Today we travelled around on the Hop-on-Hop-off bus.
It was another very hot day, with temperatures of 37 degrees forecast, so we made the choice to basically stay in air conditioning as much as possible.
We walked down through the little village of Leura browsing the pretty shops. We found a lovely chocolate shop housed in an old church. Of course, we had to sample a couple of their handmade chocolates. 🙂
We found the bus stop and had a few minutes to wait for our ride to Katoomba. We had decided to get off at “Stop 3”, The Gingerbread House and then walk back up the street for morning tea and then to the Carrington Hotel for lunch.
We had a look at the Ginegerbread House, which is also housed in an old church.
Back up the road onto Katoomba Street, we again just browsed the shops and came across a cafe that had Devonshire teas. Perfect for morning tea.
Next stop was the lovely Carrington Hotel. This historic hotel was built as a fine establishment in 1883 and remained popular for most of its life. It was fully renovated in the 90’s, reopening in 1998 after an eight year renovation. You can read about the history of the hotel here
We were a bit early for lunch, so we made our way back to the bus and thought we might have lunch at the cafe at “Scenic World” As we are both not great with heights, this was not a Blue Mountains attraction we wished to do, but we thought the view from the cafe would be nice. I asked the bus driver, if we could have lunch there without having to pay admission. He said yes we could, but looked at me and said “Why would you? It will like a disturbed ant’s nest there today!” ??
When we pulled up at the bus stop there to let off a number of passengers we understood what he meant. We saw there were men directing the carpark and turning people away as the carpark was full. On top of that, here were at least a dozen full tour buses parked. “Disturbed Ant’s Nest” would probably be an apt description.
We thought we would have a look to see how many people were at the 3 Sisters, but again it was very busy. Jimmy the driver suggested we try the “Leura Garage” We thought that would be a good option as it is literally across the road from our hotel, and backs onto Woolworths. We had a nice pizza and a couple of glasses of local wine ( one of which was free with our bus ticket) topped up our food socks for a couple of days.
We got back to the apartment around 3:00pm. I did a load of washing and we had an easy afternoon. It had again been very smoky and hot. Although neither of us has any asthma, both of us felt tired from not breathing “properly”
We were both falling asleep on the couch so decided to just go to bed… it was 7:30pm!!! I thought we would be up at some ridiculous hour of the morning, but we woke at just after 6:00am We MUST have been tired.
