To get Wednesday straight.  We started with a bus tour of the CBD (Central Business District for the acronym adverse) that wound up at Circular Quay where we boarded a very large cruise boat to complete the city tour from the water,  with a lovely (overwhelming) buffet lunch.  We passed under Sydney Harbor Bridge a couple of times and I got my binoculars out to ogle the climbers on the top of the bridge.

After our tour of the Sydney Opera House we bused back to the hotel for a two hour break.  We caught a cab back to the Opera House for the 6:30 performance by the Sydney Symphony of the aforementioned Leningrad Symphony by Shostikovich. They opened with a world premier of a Cello concerto follwed by a performance of  a cello piece by Tchaikovski. The cellist then played an encore including vocalizations, hammering on and other methods of achieving sound not normally associated with concert performance on the cello. It was marvelous and the standing ovation was well earned.  Following intermission the Orchestra doubled in size for the Leningrad.  90 minutes later I felt I had survived the siege on Leningrad.  The performance was wonderful,  I do not remember ever hearing a live performance,  RPO must have performed it in a moment of feeling rich. We walked back to the hotel stopping for a snack on the Quay.
 We were preparing for the morning climb of the Bridge. The are plenty of superlatives, all available on bridgeclimb.com. There will be pictures, later. I had to buy them on a thumb drive.  We were not permitted to have anything with us that could fall or be dropped.  We were provided hats with clips to lanyards to the provided jump suits.  There were lanyards for glasses, even a handkerchief with clip was proved and a fleece in a bag clipped to the safety belt in such a manner it could be extracted and worn without unclipping it. We were to spend almost 2 hours directly above the flow of traffic,  a long way above. For all the nervousness the climb was essentially a long walk along a narrow catwalk,  we were harnessed and locked into our safety line already.  Then we climbed a series of ladders,  passing through the traffic deck between lanes 5 and 6 in a caged safety Island. Eventually we gained the top arch and began a long climb to the midpoint.  None of the climbing was particularly strenuous and there were many pauses as our guide related the history of the construction and we waited for the group ahead to move on. We were working with a 10 minute separation.  At the mid point we crossed the top center beam to the west side of the bridge to begin our descent. Total time from check in to tossing the used jump suit down the laundry chute was just over three hours. We would recommend that any able person who can climb two stories without straining should do this for the once in lifetime experience.

We walked back to our hotel and took a break to recover from the physical and nervous energy we had spent.  Friday we got up early and flew,  and flew,  to Alice Springs.  Near the middle of no place in the Outback. I’ll write about that in another post.