Manly Beach
We bought a week long transit pass today. It allows us travel on the Sydney rail, bus and ferry system for the next seven days, and only cost $48 apiece. That is a good deal, as a daily pass costs $20. We used it today to take the train from here at the tourist park to the Sydney core, and then took the ferry across the harbour to Manly. The talk on the news tonight was of the poor state of public transit in Sydney, but frankly it’s the best system I’ve ever been on.
It was a pleasant day though cool this morning when we started. At Manly, a thirty minute boat ride, we walked down the Corso (a pedestrian mall) to the beach. There is a nice walk along the beach. There were many, many grandparents with young children at the beach, on the ferry, and on the walk (it is school holidays now).
On the ferry ride back to Sydney the woman sitting next to me asked what part of the United States we were from. I said we were Canadians from Saskatchewan and she told me she’d been to Regina. When I got up to take a picture, Enid slid over and talked to her for the rest of the trip. The woman sitting on the other side of me said that since we were tourists she’d tell me all about what we were passing, and talked for the whole time about the submarines that invaded Sydney Harbour during the second world war, and how they were caught in the submarine cable. She also pointed out all the old naval gun emplacements on the banks. I’m sure she probably got it all right, since her son was a career officer in the Australian Navy.