hahaha

So, every time I start writing a new blog post, I try to think of a mildly clever post title that has something to do with the subject...usually involving wordplay. Since this post is going to be about my trip to the Blue Mountains, I was thinking, "blue...blue...velvet!" But then all the Blue Velvet quotations I could think of were obscenity-laden. I'm sure this was of a lot of interest to you.

A little over a week ago I took the train to Katoomba and then connected to the Blue Mountains explorer bus. The train took a couple of hours, but was a fairly pleasant ride. It was, however, pretty unfortunate that the day ticket was so expensive. The train was only $17, but since the bus company is privately owned and has a monopoly on convenient mountains transport, they charge almost $40 for a bus ride which you only get to use a couple of times in between short hikes. Typical penny-pinching aside, the only other qualm with the day was that I was coming down with some kind of demon flu which plagued me all of last week.

But on to the good stuff! I'd been to the lookout point at the Three Sisters a couple of times in my youth, but I was eager to see a little more of the surrounding mountains, so it was cool to do a couple of the short hikes that were available to tourists. Because I was under the weather, I only had the energy for a little low-impact walking, but here are some of the photos I took:

These are the gorgeous flowers I had in my apartment last week:

So, it was a good day spent in the mountains. If I were to do it again, I might study the map of the hiking trails first, take the train out, and then plan to skip the bus. I'd also be sure to spend some time in Leura, where we picked up the train to come back into the city. It's got a handful of adorable cafés and restaurants, and a lolly shop full of candies both delicious (fizzy cherry coke bottle gummies) and devastating (anything Norwegian).