How to find parking in Sydney

Last night Camilla had read the Australian news and weather report to me. A dust storm from inland was expected to hit Sydney the day we would arrive there. It had started to storm and rain in Narooma already, so that we had not hung our washing outside. And that was quite clever, because it rained heavily all night, which even woke me up at some point.
When we left the apartment, it was still drizzeling. We had a five and a half hours drive ahead of us. When we arrived at the city to have breakfast, we did not need to look for options, because there was only one.

After breakfast, we took the tourist route for a couple of kilometers and stood by the beach, watching some surfers. It was protected from the wind and nice, hot and sunny.

The wind picked up on the way and we read about how to behave while in a dust storm. It did not sound very dangerous to healthy people, maybe we would need to cover our mouth and nose when walking around outside a lot. I was more concerned about the car being hit by a tree branch. Kat had told us, that eucalyptus trees are easily damaged during storms and they do have some heavy branches.

We stopped at a place called Ulladulla, but it was no fun outside at the sea, so we only ran around the car once and drove further towards Jervis Bay, where we knew that there are beautiful white beaches. We wanted to go there, even if that meant we would be sand-battered afterwards.

Jervis Bay is a nice tiny city with some shops and a vegetarian restaurant, where you can order food until 2:30 p.m.. We entered the store at 2:28 p.m.. Phew. From the restaurant you have beautiful view over those white beaches. There was a guy that paddled on his surf board over to the next sandbank, his little daughter sitting in the front on the board looking very excited. We later saw him swimming all the way back with her on his back and no board. Pretty cool guy… I would have loved that, too as a child.

We did a long walk by the beach, over the swiss cheese-like looking stones. It was not windy there at all. But it was at the top near the car park, where a little twig hit me at the head. That hurt pretty much. The sand was so fine and white. It was a pity that we had such a long drive ahead of us. It was another roughly three hours. We stayed nearly two hours, because we had a coffee after our walk. That was when we thought of staying at Jervis Bay, because it might be too dangerous on the streets. Driving further inland was not an option, because that was were the wind came from. But as we only had two days in Sydney, we decided to give it a go and try it and maybe stay elsewhere if the wind would pick up too much.

The sky was not at all pinkish when we arrived at Sydney. Our hostel was at the main road near the central station. I hated it from the very start, but tried to be a little more relaxed, so I ended up hating it just a little bit.

There was no parking in front of it. I googled a car park that belonged to the university with mixed comments about it. It said cheap.. yay, but also extremely hard to retrieve a ticket for. But how hard can it be, right? Well, it can be very hard. Long story short, the credit card option did not work, it would not accept our 50 dollar note, it just swallowed the 20 dollar bill we put in (we had been to a pub for change money somewhere in between) and gave us nothing in return, we downloaded an App that is still a mistery,… I think it took us an hour until we were 50% sure that we might just have selected the right option, so the car won‘t be towed away. This was the first (and last) moment during our four weeks together, that the air between us was a little… electrified.

After walking it off a little, we ended in an italian restaurant for beer and pizza, before returning to the hostel.

The hostel was extremely loud and crowded. It would have been perfect for us in our twenties, but I guess we are getting old… We found a nice, cheap and central hotel for the next two nights and decided to move there the next morning.