Wednesday, May 30, 2001.
Our last full day in Australia. Its been a whirlwind visit, hardly time to breath, much less anything else. While the main body of the conference was over, Ken & Brian were doing a post-conference workshop on .NET, and Don Kiely was doing a workshop on SQL Server. Richard had agreed to a few hours of consulting with a client of Adams in the afternoon so that Adam could catch the first half of the .NET presentation.
This left the morning free to do a little more exploring of Sydney - we grabbed the chance to visit the Taronga Zoo on the north side of Sydney. Peter Vogel and his wife Jan joined us. The best way to the zoo was to walk from the hotel to the ferry terminal and catch a ferry to the north side - the zoo actually has its own ferry terminal and you can buy a package ferry ticket and zoo pass.
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| Waiting for the Vogels (and Stacy), gave an opportunity to get a shot of the columns in the lobby of the hotel. After the columns of Istanbul, these didn't impress much. | The main ferry terminal at Sydney Harbour. We bought our zoo pass here, then had some time to kill before the ferry departed. | |
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| Wandering along the sea wall, we caught a nice view of the Opera House. | A reasonable facsimile of the ferry that took us to the zoo. | |
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| Jan and Peter on the way down to the dock. | Jan and Stacy waiting for the ferry. | |
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| Heading out of the ferry terminal, we get more great views of the Opera House. | We've had views of the Opera House before, but you can't help but stare as you go buy, its quite spectacular. | |
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| Looking back at the Sydney Harbour bridge, you might just be able to see the silly people who paid perfectly good money to climb to the top of it. | Passing the navy docks again, the Kitty Hawk is gone, replaced by another carrier of uncertain origin... maybe British? | |
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| This is a frigate at the navy dock flying a union jack/southern cross flag with a white background... | The ferry terminal at the zoo. |
The zoo was originally constructed in 1916 and has been expanded significantly since then. It is built on the side of a hill, with the ferry terminal at the bottom (obviously). The logical thing to do is to start at the top and work your way down back to the ferry terminal. There are two ways up - using a tram or a bus. Since the line up for the tram was huge, we opted for the bus.
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| Line up at the tram near the ferry terminal. | Top side entrance to the zoo. |
A quick visit to the information centre at the entrance to the zoo got us maps and directions - the logical starting point at the top is the Australian exhibits. The first section of the Australian exhibit was an open trail walkway, right beside an emu, kangaroos and wallabies.
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| Peter and Jan in the Australian walk through exhibit. | Richard and Stacy, at the bottom of the trail just before the ferry terminal. |
After the Australian exhibits, the next section had both birds and various reptiles in it in more traditional zoo settings - glass cages, deep concrete pits, etc. The final area of the zoo focused on the animals of Africa.
Leaving the zoo, we took the ferry back to the main terminal and walked back to the hotel. After taking a quick tour through the conference area and post-conference workshops, Richard hooked up with Adam. Richard had agreed to speak with one of Adam's clients on development methodology.
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Erik and Mitch wrapping up the details of the conference. Erik is fighting back against the mad photographer with another Canon Elph camera, although that one actually uses film. | |
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| Brian and Ken doing their post-conference workshop. Is that Tom Howe in the front row? You bet! What IS he doing with his laptop? | Don Kiely at his workshop, and in typical style, incorporated the invasion of the photo taking into his session with a line like "And here's Richard Campbell, the guy who likes Concurrency IDs." | |
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Adam's car. Many of the SSW staff have custom plates, this one says "INTEL." I wonder if Intel knows about that... |
The visit at the client's offices took Richard and Adam up into the northern part of Sydney. Since it was hardly a setting for photographs, you'll notice a distinct lack of them. After more than two hours of talking, they came back to the hotel to hook up with everyone for dinner. This time it was Adam's turn to pick the dinner location (after the frightening experience the previous evening).
You'd expect everything to go smoothly, but it didn't - when we arrived at Adam's favorite Italian restaurant, the power was out! Fortunately, there was a Thai restaurant down the street, and so we took the back up location and had decent Thai food - and ten people ate for less money than one from the previous night.
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| Adam leaving his car parked semi-legally at the hotel to round up everyone for dinner. | Post-post conference Thai dinner with the whole gang. |
And that was the last day in Australia - the next morning we would leave early for New Zealand.