Day One: Things Do Not Always Go As Planned!

When we arrived at the monastery and told Fr. Bernard our plans for our first full day, he laughed. I wonder if he was in persona Christi at the moment.... ;) He warned us that travel would take much longer than we anticipated by public transportation, and boy...was he right! You can go the same route on the train on two different days, and it can take twice as long one day as the other!

So, though our first day's plan was to go to Bondi Beach and Cronulla, he suggested we go up to Manly beach instead as it would be closer and right off the ferry. So, we hopped the train into the wharf at Circular Quay and took the Manly Ferry over to Manly. Here are some things we saw along the way...














Our first stop was the Sydney Harbour National Park. Here are some pictures from that part of our journey, most of which was up a steep hill for about a mile. Talk about a challenging first day - jet lag and climbing! The walk through the old military training area was spectacular, and even though some were still a little tired, we managed to have a wee bit of fun.




















After the National Park, we headed for the beach, with a brief detour to look at what used to be the St. Patrick's Seminary, but is now a School of Management. We were a little dismayed that the school had either planted or allowed to grow some bushes covering a statue of an unidentifiable saint (most likely Patrick, but we couldn't see due to the bushes in front of it.). Anyway, most of us braved the cold waters and dipped our feet into the flip side of the Pacific!















At dusk we headed back from Manly on the ferry (which was a bit on the chilly side, but gave us some fantastic views!) and made our way back to the monastery. We kept running into pilgrims from all over the world - the group in the picture above is from Paraguay. On our way back from Manly we kept running into some Italians - that picture is below.














We ended the night very tired, but some of us still managed to stay up past midnight, quite unintentionally, and paid for it the next day. As for now, I must run back to the cottage for a quick breakfast before Mass! We'll try to post about our trip to the zoo later on today.

Good morning/night and God bless!!