Day 1 : Cricket & SkyWalk Tower

After 33 hours of travel, we arrived at our destination of Sydney, Australia. Believe it or not, but the 15 hour flight across the Pacific Ocean wasn't too bad. They break up the time by feeding you plenty of meals & snacks as well as providing plenty of movie choices on the TV set on the seat in front of you. We flew in on the longest runway in the Southern Hemisphere which was partly paid for by NASA as they wanted a runway that space shuttles could land on in the Southern Hemisphere if necessary. So far they have not had to use it and since the NASA program has cut down dramatically it may never be used. 

After arriving in a new country, we had to get through customs. In Australia, this was a multi-step process that took a bit of time with our group of 52. The dogs at customs are trained to find a variety of items, in the group I was with a cute little beagle attacked a Slim Jim that one of the girls forgot she had in her bag. 

We met our Delegation Leader, Dion, and our bus driver, Brett, after clearing customs and boarded the bus to immediately start our day around 7am Monday. 

Our first stop was over to the cricket grounds where we watched an informational video that explained some basics of the game before they took us to practice our skills. The two gentlemen that helped our group were fantastic and I really learned a lot. However, I'm not very good at the game! Cricket matches can be extremely long. Like 8+ hours! We practiced pitching, hitting and running before moving along on our tour of the stadiums. 

We were very lucky to have some back stage access to the rugby stadium on our tour and saw areas like the club seats, locker rooms, etc. This stadium is home to the Sydney Swans, an Aussie league football team. They just happened to be practicing while we were there, it would be like seeing the Packers or Brewers practicing on their field during a tour. The rugby types are confusing as there are multiple types. The Aussie rules football has the four posts and point values chance based on which posts you kick the ball through. After the stadium tour we went across the street to the park & practiced rugby skills. The way you pass the ball changes with the type of rugby you play, so we tried all of those with our "athletic trainer."

Lunch was spent at a local mall along the Sydney Harbor. We had food vouchers to spend at a variety of locations. This cute harbor had a Ferris wheel and lots of walking areas for people to check out. 

Our next stop was up on the tallest building in Sydney, the SkyWalk was much like the Willis tower in Chicago, but I'll need to check the height comparison. Of course here they use the metric system and C for temperature, so it can be challenging to understand how high, far or hot something is. After taking a fast elevator up, we had fantastic 360' views of the city. Our group split into four for the next big step in this trek. We had to put on fashionable jumpsuits and get hooked into harnesses before being brought outside and waking around the outside of this building. It was scary, but also pretty amazing. There were two areas with glass bottoms that our guide brought us out on while pointing out parts of the city.

 

We went to dinner at a cook your own steak place. It took quite sometime to get over 50 people to cook their steaks, but once we finished we headed back to the hotel to get the kids on wifi & into bed finally for the night.