Boxing day(still not quite sure why they call it that), and our last in Sydney. We woke up to rain, and were forced to pack a very wet tent. With our packs loaded and very heavy we made our way to the central train station. We checked our large packs in early and since our train did not leave until 4:12pm we had a few hours to kill. We took the train back to Circular Quay and headed up Pitt St. to check things out. Pitt street is one of the busy shopping streets that is lined with one shop after another, there were lots of people out and about because it was boxing day, but soon the road access ended. At the road end everything was brick pavers and several blocks of huge mall. Walking in the mall was probably the most people I have ever seen at once! It looked like popular movie openings everywhere with long lines out of all the designers stores to catch the sales and it was afternoon these people still had not gotten in. Shocked we tried to maneuver our way through the crowd, it would have been an awesome few blocks to window shop since it is only pedestrian traffic and cafe's in the middle that sell booze, but since there were easily 5 million people out I lost my patience very quick. We cut over to the next block , there were still people but it was no where near the mess of Pitt St.
We decided to head back to the central platform and just wait out the last hour at the train station to get away from the boxing day crowds. The train station provided some good people watching and the hour flew by, so we hopped on the train ready for a change of scene. Our car was about half full when we left Sydney, but they said it was a full train so we would be making a few stops along the way. About our 4th stop we picked up a couple, I'm not sure where they were from but I think they were Aussie, the girl had two Louie Vuitton purses and they looked real however her look turned cheap quick with all of her over the top fake diamond jewelry. They sat on the other side of the train and 3 rows back at first and after the next stop they were moved right across from us and she kept saying something about moving to first class. Soon two train cops came over and with the train equivalent to a flight attendant they were talking to the couple. Paul over heard that they had booked train tickets but the missed the date and thought they could just jump on and sit in the same seats, when the person who booked the correct date showed up they made up some story that the train made a mistake. It took atlas an hour or two to figure out and they were lectured several times by the train attendant. However, the train attendant got to the bottom of it and they had to pay for new tickets, unfortunately they remained right across from us and annoyed the hell out of me!
The lights on the train turned off around 10pm, we thought we would sleep well since we had so much more room than on a plane, however this was not the case, it was a long 11 hour train ride and we were both exhausted and stiff when we rolled into Brisbane at 5:30am.
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