Syd-a-ney for the weekend

Last weekend I took a road trip up to Sydney. No one here actually just says Sydney though - it's Syderney, Sydainey, , Sydnay, or something equally mocking.



I drove up in my new car. Isn't it pretty and red? (Apologies to Toyota..."oh what a feeling!")




I went up to Sydney with 2 friends to run in the City 2 Surf, a 14K road race with 70,000 people - it's run each year from Hyde Park in the City to Bondi Beach. F and I stayed in Bondi and I can't tell you how great it was to reach the finish line and know that my hotel room was literally 500 feet away! It was a bloody hard race, but I ran the whole thing, even crazy Heartbreak Hill, which is about 2X as long as Cardiac Hill in the Peachtree. Oy. After the run we had fish and chips and beer and then coffee and mudcake. Just about the most perfect race recovery food I can imagine.



The race was on a Sunday so we took Monday off and we just bummed around Sydney - had breakfast on the beach in Bondi, went to the Australian Museum, and had lunch at a vegetarian yum cha place called Bodhi. Yummo!

The drive back to Canberra was okay - aside from legs cramping from sitting still for 3 hours, about an hour out of Canberra the temperature plummeted back to its normal freezing-ness. That weekend we were away, the high in Sydney was 15C (which was a cold spell for them) and the high in Canberra was 7C with sleet. So much fun in freezing arse Canberra.

Some of the crazy animals that used to exist in Australia...

The marsupial lion (most closely related to a kangaroo):


The Diprotodon (most closely related to a wombat and a koala):


And here is a wombat(stuffed for your viewing pleasure) I still haven't seen a live one in real life!: