Opening the longest floating bridge in the world

We arrived in Seattle just in time for the new 520 to open, the longest floating bridge in the world! We walked over it with the kids and most of Seattle.

The following day I did the emerald city bike ride across the bridge and through Seattle, then got trapped on the Seattle side because the bridge wasn't opening to traffic for another 4 hours! So I accidentally rode my longest ride ever, around the top of the lake.

Breweries beside bike trails. This is the best thing ever.

PACE Art + Technology exhibition at the PACE Gallery in Menlo Park

Great exhibit, kids had a ball!

Lake Tahoe Squaw Ski Trip

Great snow up the top, rain at the bottom :(

Stevens Pass

Quick break from house-hunting to head to Steven's Pass for some great skiing.

Canberra and Broulee for Christmas!

Spit Bridge To Manly Walk

The Spit Bridge To Manly walk features on a lot of "best things to do in Sydney" lists, so I thought I'd do it given some free time in Sydney. It's a beautiful walk and well worth doing: 10.5km, 191m elevation, 2 hours walking time at a fairly quick pace, and 3 hours total including hanging out on the beach.

Getting to spit bridge from Glebe on public transport involved light rail and two buses, and should have taken about an hour, but I messed up the stops at one point so it took a bit longer. Doing the more complicated transport juggling at the start is better because you finish with the simple and spectacular Manly ferry ride back into town. The closest bus stop to the start of the walk requires a dash across a fairly busy highway to get onto the other side, there's probably a better way to do that.

You get a lot of great stuff on this walk, but on a weekend in good weather solitude isn't one of them. I found myself wishing I had brought my headphones to avoid listening to inane conversations being had by others. You'll do a lot of overtaking and/or getting trapped behind other groups.

There's a few amazingly pretty little beaches that were deserted except for a handful of rich people on their boats. Come prepared to swim, you'll want to.

Castle Rock beach, one of the best.

Great tree colours

One of the best views. There's a decent climb in the walk, more if you take the sidetrip to Arabanoo lookout as I did. Manly on the left.

As you get closer to Manly the walk is mostly a tour of rich-people houses, and one smelly boat-launch cove.

Quintessential Sydney view from the ferry on the way back.

Blue Mountains MTB: Woodford to Glenbrook on the Oaks Fire Trail

An adventure in the Blue Mountains: the very well-known Oaks Fire Trail. The weather was perfect for riding, not too hot.

But before the main event we took a quick spin on a cool little downhill course near Glenbrook, in Tunnel Gully Reserve. Someone has put an awful lot of work into building berms and bridges, it's pretty cool.

Yeah, I'm not riding across that one.

Then we put the bikes in the car, leaving one car in Glenbrook. You can normally do The Oaks without a car shuffle using the train, but they were doing trackwork, which is pretty common on the weekends apparently.

I hired a bike (Trek 29-er hard-tail) from Blue Mountain Bikes for $100. It was a pretty decent bike, although I really missed the rear suspension, dropper post, and cleats of my bike at home. It just has demo pedals, and I slipped off them a few times on some of the singletrack drop-offs. My only real complaint is that I paid for a puncture repair kit, but they gave me a 26-inch tube :(

The track starts very near the bike shop (we left the car there), you basically just cross over the highway.

The first 17km is fire trail, which alternates between climb and descend. Fun, but nothing challenging. Some nice views over the mountains through the trees.

After the gate at the end of the fire trail you start on the singletrack. It's really good. The first few km is fast and windy through fairly dense scrub on either side. Nothing particularly technical. The second half-ish is amazing with some more technical drop-offs and rock platforms. Many are marked with blue and black diamond options. Really fun singletrack.

You eventually pop out into a carpark and have the option of turning right to go up to a lookout. It's well worth the climb, there's a great view out over the Nepean river and the plains towards Sydney.

And this is the point one of our party realised they had a flat tyre and no tube. My tube would have come in handy at this point if it had been the right size...Anyway we patched it, and a ridiculously nice guy actually drove back to his house and came back with a 29-inch tube for us.

On the way down the bitumen I rode over a black snake. Eeek. It may have been dead already. Maybe.

It was a great day's ride, highly recommend.

SF 49ers vs. Atlanta Falcons @ Levi's Stadium

We'd seen a pre-season game back in Baltimore, but it was on my TODO to see a real-deal NFL game. A friend of Em's visiting from Australia wanted to see a game, which was a good enough excuse to tick this one off. We got decent tickets $160 each(!), which when combined with a babysitter for 7 hours (another $140), Uber and VTA fares, and food/drink at the game, it all made for a pretty damn expensive day.

Amazingly it rained and was pretty cold. Amazing because it was probably only about the third wet day this year...but we came prepared and were comfortable under a blanket and raincoats.

Getting to the game was fairly painless on VTA, and surprisingly efficient and fast on the return journey too. I just wished we had driven to one of the closer stops (like Moffett Park) and parked (we got an Uber to Mountain View and had to sit through lots of stops). Security was intense. If you expect to carry anything you should probably buy one of the NFL-approved clear bags. Anything else won't get in.

The game was great, and close enough to be exciting.

The stadium is impressive (it will host the Superbowl this year), as is the constant bombardment of advertising. You probably don't go more than 20 seconds without seeing an ad. That wasn't surprising, the NFL is a money-making juggernaut, but what was surprising was the level of military propaganda: there were probably a dozen or more different "support our troops" moments from appearances by veterans on the field and in the stands, to multiple messages of support from players pre-recorded and played on the big screen. Unsurprisingly, there has been some significant recent controversy about paid patriotism in the NFL.

It was a fun day, but I won't be rushing out to go to another game any time soon.