Day 3- January 20

We checked out of our hotel at 10:00 AM and drove over to the Sydney airport for our flight to Brisbane.We dropped off our rental car and boarded the 11:00 flight which was a short 1 hour and 30 minute plane ride. Sydney is one hour earlier than Brisbane so when we got there is was about 11:30. Our bags did not show up and the airport staff said it was backed up for a couple of hours so we decided to explore.

The second most popular sport in Australia is Cricket (Sports). Cricket is played similar to baseball and involves a bowler (pitcher) attempting to hit a stump behind the striker (batter) to prevent him from scoring runs. We wanted to visit a cricket stadium for the first time so we took a short taxi ride to one of the most popular stadiums in Australia, The Gabba. The first ever cricket match at The Gabba was in 1866 and since then thousands of people in Brisbane go to watch cricket every year. Unfortunately, the game that day started at 6:30 PM so we took the tour instead. The stadium was very large with a maximum capacity of 42,000 people and oddly the stadium itself as well as the field was completely circular. The tour guide let us all pretend to be bowlers and strike the stump but none of us managed to hit it. Overall it was a great time and we promised the guide we would be back tomorrow to see a real game

After that interesting experience we decided to look in to getting a hotel, but first we had to get our bags. We taxied back to the airport, picked them up and found a cheap option called the Snooze Inn 9 minutes away from our location. We taxied there and booked two rooms for two nights. After that Daniel realized that we hadn't ate as his stomach made a huge grumbling sound in the lobby, which caused the other guests to look at us strangely. Luckily there was a Vietnamese restaurant called the Green Tea Restaurant just a short 8 minute walk away. The menu had a large arrangement of items like specialties, sharing portions, soups, Vietnamese beverages, and desserts. I even wrote a review about it!


We had heard about the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary (Natural Environment) from the receptionist at our hotel's front desk. Its the worlds first and largest koala sanctuary with over 130 koalas. The Sanctuary itself is 44 acres big and exhibits all kinds of animals such as pythons, platypuses, and dingos. It was a only a 23 minute taxi ride away, and when we go there we waited in line for admission for about 40 minutes. During the tour our guide permitted us to hold the koalas to get an up close experience. It was a really fun time and was a must visit for the trip as koalas are an iconic animal of Australia.

We decided to go back to the hotel to take showers before dinner

because we all smelled like koalas. We saw a restaurant on the way back from the sanctuary close to our hotel called Lucky Egg. It was advertised as a fried chicken restaurant and we were all already homesick for American food so we tried it out. They had my favorite food on the menu, chicken wings, which we got 3 orders of. The crispy chicken sandwiches were excellent as well as the Dorito popcorn chicken. We came across another group of tourists from the U.S. and we chatted with them until pretty late. When we returned back to the hotel we all were dead tired and instantly crashed at about 10:00 PM