Wanderung 33

Having had a pleasant and quite busy two days in Sydney, we had to pack up for our flight out to Perth to see a bit of Western Australia. But first we had another morning of chatting with Lyn and Neville, and then a shopping session at the Westfields Shopping center around the corner from their home. The Christmas decorations were already up in the hallways of the shopping center, which lent it a festive air.

We wandered about, looking for a battery for Monika`s camera and a couple bottles to store some mouthwash in. The camera battery was a bit of a bother, and after searching around we finally found it in a camera shop, but at a steep price, of course. The mouthwash bottles we ended up finding at the `Reject Items` store, which turned out to be the Australian equivalent of a 'Dollar Store' in the US, a 'Pound Store' in the UK, or a 'Euro Store' in Germany. All of those stores carry lots of odd miscellaneous stuff that is sold quite cheaply, so each mouthwash bottle cost us just $1 AUD.

Austalians still read physical books, and the bookstore located at the overpass between two sections of the shopping center was very intriguing because unlike any other bookstore I have seen, this store sold BOTH new and used books. The new books were all located inside the glass front of the store, but the used books were on shelves scattered around the mezzanine landing, along with really comfortable reading chairs. People were sitting there like it was a mini-library, reading the used books. Neville said that bookstore would send buyers to estate sales where they would buy all the books of the deceased and then sell them outside their bookstores in this fashion. That sounded much better than chucking all the old books in the trash, as I suspect happens in many cases in the US. We finished up with Neville buying items for lunch, but we also had the chance to grab a couple packages of chocolate-covered licorice bullets that we had so enjoyed on Wanderung 26, and which seem to only be found in Australia for some reason.

We all had a nice final lunch together, but didn't have much time afterwards before we had to repack our bags and all travel down to the airport. We all traveled down partly so that we could still use the multi-fare mass-transit Opal cards that Neville and Lyn had kindly loaned us for the past couple of days. Once we reached the main station downtown and we we headed through the turnstile to take the train out to the airport, we managed a last-second exchange of the Opal cards by the simple expedient of my reaching back over the turnstile and handing the cards to Neville--long arms do come in useful at times! Then we processed our luggage in at Qantas, and embarked on a 4.5 hour Trans-continental flight from Sydney to Perth, Australia, which is the same distance as New York to Los Angeles in the USA.

We arrived in Perth at 9 o`clock local time, but that was midnight Sydney time, so we were tired and thoroughly jet-lagged. I was super careful as we picked up the rental car, because I had to sit down on the wrong side of the car and drive on the wrong side of the street. To add insult to injury, the steering wheel controls are reversed on these cars, so I kept turning on the windshield wipers rather than the turn signals, and once when we were sprayed with water, I immediately turned on the turn signals instead of the windshield wipers! Argh! To top it all off, our GPS guided me into two blocked-off streets in a row forcing me to make U-turns to get out! If I had not been so tired, it would have been really funny, but as it was I was glad to get out to our B&B and park the car for the night. Fortunately, Monika had picked a really nice place on a quiet residential street that had a LOT of room and was very restful for sleeping.