No Sleep on the Train for Me

Well I think I can safely say that I am GLAD that my days of having to sleep in the day-nighter seats of the trains here are officially OVER. The trip from Broken Hill to Sydney wasn't all that bad, really - the train was much less crowded than the ones I'd ridden on the way to Broken Hill, and I ended up with a four-seater all to myself! I enjoyed stretching out in relative luxury until it came time to try and go to sleep. I'd already discovered on my trip on the Ghan that propping my feet up on the seats opposite to where I'm sitting doesn't work - my knees go to sleep. So I spent some time trying to figure out how I could (a) sleep lying down on the seats, (b) stretch my legs out so my blasted knees wouldn't be bent all night, and (c) support my knees so they wouldn't go to sleep.

In the end I laid my small suitcase down between the two sets of seats, put my backpack down on top of the suitcase, and a towel down on top of the backpack. This brought the whole precarious pile almost level with the seats, so I could bridge the gap between them and actually support my knees in the process. This worked fairly well, except that the train spent about four hours going over some seriously wonky tracks just after lights-out, and it was absolutely impossible to sleep for all the shaking and shuddering we were doing. Once we reached some smoother tracks, though, I think I actually did manage to catch a few zzz's.

The train pulled into Sydney this morning right on time, and Ruth met me at the big YHA across from the train station. I stashed my luggage for the day (note: the Sydney YHA has a great luggage store room!) and we headed off to do some exploring. Unfortunately it was absolutely POURING rain and we spent quite a bit of time dashing between the raindrops! We went to the Guide Shop, just a few blocks from the train station, to purchase some badges and books. Then we headed across town to the Sydney Museum. I visited the Museum on my own last September at the start of the trip, but they've just opened up a new exhibit on dinosaurs, and of course I needed to see that. :-)

The museum was jam-packed full of small kids and their families - I had managed to forget that it's still school holidays here (hence why Ruth could join me in the first place, she is a teacher after all!) and of course any exhibit on dinosaurs draws children like flies to honey. There was some pretty neat stuff though. They'd done an excellent job making life-size replicas of a number of dinosaur species, including many of the theropod dinosaurs that scientists are now pretty sure sported feathers. There was also a good explanation on the modern view of how birds are really just highly-evolved cousins of T-rex, which was cool.

What with one thing and another, Ruth and I didn't leave the museum until almost 4pm, and then we had to hoof it back across the downtown to pick up my luggage and then catch a train out to the suburbs. The train was crowded and I ended up standing almost the whole way, so it sure felt nice to curl up on the couch once we got here to Ruth's!

I've spent the evening uploading pictures to facebook, so if you'd like to see what I was up to whilst in Broken Hill, check my pages there.

The next few days will be very busy... tomorrow I fly back to Melbourne and have half a day to get all ready for our big trip out to the Grampians this weekend. So if you don't hear from me again until Sunday or Monday, that'd be why!