neat that it ended amicably, but amazing that the building almost wasn’t finished to begin with.After the Opera House, we caught the subway down to the shopping district, and checked out the National Catholic Cathedral of Australia. Not being Catholic, I still think that church architecture is pretty neat, so we decided to stop and grab some pics of it as well.
Then it was off to a café for an ice cream mocha for Jenny and then off to the airport. Next time in Australia, we’re going to spend a week in Melbourne. What a great vacation though …
We finally made it around Tasmania to the capital of Tasmania – Hobart – and our cruise resumed being awesome. Hobart itself isn’t very large, but I had been waiting until this specific stop for my treat. I specifically booked the “chocoholic walking tour” in Melbourne so that I could spring my own surprise in Hobart – a tour through the Cascade brewery.
I know what you’re thinking. “Jeez, this guy dragged his pregnant wife on foot through a brewery on their vacation?” Yes, yes I did, and stop judging, this was my vacation too.
Anyway, the Cascade brewery is the oldest brewery in Australia, and the beer they make there was pretty dang good too. They had a “First Harvest” brew that was only available in Tasmania, and it was phenomenal, if not a little hoppy. Jenny stuck to the apple cider, I took all of her free tastings, and the result was a very happy, and slightly tipsy (OK, a bit more then slightly) Trevor. Then to cap it off, we decided to walk back to the ship from the brewery, which to buzzed Trevor sounded like a great idea, but to a pregnant Jenny was a BAD idea. Three miles later, Jenny pointed at the blisters on her feet and said, “I just want you to remember, when I complain later, it’s your fault.”
Maybe she shouldn’t have rubbed it in when she beat me at chess.
You only wish you could look this awesome in a neon yellow safety vest.
Ok, so if Burnie was tough, Port Arthur was shoe leather. Port Arthur sits on a small part of land in the southeast corner of Tasmania, and is connected to the mainland of Tasmania by a 39’ narrow isthmus of land. So imagine this – Australia was England’s penal colony. Tasmania was Australia’s penal colony. Port Arthur was Tasmania’s penal colony. Filter that down, and you get the most hardened criminals from England and Australia staying at Port Arthur. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the biggest attraction in Port Arthur is – you guessed it – an old prison.
Unfortunately, due to the ship’s late arrival into Port Arthur, the ship couldn’t get its tenders into the water until after a two-hour delay. Then, after waiting for three hours to get on the tender, we realized that it would take 45 minutes on the tender to get to shore, we’d have about 45 minutes to look around, and then we would have to get back in a 2 hour line to get back on the ship.
So what did we do to pass time waiting for the tender? Well, Jenny finally tricked me into playing some games with her, and I realized why I hate playing games with her. As a competitive alpha male, I love competition, especially when it’s something I can win. However, there has yet to be a game invented that I don’t habitually lose to my wife at. She crushes me at everything. It wouldn’t bug me except she‘s such a good winner. No gloating, no trash-talking – just pure, unadulterated dominance. I hate it.
Ok, I lost the first round of chess. I blame the mood lighting in this dimly lit, nautically themed bar. We change locales to better my odds. Best two out of three goes into effect immediately upon my loss. Silly – I should have recognized the futility of this venture based on previous performance against Jenny. But, like a small child, I apparently needed to relearn this lesson.
Did I say she didn’t gloat? I must have been wrong, because she insisted I take this picture to prove to everyone that I had lost the second of two games. Like a habitually gambler, I figure I gotta double up to catch up – best three out of five is out of my mouth before the king even gets tipped over.
I hate chess.
Once they finally call our tender number we made our way to shore and checked out the old prison that is Port Arthur. Pretty neat architecture, but to be honest, living out my life in a Tasmanian prison is NOT how I’d want to go out.
Ok, so this is where the cruise took a sort of side trip down negative lane. I don’t blame the cruise line at all – well, OK, I do a little bit. The weather wasn’t as warm as a lot of people thought it was going to be (only about 14-15° C for most of the trip, so lots of pants and long sleeves being worn), so the pools were closed a lot of the time on the ship. Driven indoors, most of the over-60 set sat down in every char on the ship and promptly fell asleep. They fell asleep in the bars. They fell asleep in the theaters. Heck, they even fell asleep in the game room, where there are only about ten chairs to begin with.
Why so many sleepy seniors? Oh you haven’t been on a cruise before? Well allow me to explain. There are about four distinct demographics of people that will typically take a cruise.
1)The newlyweds. Harmless, they seldom come out of their rooms for air, and when they do, they are on the early-20s to early-30s age bracket and won’t look at you cross-eyed when you order your third scotch at dinner, probably because they are still so busy looking at each other and trying to figure out how to disengage from your conversation and head back to their room. Like I said – harmless. They make up roughly 10-15% of the people on the boat.
2)The couple that needs a break. Not a break from each other, but a break from whatever jobs/callings/responsibilities they have back home. No real age bracket on this one, but most of them are pretty cool to hang out with, engage in conversation, and have a drink with. However, they only make up about 5-10% of the people on the ship – I’d put Jenny and I squarely in this demographic.
3)The family with the obnoxious kids. You probably won’t see the parents, just the kids. What kids you ask? Oh, those would be the kids that run around doing cannon balls in the “Adults Only” spa, make loud obnoxious remarks during the shows at night, and generally tend to flock to each other around the “you-must-be-18-to-get-in-here-nightclub-but-maybe-if-we-loiter-around-the-entrance-the-bouncer-will-think-I’m-“cool”-and-let-me-in” place on the ship. You won’t see the parents because the parents are trying to enjoy their cruise like the couple from the second demographic, and thus have little desire or social wherewithal to corral their offspring. Did I mention obnoxious? Fortunately, these only make up about 10% of the passengers as well.
So where does the other 70-75% of the cruise passengers fit in on this scale?
4)The senior citizen. God bless ‘em. On a boat of 2,000 passengers, at least 1,300 of them will be AARP-card-carrying members. They have probably been on about 80 cruises by now during their retirement, and you can tell because they wear their “Platinum” and “Gold” member cruise cards around their necks on these tethers as if to scare other, lesser cruising passengers into submission through the sheer awesomeness of their metallic-colored cruise card. Most of them are extremely nice, polite, will fill up the early seating at dinner and be in bed by 8 pm. Thus, eat at the late dinner seating and go to the later shows, and you will, for the most part, not see most of them. Unless of course, the weather sucks, like it did on our cruise, and everyone is driven inside, where a great number of these members of the greatest generation will fall asleep in every public space on this ship. I love the senior citizens on the cruises, and I have no beef with them until they fall asleep at every table in the bar.
But I digress. Except for the falling asleep at the bar deal, my biggest beef with the rest of our cruise has to do with the city councils of Burnie and Port Arthur. I’ll explain.
After Melbourne, she ship sailed across the Tasman Sea to hit up three ports in Tasmania. Awesome right? Well our first stop was in Burnie, and tourist attraction it is NOT. I feel bad because they obviously do a lot of industrial shipping out of Burnie, but when you dock a cruise ship in an industrial ship yard and have to put all the passengers on a bus to guide them out of the wharf area, maybe your wharf isn’t conducive to your tourist industry.
I will also admit that we arrived in Burnie on a Sunday – hence almost NONE of the shops and sites in Burnie were open. I don’t blame the shop owners; I’d take my day off too. But a message to the Burnie Chamber of Commerce – if a cruise ship arrives and disgorges 2,000 tourists who all have money burning holes in their pockets, you might want to entice your shop owners to open up and let that money get pumped into your economy.
I’m just saying.
So Jenny and I took a nice leisurely stroll on the beach and ate Fish and chips and basically just enjoyed each other’s company. Which in the long run, was the whole point of our vacation.
A Target. The first one Jenny had seen in almost two years. She lost her mind. We did not go in, as doing so would have created a public spectacle I wasn’t prepared to make.
Fish and chips on the beach. Tasmania makes some pretty good beer too – Cascade. More to come on that later.
The Beach. It's only about 50 F out here and we are both freezing. Leonardo DiCaprio, eat your heart out.
Jenny and I both agreed that the best stop/port/whatever you want to call it on our vacation was Melbourne. I could live there for the rest of my life and have no qualms about it. What an absolutely gorgeous city. Wide, clean streets with awesome colonial/Victorian style architecture in the downtown area, a seemingly endless supply of good restaurants and bars, shopping, and tourist attractions, and some of the nicest people we met on our travels made Melbourne a fantastic place to visit.
We spend the first part of the morning at the Queen Victoria Market, which is like five football fields of covered swap meet/outlet store stuff. Neat to look around, with an enormous produce section that made me envious.
I loved this sign so much I had to get a picture of it. So simplistic, and so true – you can’t get enough of it. Jenny did not understand my fascination with this sign.
Jenny thought this was hilarious, probably because, in Japan, it’s hard to find clothing that is larger than a child’s medium-ish on her.
The afternoon was Jenny’s treat – a chocolate tour of downtown Melbourne that took you through most of the high-end chocolate stores in the area. We started at Lindt, and then worked our way over to Haigh’s chocolate. Our guide was a wonderful woman named Carol who probably has the best job in the world – take tourist to chocolate stores and bring out massive trays of free samples. Ok, she’s not a fighter pilot, so second best job in the world. Anybody who is interested in this kind of tour and will be in Melbourne check out their tours at: www.chocoholictours.com.au
Dark chocolate, milk chocolate, and the round ones were Champagne Truffles and were easily the best ones there.
Then we walked up to another chocolate store/café called Koko Black where we had MORE chocolate and some chocolate-themed drinks. Jenny and I actually got sick of chocolate, which you would think would be physically impossible, but oh no, it is. After the three hours of chocolate, we decided to wander through downtown Melbourne to try to walk off some of the caloric assault we had just launched on our bodies.
On our way back to the ship, we got to see a lot of the old architecture that the Melbourne residents have been really careful to preserve. At the same time, we ducked down one alley and found a tour guide giving a group of tourists a walking tour of the graffiti walls downtown as well. The alley was covered on its entire length with some pretty awesome graffiti, but kind of like curling isn’t a sport, I have a hard time calling graffiti “art.” Not that I could do it, but the mental image I have of “art” doesn’t equal a painting on the side of a bar wall in an alley. But then again, maybe I’m just an art snob.
The graffiti walking tour o’ justice.
This awesome Episcopal church right in the middle of downtown Melbourne. There was a wedding going on, and Jenny and I surmised that, since it is summer in December in Australia, December weddings in Australia are like the June wedding sin America. The bride was DECKED OUT.
Once we were finally tuckered out, we hopped back on the train and headed back to the ship. We had dinner reservations at the steakhouse on the ship, one of the things that we always insist on doing because the steaks on the Princess cruise ships are usually amazing, and these didn’t disappoint. I am so glad I married a carnivore, because the Ribeye picture below is hers. I get hungry just looking at it.
Our first day of the cruise was spent “at sea” while the ship sailed around the southeastern end of Australia and headed for our first stop, Melbourne. So what did we do with our day?
Nothing. And it was everything I hoped it could be.
We bummed around, explored the ship, ate the first of what would prove to be several metric tons of food we would have on the trip, and basically discovered that, once again, the super-heated Jacuzzis in the “Adults Only” swimming part of the ship was where you want to be.
The ship had been decorated for the Christmas season, so we took a couple of pictures of the ship. It’s pretty hard to think of witty things to say about pictures taken of an endless expanse of water, so we didn’t take the pics. Formal night too – I did the traditional tux thing and Jenny looked great in her dress.
The flash made this shirt semi-tansparent. AWESOME.
