A Week of (Mostly) Sun in Sydney

Sydney, Australia
33.8688°S, 151.2093°E

After almost missing our flight to Australia because I set my alarm for 4:30 p.m. instead of a.m., we touched down at Sydney Airport and headed to our Airbnb for the week.

Australia is the only country we are traveling to that either of us has visited. In 2012, our good friends Gerry and Julie got married in Sydney and I was able to make the trip to celebrate with them and spend two weeks exploring the east coast of Australia.

Gerry (yes, there’s more than one of us) and I have known each other almost 20 years. We met as college students in Galway, Ireland where I was living and working for the summer between my sophomore and junior year at JMU. I had traveled to Ireland with my high school friend Danny with a summer job offer but no place to live. After a few nights in Galway hostels Danny and I found a small flat above a popular bar called The Hole in the Wall. It was in a great location and only IR£37.50 a week (roughly $55 in 1998 US dollars). The catch was that we had to share it for the summer with two strangers, a couple Irish guys named Gerry and Paul from County Mayo, just north of Galway.

Fortunately, the tight living quarters and cultural differences were no issue and the four of us ended up getting along great that summer (shockingly, two 20-year-old Americans named Danny Murphy and Gerry O’Shea found a way to adapt to live in an Irish city full of college students).

Prior to arriving in Sydney, Sarah and I had last seen Gerry and Julie at our wedding in 2015. We were very much looking forward to seeing them (and their two young daughters!) and explore Sydney and its eastern suburbs. After some cooler temperatures in New Zealand, we were also very excited about the outlook for mid-80 degree days in Sydney.

Bronte Beach

Because I had been to Sydney before, I had a decent sense of the neighborhoods and what areas Sarah would like. We ended up choosing to stay for the week at an Airbnb in Bronte, a coastal neighborhood with a beautiful beach and a good amount of local shops and cafes.

Bronte is located along a stretch of coast that includes a number of beaches, including the famous Bondi Beach, well-known for its surfing, sun-bathing and swimming. After two weeks of living in a van Sarah and I were looking forward to being settled in one place for a full week.

While Bondi and neighboring Coogee (where I stayed for Gerry and Julie’s wedding in 2012) are known to have more of a “scene”, Bronte offered us a very relaxed pace of living while still providing us easy access to all the local beaches, cafes and downtown Sydney as well.

Our Airbnb hosts, Liz and Chris, were awesome and included a whole packet of information for our stay….including passes for the local transit! Liz works at the Sydney Opera House and even got us tickets to see a concert there on Saturday night.

Clean Living

One of the things that struck us about the eastern suburbs of Sydney is the health consciousness of its residents. The restaurants are full of healthy menu options and the entire city is seemingly at war with gluten. Walking around the beach-side neighborhoods in Sydney’s eastern suburbs you see countless athletic fields, outdoor tracks, gyms, swimming pools, and people jogging everywhere.

Much of the area where we stayed is really hilly, and Sarah and I joked that because of the hills people really have no choice other than to stay fit here. Maybe this is part of the reason why Australia does disproportionately well with its Summer Olympic medal count every four years.

Most of our days in Bronte were spent waking up for early breakfasts, doing a little work and then heading to the park adjacent to Bronte Beach for lunch. There is a beautiful cliff walk that stretches along the entire coast, and each day we’d either head south along the walk towards Coogee or north towards Bondi.

In addition to our daily walks along the coast, we did head into downtown Sydney a few times to explore the city and some of its tourist destinations.

Lora’s Cousins 

Our good friends Matt and Lora have traveled to Sydney a few times to visit some of Lora’s family. When we let them know our plans to be in Sydney a week, they told us we have to try and connect with Lora’s cousins who live in the area.

Lora’s cousin Enza and her husband Lino graciously offered to pick us up the Saturday morning we were in Sydney, and even though it was the one rainy day we had all week, they took us around the entire city by car and told us about the neighborhoods and history of many parts of the city.

Their hospitality continued with a big lunch at the home of Nick and Mela (more cousins) in the Hunters Hill neighborhood on Sydney’s North Shore. Lora’s family is originally from Italy, so needless to say the lunch was delicious! Sarah loved the fresh mango that came right from Nick’s mothers yard. I was partial to the cannolis from Papa’s, an Italian bakery in Haberfield, not far from Hunters Hill.

After lunch, our group got on a harbor ferry to downtown Sydney. The Queen Mary II cruise ship was docked there and we had some great views of its massiveness as we pulled into the harbor. The Queen Mary II had been in Boston in September and it was pretty cool to see something this massive docked on the other side of the world, when only six months ago it was less than a mile from our South Boston home.

On our last day in Sydney I met up with Gerry, Julie and their daughters to go for a scenic drive while Sarah ran some errands in Bronte. We went to Nielsen Park on Sydney’s South Head and took in the beach and city views.

After meeting Sarah for lunch, we headed to Gerry’s brother Paul’s house in the Randwick suburb of Sydney. Paul lives close to an area called “The Spot” and after catching up at his house for a bit we headed out for Thai food and ice cream for the kids (and Sarah).

We left Randwick and headed back to our Airbnb to pack for our morning flight up to Queensland, where we would spend our last week in Australia.

More pictures from our week in Sydney…..