A Tennessee Girl in Oz: Happy birthday to the T!

My work schedule has been pretty full-on, so I've not had much time for adventuring lately. But I did take a nice weekend to fully celebrate T's birthday last weekend.

Of course, there wasn't much that Toby wanted to do on his big day. But I had other ideas, surprise! So we compromised and I kicked off his birthday weekend with some fun Friday evening activities, and then the rest of the weekend was left to his choosing.

No successful activity happens on a hungry stomach, so we started Friday evening with a walk down to Walsh Bay for dinner. I really like Walsh Bay because it's mainly restored wharves and warehouses from Sydney's early port days. It's also pretty quiet, even though there are a few fun restaurants scattered here and there.

Our dinner destination was El Phoenician, a Lebanese restaurant. I'd picked it out for Toby's dinner, mainly because there were plenty of small plates involving dips. He agreed it was a good choice!

We had a leisurely dinner, but we were also on a schedule: our tour at the Sydney Observatory started at 8:15 sharp! This was my other choice activity to kick off T's b-day, but I didn't tell him about it until we were at dinner. I think of all the activity scenarios he'd been worrying about in his mind, he was pretty happy with the observatory tour plan!

I didn't get too many pictures because of course it was dark. But we had a pretty good time! Toby volunteered to turn the crank to close the telescope silo, which was pretty cool. All the other parts of the observatory have been mechanized, like the rotation of the telescope and the silo itself. But one bit was still by hand and that was very cool! We got to look at a lot of stars, star systems, and the rings of Saturn. All very fun and interesting!