Sydney 1

Saturday 23rd November. Our blogs have been few and far between lately with living a "more normal" life, still in the bus, but closer to home with excursions generally being more local - up the inner harbour for example - as we get closer to returning to our house on Sunday 1st December. In between times, from the 5th - 12th November, we had a lovely week in Sydney staying 5 nights with David and Christine at Cabarita and then a couple of nights with my niece, Debra, Danny and family at Killara. You can buy MyMulti 1,2 or 3 weekly travel passes for trains, ferry and buses around Sydney and after studying the map to get the most suitable one for the places we wanted to travel we bought MyMulti 2 passes, mine a concession at half price and even though the girl in the shop thought Len should have a concession one too we decided that might be pushing it, not being sure of the age for a pension pass in Aussie. Anyway we travelled happily around Sydney with our passes until we tried to go to Manly on the ferry when it said we had invalid tickets when we inserted them into the slot at the gate - it seems like you need a Multi 3 but, without elaborating any further apart from saying that there were pushing crowds behind us, we were through the gates before we even had time to think about it. Its a nice trip out there on the ferry but we decided to return to Daves via buses and trains which was probably a bit of a mistake with the whole journey taking nearly 3 hours - so much traffic! The trains and ferries in Sydney are wonderful however - so quick and easy. Our next awakening regarding the travel passes was when we arrived at the airport on departure and found that our cards wouldn't work at the airport gate. It seems you need to buy a separate gate access ticket at about $12.50 each which you can do at the nearby kiosk and is no problem except that the lady in the kiosk saw my concession ticket and asked how I had one of those. Replying that I was a Senior she told me that weekly concession tickets are only available to students and I was lucky that I hadn't been given a $200 fine! Seniors concessions are only available for day passes and then you need to show your NSW Pension Card as proof - they are not available to kiwis! You live and learn and I guess we would be wise to follow the rules next time!