A storm in a teacup

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Up at 7am and headed off to collect my car, albeit a day late, from the rental place. Today I'm off to the Blue Mountains, somewhere where I've been before but in, as you may well have come to expect by now, much worse weather. This morning the sun is out, I've nabbed an upgrade on my car (new Toyota Corolla today, quite spacious, though appears to have been driven into a yellow post at some stage and had its parcel shelf removed...) and a sat nav to boot.

My first thoughts of driving through the centre of Sydney are riddled with fear. Perth I can handle, but Sydney? This place is manic. Thank the Lord for the sat nav as it carefully directed me over ANZAC bridge and onto the western distributor. Handily the sat nav reminded me of the speed limit changes, which occur every 5 minutes here, so hopefully have managed to avoid any loss of licence that the signs along the way keep threatening me with.

100km later and I'm here. I drove through Leura, a very quaint little town, reminiscent of somewhere like Dunster. Leafy, full of little craft shops - you get the picture. I stopped and picked up a couple of emails and my mood went from happy breezy to decidedly murderous. Again, not going to go into details but what it has meant is that I'm going to create a couple of additional new year's resolutions. One will be to write another blog - I've been given inspiration to write one which is more of a social commentary - and another is to surprise three people who have properly been through the mill when I get home. You've got to turn negatives to positives so that's what I'm doing. I will not let the actions of a couple of nomarks bother me today - they'll get theirs one day, I'm sure. Simples!

So, bright and breezy Adele went off to Echo Point, to look at the stunning view of the Three Sisters and the Blue Mountains from Queen Elizabeth lookout. The Queen came here in 1954 I think it said, hence why they've named the lookout after her. Anyway, the attempt to walk any further round was spoilt by the fact there had been some serious bushfires a couple of months back that had destroyed much of the scenic walk, coupled with some random flooding of the pathways, when I was only wearing flip flops. As a result, I headed off to find my hostel, and to plan the next couple of days.

Katoomba is a bigger town that Leura, but a bit odd. It's full of op shops (charity shops to you and I) and antique shops. No high street names apart from Subway and a few banks. Sound familiar? It's Burnham all over. Less than ideal - will spend as little time in town as possible and make the most of the scenery around!

The sky tonight has lit up like a Christmas tree and the thunderstorms have been accompanied by torrential rain. Miserable. I'm in my dorm by myself - no one else to talk to tonight. So thank the stormy heavens for the car, because I went to the cinema to watch the brilliant Sherlock Holmes 2 at a cinema with red velour seats (the Ritz all over, it was). Now I'm back here and wondering how the hell I'm going to go horse riding tomorrow. Yes horse riding. Not been since I was 12-ish when George and I used to trot from Uphill to Bleadon and back. I wasn't very good then so imagine how bad I'm gonna be now. And how strong the horse is going to have to be to lug me on its back. It may have been praying for a rainstorm to get out of tomorrow! Looks like the mission might have succeeded....time will tell!

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