From Tasmania to the Blue Mountains

We will miss Tasmania ... It is a beautiful place with such lovely outdoor landscapes that we really enjoyed driving through and admiring.  The people here have been super friendly and very welcoming.  Oh and that salmon!  Yum!

Today, we rise early and head to the airport for our flight to Sydney.  The flight is uneventful with one annoyance in the process.  When a flight is nearing departure time in Hobart, anyone who needs to get on the plane but has arrived late to the airport is told to jump to the front of the check-in line.  Similarly, these latecomers are able to jump to the front of the security screening line as well.  For those of us who arrived early to the airport for our own flights, it is a little exasperating to have to wait while those who are late are processed first.  In the USA, if you can't get to the airport on time, you will miss your flight -- here, you get first class treatment.  Not fair!  I spend the flight researching the Blue Mountains and reading the book that I bought about the history of Port Arthur on the Tasman Peninsula.

Anyway, we arrive to a rainy Sydney, but quickly collect our bags and obtain our rental car.  I wish the remainder of our journey today would be so uneventful.  We get plenty of directions for how to get on the highway (the M5) that will take us west, but when we leave the airport, there are no signs for any highways.  So of course, we make some wrong turns, then retrace our steps and Rob is able to navigate us in the right direction even without any signage.  I have to say that based upon our experience today and when we initially landed in Sydney, this airport is kind of a mess.  Finally, we see the signs for the M5, but one direction takes us to Botany Bay and the other to Canberra.  Neither seems correct to us.  Why can't they just say "East" or "West"?  Ugh!  Rob quickly consults the maps and Canberra seems the right choice.  Unfortunately, it is too late to get in the correct lane, so we drive on and figure out a way to backtrack on get on the highway (which is really backed up, by the way).  The drive to the Blue Mountains is relatively uneventful at this point, if you discount the downpouring rain and fog.  Isn't Australia supposed to be a dry place?  The rain and the fog continue all the way to our destination.  It is pretty dismal.

We reach the town of Katoomba, where our hotel is located, but we have no idea where.  We pull over to try to use the Garmin GPS that we had rented, but either it doesn't work or we're stupid.  I'm pretty sure it doesn't work (I hope).  Rob jumps out of the car to consult a shopkeeper who gives some type of instruction, so we follow a hunch and luckily find the hotel.  The fog is still really thick at this point, so it is difficult to say the least.  We check in and have lunch in the hotel's restaurant:  caesar salad for me and quinoa salad for Rob with sides of chicken satay and steamed vegetables -- pretty good with a glass of Dalyrimple sauvignon blanc from Tasmania.  It is now about 3pm and there is literally nothing to do, given the weather.  Can't do any sightseeing (try admiring mountains in the fog) and won't do any walking (no real attractions in the town here, all the attractions involve shrouded scenic viewpoints).  It is disappointing since we had come here to view the sites and do some hiking, neither of which are possible today.  We'll hope for better conditions tomorrow, but not feeling very hopeful about that.  This afternoon, I guess we'll just lounge in our very nice hotel room and watch Rafael Nadal lose in the Australia Open.  The hotel, but the way, called Lilianfels, is really nice, too, not just our hotel room.  Not much to do until our 7pm dinner reservation at the restaurant called Echo, a short walk away at a sister property of our hotel.

Dinner at Echo is very fancy and rather expensive, but very good.  It has an Asian theme to its food.  Rob starts with a fig salad, which features figs stuffed with goat cheese with frisée and melon.  I start with a salad with grilled octopus.  It tastes similar to calamari.  Underneath the salad, however, is some type of seaweed that I absolutely cannot eat.  Other than that, it was very good.  For mains, we each have grilled John Dory filets that are served with sugar snap peas, broccolini, cabbage, and little potato in a ginger broth.  Extremely good.  Our wine is a pinot grigio from Pipers Brook in Tasmania.  We retire to watch Andy Murray defeat Australian Nick Kyrgios in a quarterfinal match in the Australian Open.