Lots of work today, though Ron did find time for surfing lessons! He did pretty good for a city boy! 
The day finished with a beautiful dinner at Room 81, one of the city's most prestigious restaurants. Yum!
Sydney’s been a blast, and today we’re off to the Australian Gold Coast. The Miami Beach/Las Vegas of Australia, this smaller town is right on the beach and with warm temperatures and casinos.J
The flight was only an hour and we exited the airport to a chauffeur driven limousine that took us to a three bedroom suite at the Kirra Surf, it was gorgeous! We had a nice lunch on the beach then headed off to the Wild Animal Sanctuary where we cuddled koala bears. It was amazing how docile they were….just like babies, wow!
We also experienced an aboriginal performance in honour of planet earth and the spirits which was really quite moving.
The highlight of the morning was undoubtedly the interaction with the kangaroos. This area of the sanctuary housed over 100 kangaroos and they literally ate out of our hands (and no, they didn’t bite!).
This mom was protecting her baby (like we all do), so we kept our distance, just in case!
Back to spend the rest of the day working, they headed to a reception for the organization’s members. Below are Fabrice from L.A. and David from the Gold Coast who hosted us here.
Our friends Barry and Dave picked us up at the hotel at 9:30 and we headed out to DFO, the Sydney outlet mall. It was pretty cool. Similar to Las Vegas, but lots of unique items we’ve never seen, so couldn’t resist loading up, especially since the prices were so amazing! We met a nice young lady that was on her way to the states for a month, and we put her in touch with little Mya. She reminded us so much of Mya, I’m sure they will hit it off.
After shopping, we went to Manly Beach for lunch. Picked up fish and chips and walked to the beach to enjoy some of the freshest fish we’ve tasted in a long time.
Mya was wearing a red wig and people thought she was Gayle King! Ha Ha. Not many black people in Australia, so we smiled and went along with the program. Barry laughed and said that if I weighed another 100 lbs, they would have thought I was Oprah!! LOL!
We walked along the beach, saw an interesting bag pipe/Irish dancer peformance, visited an aboriginal art gallery and boarded the ferry back to Sydney. What a nice experience. Only 25 minutes and the water and views of the harbor and the Sydney Opera House were spectacular.
We quickly changed clothes and headed off to the Opera House for a special tribute to Jack Johnson the historical heavy weight fighter of the early 1900s with a live Miles Davis soundtrack performed by the Jack DeJohnette band. 
As it turns out, Jack DeJohnette is one of Ron’s all time favorite performers and we got the chance to go backstage to meet him! It was so incredible, Ron and Mya backstage at the Sydney Opera House having champagne with a living legend. This is stuff dreams are made of, no doubt!
Still can’t believe we’re on our way to Australia, truly a dream come true! Yes, Mya is going to work, but we’re certain there will be opportunities to fit in some fun and hopefully make a lot of new friends.
We about to take off now, its Thursday and with the time change and length of the flight, we won’t arrive in Sydney until Saturday morning, yikes! It’s a new airline called Virgin Australia and it looks really great online. We were lucky to get upgraded to first class and wow, the plane is amazing! There is a fully stocked, serve-yourself bar (this picture was taken just before takeoff and they had removed the bottles for safety).
Our two seats have individual televisions and a privacy curtain that made us feel like we were in our own little bedroom – it was even purple!
We just had an amazing dinner (they even gave us a white tablecloth!) and told us to let them know when we’re ready to go to sleep. We’re watching 127 Hours, what a great movie, but we’re starting to doze so we’d better let them know.
I can’t believe they just brought us “jammies” and once we got into them, we were out for the count. We woke up to a great breakfast and before we knew it we were there!
Our friend Mark picked us up (our plane arrived at 6:05 so we were very grateful for that!) and we headed to the car. 
These Aussie cars are quite interesting. They don’t have steering wheels! My bad, forgot they’re on the other side. Ha Ha! The really weird part was getting used to the traffic driving on the opposite side of the street, at every turn Mya thought Mark was going to have an accident! 
He gave us a wonderful tour of the city, including the Paddington Market where we did some fun shopping, then went to Bondi Beach (Sydney’s most famous) for lunch and laughs with friends.
We finally checked into the hotel and quickly changed clothes to go to the Mardi Gras Parade. We walked around the city at night then stopped for sushi at the Sushi Train. What an interesting concept, you sit at a counter and the sushi dishes revolve around the counter in front of you on a train. You grab what you want and at the end they count how many empty dishes you have to calculate your bill. Neat idea!
There were people everywhere in the streets for the parade (and I do mean everywhere!) By then, we had started to wind down and the idea of standing in a crowd of 500,000 people for 3 hours and walking 45 minutes back to the hotel was a little overwhelming so decided to be wusses and call it a night.
What a great start to this exciting vacation. Can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings!
