So Monday was our day to climb the Sydney Harbor Bridge! That wasn’t until noon so we took the morning to walk around the Royal Botanic Gardens. It’s remarkable the amount of space they have put aside for these gardens, you could get lost in them. Besides all the trees and gardens, we saw the Conservatorium of Music (what we called the castle house) and the Government house. On a time crunch because we had difficulties getting out of the gardens, laughing at ourselves, we headed out and down to the Opera house.
We made sure to walk all the way around the opera house and it looked completely different from all the sides. At times it was almost hard to recognize because we are so used to viewing it in one particular way in photographs.
We traveled over to the bridge climb building. After a quick sandwich we headed up stairs, watched an instruction video and signed our life away (weird not the first time I’ve done that on this trip!). We introduced ourselves in a little circle while staff picked out our jump suits. We had a dad and mother from Melbourne and mom was 76, 3 siblings from Holland, the couple from northern Australia, the honeymooners from London, and a dad with 2 sons from somewhere in Europe. It was quite the group to say the least, but everyone was really friendly and I enjoyed my time with them.
We put on our flattering suits, and before we even got to strapping in Tiffany and I got to making friends and laughing with our guide to say the least… he had to be thinking “oh, American girls…..” haha. More stories later. We got strapped in and everything was strapped on, went through a practice course and hello ground way below me! Mom I think I understand your fear of heights more than I thought I did.
They take you out through a tunnel and you go directly onto two wooden panels that were incredibly skinny! Your harness has a strap that has a ball at the end and that’s what clicks onto a wired path the entire way but other than that you have nothing! So regardless to say my heart was going a little faster than normal. I finally gained some composure as we got closer to the main pillar where the arch started; but before we could start walking on that part they took us out onto a see through wire mesh thing that extended out from the bridge… if that doesn’t make sense just know I felt like I was going to die! You could see straight down but I didn’t choose that option and instead I looked out at the opera house, the docking stations and the harbor.
It gets better; I had to climb up the huge pillar to get to the arc. There were four latters in which you started from below traffic, came right next to them, went a little higher as the wind blew and the cars clicked along the highway and then you went even farther up to the arc. Once I was up it was completely and totally worth the sweaty palms and the skip in my heart. You could see everything.
The poor instructor knew I was terrified, probably because he asked how I was when I reached the top of the ladders and I just reply, “that was terrifying!” haha, see mom! He snapped our picture and we got to start climbing on the top of the arc. It wasn’t scary at all. We walked on stairs built into the main arc structure so I felt safe and you could see everything. The view just kept getting better and better. Before I knew it we were to the top! We got a group shot and I got to take it home for “free”!
The entire time we were climbing we had a headset on and about half the time our guide was talking to us. He would tell us about the course and things to watch for but mostly it was information about the bridge, the harbor and anything else we wanted to know about. It was a pretty awesome experience to say the least.
I took about 9468698 minutes to get down the 4 latters and 3 hours in total, but I made it and you better believe I bought a picture and I shirt to prove I did it! Go me : )
After the climb we stopped by the Museum of Contemporary Art but most of the galleries were closed because they were in between exhibitions. However, I did see a Cindy Sherman piece alongside a lot of Australian art which was pretty cool.
After our long day out we headed back to our side of town to find a pub for a chicken parm, a well-known dish in Australia made up of fries (hot chips),topped with breaded chicken, red sauce and cheese. We quickly found out that wasn’t going to happen there for more than one reason, so we resorted to an American pizza joint and quickly made it back ‘home’ safely. Quite the busy yet eventful day!
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