The Sunday before we were due to leave Sydney it occurred to me that I was living my last Sunday in the city and from the moment of that realization I knew that my week would be filled with mixed emotions. There wasn't the faintest element of sadness when I had to walk in to work on the last Monday morning, but strangely there was when I left the office for the last time on Friday. People and places would be missed, but the expectation of things to come made it easier to say goodbye. So with a final meal at the top of Sydney Tower, we said that 'goodbye' and headed on to the next one in Katoomba.
As the little town in the Blue Mountains had always been one of my favourite places, we had plenty of friends there to see before we set off. Clay, who we met in the first week we arrived in the country, had promised to take us to a lookout we hadn't been to before where the rock comes out at on a spur and you can stand with a valley on each side of you and the beautiful mountains stretching away in every direction. But we hadn't counted on one thing restricting the normally distant horizons. A downpour of snow.
It's not uncommon for the temperature to be about 10 degrees cooler in the mountains compared to Sydney, but snow is still a rare sight. And to see it blowing up the side of one valley and being sucked back down the other must have been an ever rarer one. And it was so much colder than we expected, but luckily three-quarters of the van was currently packed with blankets – so we hoped it wouldn't be too bad when we had to start sleeping in it.
But for the moment that wasn't going to happen. A fire in the chill-out hut at the Flying Fox kept out the cold for a while, as did chopping the snow-covered logs, but it wasn't long before the draw of a cozy fireside seat inside drew us in. We had a feast of bread and wine, traditional backpacker fare, and soon forgot all about the covering of white outside.
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