We printed out a walking tour guide from a website and took the bus downtown for a day of Sydney history. We hooked up with Nancy and Dave and our friend Wendy who’s a historian, so combined with our walking guide we learned additional stories about the early days of European settlement of Sydney along the way.
We chose a day when a craft and foodie market was operating and we enjoyed browsing the artists’ booths and bought lunch from the various food vendors.
The Rocks are literal rocks and early settlers built their dwellings into the steep cliffs. Most of it’s gone now, but there’s one area that’s preserved as a small historic park. Rather than do a reconstruction or mock up, the foundations were left as is with the addition of steel silhouette furnishings to aid the imagination in visualizing what it was like to live here.
When we’d exhausted the walking tour we headed for the famous Sydney Harbour bridge walk.
Uh, no. Luckily you can also just walk across the bridge and get the same views, if a little closer to earth. It was a chilly, windy, overcast day but still, any view of Sydney Harbour is a treat for the eyes. No matter where we are around the city, the view never gets old.
We ended our walking tour with a cold one at the oldest pub in Sydney, the Fortune of War, 1828.
