Last Friday morning, Mom arrived! I had told her where the apartment was, but not how to reach me in the building. Apparently she started pressing the buzzer buttons in order until someone answered. Oops. Hopefully my neighbors don't hate me. She also told me that the train she took to Potts Point was very crowded, so she had to stand near the doors with her suitcase. There was waist-high metal pole that you could grab onto except a young man was sitting on it. My mom, who has never known to be shy, turned to him and said, "Excuse me, but could you stand up? Otherwise I'm going to have to grab your butt to stay upright." Hee hee.

My mom is a great traveler--more spontaneous than me. Since the weather was so nice, she thought we should take a ferry somewhere. We decided to take the Watson Bay ferry since neither of us had been on it. We weren't sure where we'd get off, but we took some lunch with us and headed out. Our ferry turned out to be a limited stop one, so our own only options were Garden Island, a little park at the tip of Potts Point only accessible by ferry, or Watson Bay. It's a fun ferry to take because you pass by the Botanic Gardens and Potts Point. We saw lots of boats and naval ships--last Sunday was the Navy Open Day. I took a picture of dredging accidentally--not very pretty and Mom was like, "Why are you taking a picture of that?!?"

 Watson Bay was smaller than I imagined. Basically a small, sandy beach, a little park, and some boats. But it was a lovely little place to stop and eat lunch. I had a ham and cheese sandwich on my Old Time bakery organic gluten free flat bread with a thin layer of hummus to soften the bread a little. It's so good. I predict it will be my lunch most days. I tried it with peanut butter and jelly as well but didn't like it nearly as much. Two more product recommendations: I love the Orgran rice and corn pasta and Orgran buckwheat pancake mix. The pasta isn't gritty at all and tastes very "normal" to me. Even my mom liked it. The pancake mix only requires water and the pancakes are thick but light and fluffy and taste good, too. It helps that the mix is nearly 50% buckwheat flour. These are the first puffy pancakes I've had since going gluten free. I think I'll be bringing a couple boxes home with me.

Mom saw the buses leaving at the top of the park was, "Oh, let's take a bus somewhere since the weather is nice. It looks like they go back to the city!". She had no idea where exactly they went but was completely game to get on one. Only my mom. I saw that one of the buses was the same one I had taken to get to Bondi Beach and it said it stopped at Bondi Junction, so I agreed to hop on a bus.

We soon passed an intriguing coastal walk, so we hopped off the bus at the Signal Hill Reserve and went for a 1km walk. (Don't worry. We're not really crazy. I only go places where I'm fairly sure I know where I am, and we now have a good map of city and my cell phone has gps service in it if needed.) It was completely lovely. Except for the flies. The flies were about as bad as in the Outback. I have no idea why there were so many flies. Fortunately there was often a breeze which helped shoo them away a fair amount.




We saw a prickly pear cactus. That clearly doesn't belong there. There are no native cacti in Australia. We stopped to look out at the sandstone cliffs and the nearby lighthouse and had kookaburras come visit us! It even did its laughing call. While I was taking a break at one point, Jon called me and looked up our location on Google Earth. That was sort of neat.



And in case you've forgotten what I look like:

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