Blue Mountains and Australian Open

Welcome back! Ok you didn't go anywhere. It was us that left. We apologize. We had a lot going on the last few weeks. But no excuses. We are going to have to work really hard to get you up to date but I think we are up to the challenge. Lets see where we left you and we will go from there.

Ok it looks like we fell off right before new years right when skinner showed up. Brian Skinner showed up a couple days before New Years and left a couple days ago. For those of you who don't know who BS is, he played volleyball with Jesse and I at Stanford and is now working for a software company in Palo Alto. He demanded adventures and mayhem and activities galore out of us so that's what we gave him. A couple days after New Years, Chandra Morris or Rodeo as we like to call her flew in to visit us for a whole month! Rodeo is friends with Jesse and Erin from their summer in Arizona. So once those two showed up, it all pretty much went downhill from there. I am going to talk about the last couple days first because I remember those the best and then backtrack as best I can from there. Here are the last couple days of activities out in Oz.

Blue Mountains

On the 13^th of 2009 I had a full day off work so Chandra and I (everyone else had to work) made a little day trip out to the Blue Mountains for some hiking. We were up by 7:30 to get out to the Blue Mountains by around 11. We hiked for about 5 hours and covered 10-15 kilometers. It was a perfect day for a hike. Blue skies all day but not sweltering (the next day when we went to the Australian Open and it was unbelievably hot). We started at the Three Sisters

and Echo Point and hiked along the Prince Henry Cliff Walk. There were almost too many gorgeous lookouts along the way.

Eventually we had to pass over many of the views or we wouldn't get back to civilization before nightfall. We got out to the Leura Cascades and took a little dip in the water.

From there we went down into the Leura Forest. To get from the Cascades to the Forest we descended down hundreds and hundreds of stairs. Once we got to the bottom it was very rainforesty and beautiful.

After that we hiked through more regular forest and ended our hike going up the Giant Stairway, 900 steps of calf killing work. We felt it was a little generous to call it a stairway. It felt more like a ladder it was so steep. Exhausted after 5 hours of wanderings, we grabbed some Subway (only restaurant still open at 6pm in the tiny little town) and a bottle of wine. We hopped back on the train and had a great 2 hour ride home with our wine.

To cap off the day we took a taxi home from the Edgecliff train station where we found $50 on the back seat of the cab. All in all it was a pretty great day.

Australian Open

On the 14^th of 2009 we went to the Olympic Park in Sydney to watch some excellent tennis. Like I said before, it was sooooo hot outside. We sat in the shade for most of the day and have no idea how the players managed to go on out in the sun all day.

We got to see Djokovic dismantle his opponent in straight sets and then we watched a very excellent match between Lleyton Hewitt and Jano Tiperavich. Jano is Serbian and Lleyton is Australian. There was a huge Serbian contingent in the arena to watch Djokovic and they all hung around to see Tiperavich so the atmosphere got a bit hostile when the Australia v Serbia match got pretty close. The Serbian crowd was small but rowdy and the Aussies were more numerous and got pretty upset when Hewitt was losing early. At one point the Serbs started shouting “Look at the scoreboard”. Some old lady yelled in response “Look at your country!”. So it was a pretty entertaining match all around. Hewitt went down 5 games to 3 in the first set and came back to win 7-5. He went on to win the second set as well to the delight of the crowd. It felt like the Serbian crowd really only cared about seeing Djokovic win so they left happy too. It was the first time I have ever been to a real professional tennis match and I enjoyed it a lot even though I was falling asleep at times from being still exhausted from the day before in the Blue Mountains. All the rules about being quiet during points and not being allowed to walk around during games. I didn't realize tennis was so civilized. I didn't really care for it too much. I think the players could focus and perform just as well even with the crowd cheering during the point. But what do I know.

Anyways thats it for the last couple days. Hopefully in the next week or two I can go back and recap our adventures for new years and the first couple weeks of 2009. It's good to be back!