Blue Mountains, ughh!!

These are the Three Sisters, oh sure they look pretty now, but try getting lost in the bush and having to see them grow smaller and smaller the further out and more lost you got....


This is the calm before the storm, and by calm before the storm I mean yes we did make friends with the sausage slash emu slash kangaroo man!


On a happier note, I did finally get revenge on the Emu who thought it was cool to make the American girls scream! Look who's laughing now!! (Yes this is real Emu meat and it tasted just like chicken!)


Yeah I did jump over the child proof fence to pose for this.... Who's the tough guy now?

So Monday July 7 we finally made it to the Blue Mountains, yay! It's about two hours outside of Sydney by train and it's tons of rainforests in this massive ravine (I'm talking like Bryce Canyon or bigger wide if you can imagine that big of a space) and way high crazy cliffs and stuff. Anyway everyone that we talked to about the Blue Mountains would just always say be careful you don't get lost in the bush it can be crazy dangerous out there and people get lost and stranded all the time blah blah blah....

Well to even start hiking in the Blue Mountains we took the worlds steepest train! It was way sweet and steep and takes you deep down in. Once there we could choose 10, 30 or 50 minute hikes. We decided on the 50 minute and as we were marching along we just kept going up these different paths and messing around and taking fun pictures. Just a side note, hikes that would take a normal person a half hour turn into hours with us, probably cause the camera can't stop taking our picture at every nook, tree and cranny along the way! Eventually, a couple hours later we decided we needed to get serious about finishing the trail and start hiking so we could get back and finish exploring everything else, well after about an hour and a half and still nothing we started to wonder what was going on. I just kept saying oh its gonna curve around and we'll start heading out, don't worry guys it's fine. PS Wendy hates hiking anyway and was already a little panicky that we were even going.

Don't worry we were just wondering around lost down here somewhere, for so long...

So we had been hiking since 12 and it was 3 and it gets dark here at 5 and all the buses and ways to get up and out and back to town shut down at 5. Finally at 330 we come across this sign that says Mount Isolation 3 hours Ruined Castle 2 hours Scenic World 2 hours (that was where we had started) or behind was a sign that said Golden Stairs 1 hour so we were like ok, we've must have taken a wrong turn but it's gonna be the same whether we head back or just keep going this way we might as well keep going and see the rest of it. But we knew we were in a hurry and had to be super fast so we set a pretty good jogging pace through mountain trails and rocks and all that kind of stuff for about 30 minutes. We were getting so tired, but we figured we had to be there soon and we were running out of light, when we come across a new sign that said Ruined Castle 1 hour and Mount Isolation 2 hours if we kept going the same way but Scenic World was 3 hours back the other way. Apparently we had all read the sign wrong and we were going in completely the wrong direction. At this point it was 4 o'clock and the sun was really starting to fade! I've never been so scared in my life, really truly scared about what was going to happen and what we were going to do! We all kind of freaked, Wendy started to cry and Brighton dropped her veil of playing it cool for Wendy's sake,. So the first thing we did when we panicked was said a prayer which helped for about 30 seconds until I let a few choice words slip out... but it did clear my mind so I could think better, and I just had to walk away to make sure if the path said anything else and so I could freak out alone! We decided at that point all we could was head back as fast as we could. Also, we had not seen a single person on the trail the whole day, we even said probably four times why haven't we seen anyone else on this trail? So now we were already tired from hiking for 4 straight hours plus we had just been running for the past half hour, but we took off running back the other way. The whole time I have flashes in my head of us ending up on the six o'clock news stranded and lost and having to sleep there overnight, and mind you it's winter over here and we were in the mountains, I had to wear my spandex and jeans and a long sleeve shirt and sweatshirt it was so cold! Finally after about 10 minutes miraculously we see 3 boys coming toward us, we probably looked so dumb running down this trail with these terrified looks on our face, and I stop and ask them if they know where they're going, they were like, "Duh who hikes clear out here without knowing where they're going!?!" So we asked them how to get back and they said, "Not the way you came you'll just get more lost out there, we're camping and our tents are still another 10k away. You need to go back and go up the Golden Stairs and that will put you on a road and you can follow that road back into town. We finally made it to the Golden Stairs and it was still an hour to the top, straight up! We were all beyond the point of exhaustion and our water was gone we stopped and said another prayer and somehow we made it up, but we were literally shaking up the stairs and breathing so hard it was crazy! Plus Wendy has asthma and was going crazy with her inhaler, so that made it even harder on her!


These are not the faces of happy campers....


Apparently the Australian Division of Transportation didn't get the memo that there are still dirt roads out here.... maybe that's because we were still in the middle of nowhere?

We finally made it to the top and it was just this dirt road with no signs of life on it, I think we had all been imagining a paved road with a few houses by it, but we were still in the middle of nowhere! So we just walked and walked and walked. A car passed us that we tried to hitch hike a ride but the guy looked at us like "what?" and just kept going. Luckily right as we came to the actual road the only other person we saw was this friendly man who helped get us on the right road to Katoomba. So then we walked some more and it was like 6km into town but we finally made it by 630, which doesn't even really make sense that we did it so fast! I know I'm usually so dramatic, but I really can't even be dramatic enough for how scary this was. It was so crazy too, it had been really good weather even though it was supposed to rain, and literally the minute we got inside right by the train station it started raining! Seriously, it was such a miracle and I can't even believe how blessed we are! Really it was scary, but very cool to see how we were so blessed and still being looked after even though we weren't doing what we needed to, like paying better attention to the map!