We had an extremely early start to leave Orange behind as Pete picked us up at 5:15am so we could catch the bus in town at 6am. After wanting to leave for so long it now felt a bit sad leaving our little cabin behind. Our coach journey took 4 and a half hours as it has to go right through the Blue Mountains before finally arriving in Sydney around 10am. I took this opportunity to sleep but Matt really struggles to sleep on coaches or buses so he got to take in the spectacular views of the beautiful sunrise which I slept right through. 
 
We finally arrived at our hostel, The Maze Backpackers, around 10:30am but we couldn't check in until 1pm . Although I had slept most of the way, I really didn't feel very well now, I think it was a combination of being ill anyway and going out drinking until very late when we had to get up so early. Matt was also shattered by now as he'd been awake the whole time so there was only one thing for it: a sleep in the park, of course. It was a lovely sunny day and the park was literally just up the road form the hostel. We grabbed some food and soon crashed out for a bit as we lay in the sun. Once it reached 1pm, we checked into our room and went off for a walk around the city.
 
Even though this was about the 4th time we'd been to Sydney and we've spent over a month here in total now we still love just looking about and going for walks. There's always somewhere to go or something to see, even if you've seen it before. One of our favourite places is Darling Harbour, so we had a wander around there and stopped for food in the food court. We were both absolutely shattered now but it was only 7pm so we decided to go to the cinema and watch the new Star Trek film . This isn't really either of our cups of tea as we've never seen any of the old ones but the trailer looked pretty good so we thought we'd give it a try. The film itself was alright and it was funny to see so many people in the cinema on their own watching it; we figured it must be because either their girlfriends wouldn't go with them or because they're such Trekkies they don't have girlfriends or even friends anyway!! The latter seemed particularly true of the guy sat behind us who ate very noisily through most of the film and laughed and cheered at things that we really couldn't understand why he was laughing or cheering. Must have been a Trekkie thing!
 
The next day was our only full day in the city so we headed off to see an area called The Rocks and to the harbour bridge tower lookout as we were given free tickets when we did our bridge climb last time we were here. As we got to The Rocks and had a little look around we found out it actually had a market on, it turns out it's a regular Sunday thing we never knew about . It was a beautiful market with so many different things to look at, including a stall that sold prints of the city which Matt fell in love with, so we treated ourselves to one. We ended up with more time than we thought to look around as we discovered our free entry tickets to the harbour bridge lookout had actually expired a few days ago. This wasn't a problem anyway as we got to have a proper look in the market and then we were going to meet Josh, Jen and Reef for a few drinks in the Opera bar. 
 
On our way to the Opera bar we saw that there was a huge cruise liner docked in the harbour and it was the same one which had just been in the news after 2 of its passengers jumped over board to their death. according to the reports, no one noticed they were missing until they docked here in Sydney and did a passenger check as they let everyone off. 
 
As always, we had a lovely afternoon catching up with Josh, Jen and Reef while we had drinks and bar snacks. We always love seeing them whilst we're in the area so it was brilliant to tell them about where we've been, hear about what they've been doing and see how Reef is growing up . Their exciting news was that they are in the process of bidding for a house in Palm Beach which is where Home and Away is filmed! So that will be incredible if they move out there. Surely that will warrant another visit! He he! This is about the 3rd time we've said our goodbyes to them and it never gets any easier but this time it's probably going to be for quite a while as we have no plans to come back to Sydney in the near future but I'm sure we'll see them again sometime soon!
 
Our last day consisted of packing our bags, checking out, a quick trip to the Apple store, eating the last few packs of super noodles and catching up on the blog for the afternoon whilst we had computer access. We had to be at the airport at 5 pm so we didn't have time to do too much or go too far. Plus the blog was falling way behind so it desperately needed doing. 
 
5pm came and we headed for Sydney airport one more time. We were pretty tired now after looking at a computer screen for so long but we had a late flight which was 4 hours long, we weren't going to arrive until gone midnight in New Zealand time and were planning on sleeping in the airport so we were in for a long night. One thing caught our eye as we waited in the departure lounge though: a bottle of Penfold's wine costing $168,000!!!!!! Crazy!!!!
 
As always, we loved being back in Sydney even if it was just a quick visit but this one was tinged with a bit of sadness as we knew it would be quite some time before we'd be back for another visit!