Day 0 - Friday 21st April 2023

We left home to stay at an airport hotel in Sydney in preparation for our departure on Saturday for our holiday to Japan, Germany, Scandinavia, Portugal, Spain, Malaysia. This is because our flight is quite early tomorrow and we didn't want the hassle of getting to the airport from St Ives at that hour.

The Uber picked us up at 3:15pm and we arrived at the hotel entrance at 4:15pm. It was a slow trip - partly because the driver drove at a very leisurely pace and partly because of the heavy traffic on the Harbour Bridge and the Eastern Distributor. Apparently there had been an accident in the Harbour Tunnel.

It reminded me about how bad Sydney traffic can be and reminded me how lucky I am to be able to work from home instead of battling traffic to get to and from the office.

Rydges Sydney Airport is located right at the entrance to the international terminal. Our room is on the third floor and we can see the airport terminal across the road from our window.

The Wi-Fi speed is good - about 100Mb/s in both directions. My guess is that they have a lot of business customers as well as holiday makers.

When checking in, we'd booked to have dinner at the hotel restaurant at 6:30pm. It was an excellent meal with great service - just as you would expect from a high class hotel like this.

Suzy had overheard someone say that every time she came here, they ordered the lamb shoulder to share and so we decided to follow this recommendation. It was a great choice. We thoroughly enjoyed the meal.

The wine was expensive and so I went for a couple of glasses of the shiraz that was on special and Suzy ordered a gin and tonic which she enjoyed - she said it was aromatic (whatever that means).

However the G&T wasn't without problems because she somehow managed to break the glass when she was halfway through it. (Usually I'm the one to break things). The waitress was very good. She cleaned up the broken glass and brought her a replacement drink.

There might have been more meat on the bone but we were full. So we were back in our room before 8pm. The plan was to get to bed early because we had a very early start tomorrow morning. We were in bed before 9pm.