Penrith

After spending the last 10 days full of adventure and intrigue, it was time for a day off. Nothing big would be planned today, just some souvenir shopping in Penrith and a visit to Windsor. We started at a large shopping center in Penrith, this is where Jaimie works everyday. It was a pretty good sized mall, many of the clothing stores were familiar to me. They even had several grocery stores, a bunch of meat counters, and a liquor store firmly in the mall. I don't see how anyone would ever need to go somewhere else for their shopping. I bought a few things from Australian Geographic as gifts and also from a candy company here named Darrel Lea. They claim to have the world's softest licorice and I must admit, it is the softest licorice I have ever tasted.

Our next stop was the Olympic rowing venue. It's also in Penrith, but it was raining and not all that exciting. Basically it is a big man made lake with some rowing lanes down the middle. This area has gotten so much rain that the ramp out to the medal platform was almost totally submerged. As a side note, dam levels here are at their highest levels in 5 years. They are sitting around 60%, up from 35% when I arrived here. Much of the country is on very tough water restrictions, although this much needed rain probably will not do much to loosen things up.

From the lake we went on to Windsor, one of Australia's original towns. It's claim to fame is "Australia's Oldest Pub", the Macquarie Arms hotel. Jon and I ordered a beer here and got ourselves carded. That's pretty sad in a country where the drinking age is 18. The rest of Windsor is mixed between restaurants, little souvenir and crafts shops, and boarded up storefronts. Its saddening to see such a historic town like this dying, one of the many expenses of the Penrith shopping center.