FROM CINCY TO SYDNEY

I was in charge of the early morning wakeup call for our group of 8. I woke everyone up at 8 and we got ready to start our day. Since we had absolutely no plans for this trip, we went down to look at some brochures. One thing that caught our eye was the world famous Great Ocean Drive, which is one of the most beautiful roads in the world. Right next to that was a brochure on renting a car. Now in Australia not only is the steering wheel on the right side but you drive on the left side. We had some people in the group doubt we could rent a car.

We spent that morning organizing the 8-person van for the following day. All you needed to be was 21 and a driver’s license. The remaining people from our group of 32 were scared for our lives. You could organize a day trip as a group and it would have been $100 a person. While renting a car including gas and mileage it cost us about $50 a person, and we could stop wherever we wanted.

We already had the rugby game planned for 730 that night, so we spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the city. We took a free trolley around just to see the city. The trolley driver stopped and said he wouldn’t move until its departure time in 13 minutes. We proceeded to get off the bus and the Parliament House was right off the bus. We went up and ended up taking a tour of the Parliament. Before taking the tour we got to put our backpacks in a closet and I managed to put my backpack on the top shelf. The guide told me I was the first person to ever do that, so my name went down in history in Melbourne. It was a really neat tour and the tour guides were really nice.
We proceeded on to a Chapel and walked in to see what it looked like inside. This place was huge! It reminded me of one of the ones I went to during my 8th grade Washington D.C. field trip. After this we went to a bar in this building just to go to the bathroom. Our tour guide from the parliament recommended we go to the bathroom up there on the 32 floor. Being the explorers we are we indeed went up there and walked in the bathroom and we were blown away by the view.
After this we explored some more around the city and then went to the rugby game, which again was awesome. After the game we were so wore out and tired from so much walking we decided to just go to bed as we had another early morning and a big trip to the Great Ocean Road.
History Lesson: There are six states in Australia: New South Wales (Sydney), Victoria (Melbourne), Queensland (Cairns), Western Australia (Perth), South Australia (Adelaide), and Tasmania (Hobart.) Some people commonly mistake the Northern Territory as a state but it is indeed a territory.