We like the idea of being bloggers; of chronicling our (admittedly rather benign) adventures for our friends and family, and leaving ourselves a record of our thoughts and feeling about our first experiences in new places and new situations. Unfortunately, blogging is a lot of work. It requires a diligence to regularly type up your day’s adventures while they are fresh in your mind, even if you’re too tired or if nothing of interest happened that day. In short, it’s basically a full-time job. And we already have full-time jobs. Which means you only get to read brief snippets of what has happened, when Jess or I has some spare time and spare inspiration. Now is one of those times. I’ll type until either one runs out and post whatever I have. Unfotunately, Jess and I have many unfinished blog posts that will never see the light of day. So I’ll write and publish whatever I wind up with. Enjoy. :)

It’s 8am on our first morning in Manly (across the harbor from Sydney proper). We lingered at Mowbray Park Farms longer than we intended to yesterday but we were in no real hurry to leave and the kids had met some Australian friends and didn’t want to leave.

However, around 5pm the time came for us to catch a ride into Picton (population 3,500) to take a series of trains and boats to our rented apartment in Manly. Our trip from Sydney Airport to Picton was much more of an adventure and took us around four hours (but I’ll save that for a different blog post). We left a bag with our friend Todd (father of the kid’s aforementioned friends) which made man-handling that much luggage on a bit easier.

We took the train from Picton to Macarthur, and then from Macarthur to Circular Quay in downtown Sydney. From there we transferred to a water Ferry to take us across the beautiful Sydney Harbor, or “Harbour” as they spell it here. :)

Our rented apartment is a nice two-bedroom unit on the second floor above a bakery, in the picturesque town of Manly. Manly is on a small peninsula that juts out into the harbor so we’re never far from the beach. We arrived around 8pm last night. The kids (and the adults) had just enough energy to find a nice burger shop down the street for supper, and then hit the local grocery store for some provisions. We were in desperate need of diapers and laundry detergent. It’s amazing how many clothes we went through on the farm!

Jess didn’t get much sleep last night. She was up late getting started on our laundry (most of our clothes were either muddy or smelled like campfire) so she went back to bed after she got Truman down for a nap. Adeline (the best sleeper in our family) is still asleep, and Henry has been up for hours watching cartoons on Australian television.

I just bought a few things from the nice bakery ladies downstairs. They were closing up shop last night just as we arrived at our apartment so we chatted this morning. For the first time in my life, I have currencies from four different countries in my wallet so I paid cash for our bread, croissant and donuts.

The weather is nice, but not as hot as we were hoping. We’ll definitely hit the beach today. We walked to the Manly beach last night on our way to dinner but we couldn’t really appreciate it in the dark.