today is our sunday morning. we checked out of our hotel about 7 AM and headed to the international terminal at the Sydney airport. we are currently in the Qantas club lounge waiting for our departure in about 90 minutes to Auckland.

Sydney is "socked in" this morning - raining, cold and very foggy. we are leaving just in the nick of time.

i would definitely come back to sydney. i just loved it and our hotel location was wonderful. it would be neat to live in a place where they offer various forms of transportation like the train and the ferries to get around.

auckland is supposed to be chillier than here but we are prepared with clothes for that.

our final night in sydney was great. found a little italian place to eat close to our hotel and food was wonderful. we walked around the harbor one last time before heading back to the hotel and an early night to bed about 9 PM. my knees could not take any more walking yesterday anyway.

i'll post again when we get to auckland. i got an email from our hotel a couple of days ago saying that the street our hotel is on is closed today from 2-4 for a Santa Claus parade so don't quite know how we are getting to the hotel yet but we will figure it out. from everything i have read, cabs are very expensive.

one more funny thing. we have been keeping all the receipts from everything we have done in australia where we were charged GST because we thought you could get that GST back. This morning when we went to the Tourist Refund Scheme office we were told you can only get the GST back if you bought things like jewelry or things other than hotels, rental cars and airline tickets. so that left us out.

ciao!!