Welcome to Australia

The Sydney Opera House

Old and new Sydney

Flying into Sydney Australia during the day gave us a chance to see the city from the air.  It's a huge city with a population of 4,635,000 and looking at it from above, we lamented that we'd not allowed enough time in our plans and that there would be much we wouldn't see.  Then, upon arriving at our hotel, we were informed that we were a day late for our reservation. Yes, we'd failed to allow for crossing the International Dateline.  (We'd made the mistake of using the date on our airline reservations which did not reflect that we'd be arriving an entire day later.)  Live and learn...but we were bummed - we'd lost an entire day!  We knew then that we were going to have to focus on just a couple of sites so we chose the old historic center of the city known as The Rocks, the waterfront area with its views of the harbor and bridge, and touring the iconic Sydney Opera House.  It was a busy day and evening made more interesting by the rapid weather changes that ranged from hot and sunny to thunder, lightening, hail the size of marbles, pelting rain, and then steaming condensation rising from the streets when the sun reappeared.  Here is Sydney in a day and a night...

A clear and sunny morning at the waterfront quickly changed...

into booming thunder, lightening, hail and rain.

Over the course of a few minutes, the bridge almost disappeared from view.

Harbor view from inside the Sydney Opera House

The Opera House roof, which we'd always thought was made of sail like fabric
(similar to the Denver airport) is actually made of over a million tiles.

A few shots of Sydney by night...

We were treated to an amazing lightening storm.

Iconic by day and night - Sydney Harbor Bridge

A bit blurry with out the tripod but the lights were to pretty not to share.