North of Nowhere: Vacation 2013 - Day 3 - Taxis and phone numbers, Boarding the Cruise Ship, Where's the iPad?, Bon Voyage

It's the day to board the ship! But we still have plenty of time to see more of Sydney. We pack up and call the taxi. Unfortunately, since we don't have a local number, apparently they can't help us out. Although they didn't make this quite clear and we waited about 20 minutes waiting for a taxi that never came. We finally asked the owner of the house if we could use his cell number (we actually spent quite a bit of time that morning talking with him about various topics). He was going to call the cab company, but when he learned we were just planning on taking the taxi to the train station rather than clear to Circular Quay (pronounced Circular Key) he offered to give us a ride. We took him up on this and we loaded our bags in the van.

There were several steps at the train station, so it required multiple steps and since we timed it to get their after rush hour due to all of our luggage, we had to wait a bit for the train. We did make it down to Circular Quay, and when we went to turn in our luggage, we learned that they would let us check-in early. Wonderful!

The Diamond Princess in Sydney Harbour

We got on the boat, grabbed a bit of lunch, went back to our cabin to grab the camera and iPad for the rest of our Sydney sight-seeing and...oh, no! Where was the iPad?? We racked our brains about the last place we had it? Did we set it down when we carried the luggage up the stairs at the train stop? Did we leave it in the train or at the train stop (we didn't think so. Dad thought it was in his electronics bag. He had purposefully not taken it out of the bag)? We had cell phones but didn't get cell service (even expensive cell service) in Australia or on the cruise ship. We couldn't call the place we had stayed using Skype, as we didn't have the iPad. So, we had to go back. Luckily we discovered it missing when we still had time to go back and check for it.

Aborigine playing the didgeridoo at Sydney Harbour

We took the train back to Tempe station, and took the long walk up the hill at the hottest part of the day, back to where we stayed. Luckily the owner was home when we arrived, and the iPad had been discovered sitting outside where we had been waiting for the cab that didn't come. The owner was also very nice and allowed us to drink a few glasses of cold water and offered us another ride to the train station (which we gladly accepted). This side trip took a bit of time out of our day, but we did still have some time to visit the botanical gardens and enjoy the nice weather.