More holiday

Happy New Year!


Part 5 of our holiday starts with Friday. Friday was wet and cold and not good for sightseeing at all. But, by then, a family of 6 who has been out of home for 5 days has one pressing need, to find a laundromat. We stacked our car with 5 days worth of dirty clothes and found an open laundromat with machines available (this was a rare find - there were only two in the district and the other one was flat out busy). Thanks to three industrial sized washers and dryers our clothes were washed, dried and folded in an hour and a half. For the washing part Hubby and the Q family went exploring the bookshops in Katoomba and Anika found a gem on English composition. Once I'd loaded the dryers I went in search of a great hot chocolate. Then everyone (except Lloyd with the broken wrist) helped out with the folding.


We then went to explore a science shop not too far down the highway. The boys were happy with exploring the hands-on puzzles and holograms put out for their entertainment, I went in search of things to buy and Anika was amused with this piano which is just a regular piano but has been engineered by the owner to play by itself. It was merrily playing Christmas carols:

I found some great "lateral thinking puzzle" books which helped to entertain us all on the trip home. I also bought "Rush Hour" and we returned to the motel for lunch as there was no hope of finding a nice picnic table in the pouring rain. We played Rush Hour and relaxed a while then went out again to visit the chocolate shop. You could see through glass windows to where they were making chocolate Christmas trees. The chocolate was horribly expensive, but we just bought a plain bar of chocolate to share and all agreed it was very nice chocolate.

Saturday was clear again but blowing a gale. This time we went to the Echo Point and got a bit closer to the Three Sisters:


We then got really up close to the first sister:

The trek down onto the sisters was extremely steep and we decided against it in the gale. We didn't want to be blown all the way into the Pacific Ocean. Instead we went walking along the cliff walks and at one point the scenery along the path looked like the "get off the road" scene from a famous movie trilogy. Anika, Lloyd and Matt all got into role and I filmed a little segment. (At this point Hubby and Mike preferred a trip on the double decker bus rather than being blown away).

That night it was hard to sleep with the wind howling around the motel and the electricity went off for a few hours. The locals didn't take much notice of the changeable weather with the son of one of the motel workers shrugging his shoulders and saying, "It's the Blue Mountains."