Leaving jobs, our apartment and Sydney

---

That's it, we've left Sydney! Well, not quite. But nearly. We have quit our jobs after three months of hard toil, left our tiny little apartment and packed our bags for the outback, beaches, spiders and snakes, big rocks, fine sand and general awesomeness of Australia outside of Sydney. But we only got as far as the YHA hostel next to Central Station. Rats.

Last Friday both Amy and I left our jobs and went for a big night out with various friends from both workplaces in Scruffs Murphy's bar and woke up on Saturday with fairly ferocious hangovers. Luckily we had the perfect hangover cure planned - going to the beach with Andy, Kayte, Georgie and Charlie. We caught the ferry over to Manly in gorgeous sunshine and met up with everybody before heading to the beach for an afternoon of lazing in the sun and swimming in the cool, clear ocean. In the evening Kayte and Andy laid on a birthday meal of homemade burgers and steak with lots of wine before we headed back to our flat on Sunday to begin the clear out. Our flat was only tiny and we obviously have very few possessions but we wanted to make sure the place was sparkling before we moved out so we'd get our precious bond back! Then, this morning we packed the final few things and checked into the YHA hostel in preparation of our departure tomorrow afternoon. Our itinerary is something like this:

Sydney - Broken Hill
Broken Hill - Adelaide
Adelaide - Kangaroo Island - Adelaide
Adelaide - Darwin via various parts of the outback
Darwin - Perth and a week going up the West Coast
Melbourne for Christmas
Tasmania for New Year
Sydney to The Whitsunday Islands and various bits inbetween during January

We are both very excited to be on the road again and have no commitments. I really enjoyed my time at 2evolve, calling for various charities in my last few weeks including MSF, ActionAid and WSPA but I think Amy's enthusiasm for the Christmas decorations factory waned towards the end. We were both doing very long hours (sometimes seven days a week) and to quit on Friday was quite a relief, especially for Amy. She had been decorating various huge reindeers and trees to go in shopping centres and offices around Australia but the highlight must be the enormous tree that now resides in The Queen Victoria Building in the CBD of Sydney. We popped in one day to see the finished article and it is huge! It stretches over three floors and took hours and hours of work. The chances are, if you see and kind of corporate decorations around Oz in the next couple of months, Amy had a hand in making them.

Other than that we've been fairly quiet since our last blog. Obviously we've been working lots and the weather has conspired against us a few times when we did have a rare day off. We had planned to do more around Sydney but a few fierce rainstorms thwarted our plans to check out Bondi and the Botanical Gardens so we've actually not seen nearly as much of Sydney as we should have. Ah well, plenty more of Australia to see now! We did have a few beers one night in Kings Cross but declined to indulge in the many seedy activities that the area is famous for and opted instead for a few civilized beers while we watched the night go by outside. We also met up with Lauren (from the Thailand temple stay!) a few weeks back when she was in Sydney and had a lovely night catching up.

Right, that's it for me. A comparatively brief blog this time! I know a few of you are secretly glad. Don't worry, we'll have plenty of long ones about the desert to come....

Oh, one more thing - we recently got out 15,000th blog viewer and wanted to congratulate you and send you the really exotic, exciting and expensive prize that we bought to celebrate the milestone. However, we can only see the numbers and not any details of our viewers so we kept the prize for ourselves. Never mind, eh.

---

Photos

Leaving party
From L-R: Emerald, Amy, Nick

Comments

[jayne]

on the road again
hey both of you,nice to chat on skype, missing you very much now. please take care and enjoy your adventures!! hey Amy bet you will never feel the same about christmas trees again.xxx love mum/jayne

[Dad and Kathy]

Hello Hippies
Nice to see you are moving on, now you have quit your jobs you can get back to having fun. It was great to speak to you on my birthday, can't wait to see you in the New Year...you are coming back aren't you???

[Mark]

Perth Perth Perth
Great to see another blog fly by chaps. I hope Amy got our birthday message? Looks like a good itinerary. Fremantle is a super little town (Pirates Backpackers). Adelaide well thats where I met Sue so fond memories and lots of churches. Glad you will make Tazzy always regretted not getting that far. Excuse the spelling being in Holland not much good for that. Take care Mark

[Muthi]

Could do better
I think the bottom of the Christmas tree could of had a few more decoration on, but the top looks amazing. In true appraisal fashion, I think Amy should be sent back to the factory for more decoration training. Can't believe you both worked for three months, that's more than you did whilst you were in the UK. Keep enjoying yourself, you lucky......