I was so excited to spend the two days in Brisbane between cruises!

We disembarked from the cruise on Friday morning and spent most of the day catching up on some work at our hotel in downtown Brisbane. We found a really cool Mexican place for dinner. I'm not sure if Brisbane has a lot of restaurants that serve Tex-Mex food, but we ended up at two of them!

We were scheduled to fly to Brisbane from Sydney. Unfortunately, we missed our flight. I wasn't feeling great this day and when we got to the airport in Sydney, the agent who checked in our luggage handed our boarding passes to Brennan at 2:30. We had talked about the flight being at 4:40 all day, so we thought we had plenty of time to get lunch and then head to our gate. 

When we finished up lunch around 3:20 and went to go find our gate, it said the gate was closed! We were shocked and had to look over and over again at the boarding passes. Our flight was actually at 3:40. Neither of us could believe we missed it! 

Thankfully, it was very easy to rebook our flight for the next one that left about an hour and a half later. We made it to Brisbane easily. Learn from our mistake-always double check the boarding time!

We arrived back in Sydney after our time in rural Mudgee late Thursday night. We were both ready to be back in a city with lots of options of things to do.

Everyone we talked to emphasized that we had to see the beaches in Sydney. We are both beach people and the Sydney beaches are world famous for a reason. We spent Friday on Bondi Beach. The beach has sugary sand and the bluest water. You can see from the picture that the beach was busy, but we found a piece of sand easily and spread out the beach blanket we bought. 

We flew from Auckland to Sydney and arrived late in the evening. The next morning, we woke up and ventured out to see if we could get a good view of the Opera House and Harbor Bridge. We found the Royal Botanic Garden and walked through, admiring the flowers and trees. But the real excitement was getting to the edge of the water and looking out over the harbor. I've hoped to see Sydney for myself since I was a kid and the view was just as good as I had hoped!