Sunday January 31 - Visiting the Place of the First Landing in Australia by Captain Cook in April, 1770

Today was the day we decided to go to Botany Bay. Botany Bay has always conjured up pictures of stooped bodies heavily laden with pick axes, chains, and prisoners. Of course that is probably an inaccurate vision, especially as many of the prisoners were not kept in prison but sent out to work for the British settlers who had sailed to Australia and Tasmania but were not convicts. Originally there was a “stain” on convict families, now pride and recognition are given to the immense amount of work that convicts did in building Australia. Convicts first arrived in Australia at Botany Bay in 1778 and they say around 160,000 in total came to Australia with the last convict boat arriving in 1868. It is a fascinating history and we hope to learn more about their story as we travel to Tasmania and Perth.

We started our walk at a very special spot adjacent to one of the runways at Sydney International Airport.

Hearing the throb of the jet engines revving up and watching the big aluminium birds gathering momentum as they raced down the tarmac and soared into the skies like silver-paper albatrosses sent electric waves of wonder through my body.

The rest of the walk was along the beach, or the path running parallel to the beach,  Ray was on mission beach clean-up and filled up a couple of plastic bags before realizing it was an immense task for one person; but, he did his bit!!

We walked past endless families playing in the sand and swimming at the edge of the great blue ocean. We watched the jet-boat riders whizzing up and down just 800 metres off the shore – or at least that is the distance they are supposed to be from shore!! Unfortunately there are a few who don’t follow the rules and their screaming engines and roosters’ comb jet streams created a commotion just like a fox in a chicken run.

My eyes searched through the shells on the beach to see if I could discover any “sea glass” to take home to my friend Cathy. Cathy has a three-quarters full glass bowl in her PEI home full of green, and blue, and red ocean-polished pieces of glass. But I didn’t find any! I did find bits of lots of beautiful rust-coloured fan shells which I think may belong to the scallop family.

We stopped for a late lunch at Jim’s old yacht club, The Georges River 16ft Sailing Club where we relaxed and filled our eyes with the beauty of Botany Bay and the Georges River. Then it was onward to our finishing point at Captain Cook Bridge in Sans Souci, a 500 metre bridge over the Georges River. We guessed the whole walk was probably about 13k. We caught the bus back to the car park bedside the runway and drove home for dinner and a good night’s rest!