After the 3.5 hours on the bridge we spent a little time exploring The Rocks – the oldest part of town where sydney was first founded in 1770something. within this area is Susannah Museum – a row of old terrraces that they’ve tried to recreate in different periods from 1800 onwards. it basically looked like student digs in rusholme or my house in crumpsall, a run down terrace with basic amenities. tho i’d painted mine a little since 1920. rather than tart them up to the look of the period they wanted to show they’d just left them to rot. nice. it wasnt Beamish or York Museum i can tell you.

A lovely Lenny Bennett look-a-like showed us round, another one who knew Dorothy, and he’d also lived in one of the houses in the 90′s – when it still looked like a student hovel from 1890, i bet dorothy didnt visit much and he stayed out quite a lot.

Then we went to fetch our car which we’ve hired for a week – a Toyota Auris. i’m expecting its brakes to fail any minute, and we set off for the blue mountains where we’d rented a room at the High Mountains Motel.

Took us a couple of hours to leave sydney and head up in to the mountains, and lord australians cant drive. first of all 100kmh is about as fast as it gets (thats 60mph to you and me) and although they drive on the left, if there is a right hand lane they will hog it. it must be a real slight on their masculinity to be seen in the left lane, even if their battered old Ute only does 60k. so we took to passing on the left and every one we passed was a Freddy Mercury-A-Like with the tache and a waistcoat in an old pickup (ute) without a clue.

Eventually we made it to the motel, which was built and furnished in 1950 and has not been touched since. this made more of an interesting musuem piece than Susannah Place and had a charm, of sorts. it’s the first time since we arrived we’ve had free wi-fi and breakfast and also a quilt, a blanket, and electric blanket and an electric heater thrown in. all of which we made full use.

we tootled down in to the town of Blackheath and found that the one horse had either been eaten, escaped or shagged to death but had leaft behind a number of ladies clothes shops including “born in the mountains” and from the state of the clothes in the window the tag line should have read “and shagged by my brother”. Eventually we fell upon a pizza emporium – we were too scared to go in to the two pubs we found, knowing what the sight of fresh meat would do to the locals. did you hear banjos? the lads in the pizza place were really nice but really didnt seem to have much of a clue what they were doing, we did infact ask if they’d just found the door open and started up….. but they assured us they knew what they were doing, though they would have to make more dough and our pizza would be another 30 mins. this didnt go too well as they obviously panicked making it so it was a bit of a tasteless disaster but they were very gracious and before we left they gave us $20 of our $27 back! cheap food at last!!!! that made it taste divine to us! and we retired back to bates motel to enjoy it and fiddle with the tv.

oh and Seven of Nine! having had a free wifi i was able to find out who the bad actress was in Body of Proof – she was seven of nine, she was wooden in that and hasnt really developed much since.