Blue Mountains

At new years eve Sally, Roisin and Lisa had mentioned that the where thinking of going to the blue mountains for the weekend, they asked if we wanted to go with them, it turned out that 9 of us would be going. So Sally organised two hire cars for us on the Friday after work, as I was the oldest I had to drive and Roisin drove the other. By the time we had sorted the cars and driven to Rhodes to pick TJ up it was gone 7pm and the Blue Mountains were at least 2 hours away. We finally made it to Katoomba which is the main town in the Blue Mountains, and started to look for somewhere to sleep, the boys (Deano and Leo) had bought a 3 man tent, but that wasn’t going to sleep us all. After an hour of trying all the campsites and youth hostels in the area, we tried a pub which had some rooms above the bar, they said they had two 5 man rooms, so Tj asked if we could squeeze all of us into one room.



The landlord had no problem with that so we made our way to the room which had a double bed, single bed and a bunk bed. Tj and I grabbed the double bed but we had to let Lisa sleep in it too. Once we had dumped our stuff in the room we found a common room and chilled out in there till late into the night playing drinking games such as pronouncing fruit names without showing our teeth etc and having a laugh. The next morning we left the pub about 10ish and had breakfast in a local cafe, I had a full English breakfast which was huge, which was a good thing as the rest of the morning and afternoon we walked around the nature trail. On the way to the Three sisters whe passed a very small chocolate factory and shop, so the girls made us stop and we went and got some free samples.



This took us from the Three Sisters to the bottom of the mountains, on the way we stopped and looked at few waterfalls and different sights. At the bottom we all decided that the walk back was too long so we opted for the train, it is the steepest train in Australia and maybe the world, I have to admit that it was a bit scary especially with the girls all screaming.



We had spoken to the Tourist information earlier and they had told us of a few places where we could camp for free, the idea was 4 or 5 sleep in the tent (very cosy) and the 2 in each car, so we drove to Blacktown? where we followed the road to the first campsite, but the road ended after about 2km and became a dirt track, we carried on for another 5km and found this very small site with 3 other campers already there, so we turned round and went back to Blacktown. The Second camp site was about 25 km from the town, but 10km of those were down a twisty road taking you to the valley floor. We stopped at a local tea room for refreshments and the girls drank some tea and then carried on. Eventually we pulled up to the site which was next to a creek and had toilet facilities(a hole in the ground) .There was only two other people camping, so we picked a good spot and setup the tent while Roisin and a few others nipped back to town for supplies and dinner(chips!!!). Deano, Leo and myself scavenged around the site for some fire wood, and brought back enough to last the night. After dinner the drinking began, and it wasn’t long before most of us were very merry, we spent all night playing card games and telling stories around the fire.



At about 2am we decided to play hide and seek in the campsite, we had set limits for the area of play other wise it would had ended up being silly, any way Sally drew the short straw and started to count very loudly so the whole site could hear her, when she got to 42( I don’t know why 42) she went out seeking, within 2 mins she had found all of us apart from Debbie and Dawn, we all started shouting(I feel sorry for the poor people camping next to us), and tried to get them to come out of hiding, after 10 mins they finally came out from down by the creek which had been out of bounds, so that ended that. The next morning we all woke up with sore heads, we packed camp and left for more fantastic sites around the Blue Mountains.



We visited 2 more picturesque look out points, were the views are amazing. We had decided as we had the cars we would go to Manly Beach as it was supposed to be really nice and it is difficult to get to without a car. So we said goodbye to the Blue Mountains and made our way back to Sydney.
On the way to Manly we drove by some fantastic, large boats we could see there was definitely money in that area. It was a hot day and the beach was so busy.



We managed to finally find car parking spaces and went to relax and lie down in the sand. It was nice to chill and Adam and some of the girls even braved the slightly cool water. After a couple of hours of sunning ourselves it was time to leave and get ready for the week ahead.