Aly's Blog: The last day

There was no way I was passing up the chance to see inside the opera house this trip so given that we were not flying out until 3pm, I left it to the last morning. The boys and I enjoyed the 1hr tour and sitting in the most expensive seats in the smaller theater. The largest is amazing! Inside is all wood for acoustics and not attached to the concrete outer (a few meters space between them). There is a 10,000 pipe organ in there that took 10 years to build and 2 years to tune. Now that is job security and persistence! There is now a way to tune it within a few hours so much more efficient. The entire building was supposed to take 3 years and $7M, but ended up at 16 years and over $100M! It was such a controversy an entire government was voted out because of it and the original architect was fired, went back to Europe and never saw the complete structure. His son is also an architect and continues to work on the building for upgrades. In order to cover the massive costs, the government created an Opera House Lottery with part of the funds set aside for winnings which was so popular it raised all the money in just 3 years!

Packing up and heading to the airport we shared our favorite moments and highlights. Interesting to hear what the kids were thinking - snorkeling in Fiji, Warrnambool and Great Ocean Road, the golf cart on Hamilton Island and getting to go ATVing to name a few.

This was about to be flight 10 in our trip and the longest at 13.5 hours - all on January 6th, the longest day of 2012 for us! Kudos to Quantas for the massive 'double decker' plane with incredible in-flight computer/entertainment system. Kept us all entertained for hours Arrived safely in LAX and in spite of having a 6 hour layover we only had time for lunch and a bit more after spending nearly 3 hours getting luggage and through customs. We are all really tired but almost there! This has been a fantastic vacation :)