Trifecta—Opera House, Sydney Skyline, Harbour Bridge & me!

This was the third day I bused into the city and left my Berlin Blue rental car curbside back in Kingsford. Up early for the AAT Kings official Magical Manly & Beyond Tour which is unofficially the Sydney North & Manly Beach Tour. What a tour it was crossing the Harbour Bridge to the north with a stop at Milsons Point for what I call the ultimate trifecta Sydney picture—you, the Opera House, the Sydney Skyline and the Harbour Bridge!

Arabanoo was an Aboriginal Australians and this was his land.

Hopping back on the coach bus and leaving the safe driving to the expert—our driver Rob; and leaving the tour guiding to the expert—again our driver and tour guide Rob! Next stop was the Arabanoo Lookout at Dobroyd Head in the Sydney Harbour National Park. What a view of the Tasmanian Sea, the  sea of the South Pacific Ocean, situated between Australia and New Zealand, with the Manly headland in the foreground.

The Shell Sculpture at Manly Wharf.

Our next stop was Manly Beach and it was a magical place. The Corso, a pedestrian Main Street connects the two Manly Beaches—the one on the ocean and the one on Manly Cove. I liked the Shell Sculpture in front of the Manly Wharf, a big shell that connects the natural environment; the harbour and the ocean marine life. Supposedly it emits clouds of mist but all I saw was a young lady sitting peacefully atop the shell and then she disappeared. The tour stop was lengthy, enough time to mill around Manly and be at the beach and also enjoy the community feel of a small town. I love Manly now just like all the Sydneysiders who mentioned it to me as the place to go and have a relaxing good time.

CLICK here for a VIDEO INTERVIEW with Captain James Cook!

I never know who I am going to meet on the these Golf Journeys! But Captain Cook at age 287 years was not one of them!

Before I knew it the AAT Kings Tour was over and it was time for the Captain Cook Lunch Cruise. I didn’t realize I was going to meet the real Captain Cook. I mean Captain James  Cook of the HMS Endeavour, the first to reach Australia in 1770 near Botany Bay. The New South Wales Golf Club overlooks Botany Bay and Captain Cook found fresh water there below the 16th tee. The Captain has a bit of an edge to him and was astonished to learn that now there was a golf course above his old watering hole. The more soft spoken and humble Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship USS Enterprise he is not, though he is a likeable fellow and puts on one heck of a luncheon aboard his modern replacement ship called the MV Sydney 2000. The character actor who is Captain Cook is Paul Ellis and here is his website—The Whole World is a Stage! Employ him, he means business!

The Sydney Opera House from the deck of the Captain Cook flagship vessel MV Sydney 2000

The lunch on the Top Deck was elegant and delicious (see pictures of appetizer, entree and dessert below). The cruise was spectacular and a timely Grand Finale to my Sydney touring! Having taken the Sydney South & Bondi Beach tour on Monday afternoon and the Sydney North & Manly Beach in the morning, cruising along the perimeter of the vast and jagged Sydney Harbour, brought all the geography and history learned to a comprehensive crescendo for me! While tour stops, photo opportunities and great zoom lenses enable great pictures, there is no better vantage point than being on the water in the harbour aboard one of the nine Captain Cook vessels. I can see why Captain Cook remains on the water to this very day.

Another great day on the Golf Journey to Australia & New Zealand! Like I say in the last picture of the Day 7 post- I could not be happier with the first week of the ‘Golf Journey to Australia & New Zealand.” It has been beyond my wildest dreams! Thank you to many, many people and business organizations! (-:   (Facebook Link, Andy Reistetter, 11/7/14)

Check out this lunch!

Smoked ocean trout, fennel with black caviar and dill mayonnaise dressing.

Beef tenderloin fillet, smoked sweet potato, cavolo nero, baby beets and sauternes jus.

Mississippi mud cake, berry coulis, and fresh cream.

Andy the Star in my own mind! Surely have been treated like one in Sydney!

With AAT Kings expert driver and tour guide Rob. Like Stuart on Monday, this guy knows his stuff and knows how to share it!

I could not be happier with the first week of the ‘Golf Journey to Australia & New Zealand.” It has been beyond my wildest dreams! Thank you to many, many people and business organizations!

View of Anzac Parade and construction outside my window in Kingsford.

Tuesday, November 4th, 2o15. Blind open at 6:42 am. Penthouse room on Anzac Parade. Planning, preparing and writing daily updates. A working morning if there ever was one so far on the ‘Journey to Australia & New Zealand.’  There is a construction crew working on the street by 7 am doing a little jack hammering. It doesn’t faze me one bit or impact my writing. Not sure why other than to say I am completely living in the moment on these odysseys. Everything is so new and everyone is new to me. It is a lot of work making contacts, working out the logistics and schedule. Somethings, most things, somehow miraculously fall into place. I never know what to expect.

With my new friend Marek, a Czech golfer and golf coach.

There is a knock on my door. I open it to see this young fellow who says hello like he knows me. The lady I rented the room from told me that one of the flat mates was a golfer and this was he—Marek Mohyla, who grew up near Prague in Pardubice in the Czech Republic. I like him immediately and invite him into my humble abode. What a great kid and I immediately think of my maternal grandfather Josef Vlasak, a Czech, who immigrated to America from Uhersky Brod, which is 300 km, from Prague near the Slovakia border, which is where my other three grandparents came from. Here’s a young man, self admittedly, living his dream, with a good understanding of the connection between golf and life, and in the process of immigrating to Australia. God bless this young man! As you see in the interview, his English is good after coming here a year ago speaking none. I wonder how similar and how different are the immigration odysseys taken by Marek and my grandfather?

One from the archives, watching Jessica Korda with father Petr on the bag on the last hole of LPGA Q-School in 2010.

As a junior golfer he played golf with Jessica Korda who I saw qualify for the LPGA in Daytona Beach in December 2010. Her first professional win came at the 2012 Women’s Australian Open at Royal Melbourne. I like the part in the video that Marek admits Jessica would beat him as a junior player. The Czech Republic’s greatest male player, Alex Cejka, who has won eleven professional tournaments, shot a Sunday 79, playing with Tiger Woods in the final group, to lose the 2009 PLAYERS Championship. That day, a couple of groups ahead, I saw Henrik Stenson shot a bogey-free 66 to win it. That’s golf. That’s life. I am so happy to have met Marek. Anybody in the golf business in Sydney looking for a good man, here he is!

Hats galore in Sydney on Melbourne Cup Day. I can only imagine what it was like in Melbourne.

What I learned (by luck from my flat mate Aren) on Monday I applied again on Tuesday as I hopped a bus into the Sidney CBD to see just how big this  Melbourne Cup horse race is. Marketed as “the race that stops a nation,” it is true though the buses were still moving. I made it downtown and fell short of making it to Ryan’s but I went into ‘Establishment’ only minutes before the 3 pm race started. I will call it ‘Hat Day’ as there was a sea of hats, quite original, stylish,  and pretty I might add, atop the heads of the women. Having no knowledge of the horses entered, other than knowing there were 24 horses in the field, I placed no bet and enjoyed watching the crowd and their reaction to Protectionist, the first German horse to do so, win the Cup! The roar of the horses coming around the turn on the backstretch took me back to Churchill Downs where I visited before the PGA Championship at Valhalla.

So Day 6 was all about hats and horses and meeting my new Czech mate (that’s a pun on his chess comment in the video) Marek!

Another fun day in Sydney! Still no golf yet but playing New South Wales Golf Club, The Lakes Golf Club, Riverside Oaks and The Australian Golf Club in the next week before I head south to Melbourne for The Masters. Know anybody that would like to host me in Melbourne? (-:   (Facebook Link, Andy Reistetter, 11/5/14)

Gidday Up at the Establishmont on Melbourne Cup Day!

Ladies with hats galore!

I did make my way to Ryan’s and sat and chatted with John Seward Johnson II’s Waiting. His newspaper had an article about a Shark named Norman being Ready to Strike Again!

With our driver and tour guide Stuart. Making Australia and New Zealand come to life. Us tourists too!

The motto of AATKings, which began in 1912 when the Pyke family pioneered coach touring in Australia and continued in the 1980s when a team was formed with pioneering adventurer Bill King’s Northern Safaris, is “Bringing Australia and New Zealand to Life.” I can attest to the experience of that saying in Sydney, Australia and hope to do the same in Melbourne, Brisbane and New Zealand as this ‘Golf Journey to Australia and New Zealand’ continues!

Day 5, Monday, November 3rd, Down Under time was spent on the “Sydney Sights & Bondi Beach” AATKings tour. And oh what spectacular sights they were! The coach driver, a.k.a known as the tour guide, can make all the difference in the world on a tour like this. Stuart, our designated driver and tour guide, did just that making the tour more informative than a tour and  a lot more fun than a bunch of strangers riding the bus together. Thank you Stuart for the great time!

Sitting in Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair thinking oh what a view!

For the most part I will let the pictures below do the talking.

Though I will make two tourist points. No. 1 is that tour company know their business and know their territory and know their what their customers want. I never would have found Mrs Macquarie’s Chair on my own. Her chair is an exposed sandstone rock cut into the shape of a bench, on a peninsula in Sydney Harbour, hand carved by convicts from sandstone in 1810 for Governor Macquarie’s wife Elizabeth. I am glad I had a chance to sit in it and look out over the harbour.

With father Rajan Govender and daughter Pivessnie. We had a good time!

Point No, 2 is that not only did I meet a great tour guide I was able to make a few friends on the bus including Rajan Govender and his daughter Pivessnie. They are from Durban, South Africa and invited me to come visit them during next year’s “Golf Journey to South Africa.” Who says you make new friends on the golf course? You can make them on the AATKings tour bus too!

After this tour, not only do I feel oriented to Sydney but I also feel at home.

Good Morning USA, Good Night here in Australia. Week 1 of 11 has not even passed yet. I am not sure I can keep up this pace and I haven’t even golfed Down Under yet… thought did play one hole at NSWGC… lots of golf coming… time to got to bed, sleep and rest up for another day Down Under!   (Facebook Link, Andy Reistetter, 11/4/14)

Here are the pictures, no safari yet!

One view is to the Harbour Bridge and Opera House…

… the next view is to the Sydney Skyline.

Gap Park, the opening gap of the Sydney Harbour.

Springtime in Sydney…

Bagpiper on Bondi Beach. We happened to come while there was a solemn voyage to take a loved one’s ashes to sea and spread them.

The iconic Sydney Opera House is really two and contains 3 theatres and a concert hall.

Sydney has so much respect for prior Olympics and ones since 2000. Here I am with a key date, the last time golf was played was in 1904 at St. Louis at Glen Echo CC.

I made it 3-for-3 on Sunday, November 2nd with a tour of Sydney jetting around in my little Berlin Blue Nissan Micra. Australia is golf, the beach and Sydney, the capital city of New South Wales to me. Up early, I hopped in the car and headed out on the M1 and M2 to the western suburbs. I felt like James Bond, shifting with my left hand while taking pictures with my right hand. Through lots of tunnel and with light Sunday morning traffic I was on my way to see Sydney. Zipping through toll booths with no attendants, the rental car thingamajig was beeping often. Tolls are not cheap here and I think I will be charged a little extra at the end of the week.

Are people in Sydney friendly, helpful and overly nice to be around or what? This is how I met Jim, the security guard!

I didn’t know where I was going until I saw a sign for Sydney’s Olympic Park. We all remember how well they hosted the Summer Olympic Games in 2ooo. Why visit the Olympic Park? Easy answer when you look at what I was doing last year at this time—on a ‘Journey to Olympic Golf.’ Now Sydney would be the fifth (Atlanta 1996, St. Louis 1904, Mexico City 1968, Rio de Janeiro 2016) Olympic City I visited on my quest to define the ‘Olympic Spirit of Golf.’ Simple logic: extract the Olympic Spirit from prior Olympics and combine it with the history and tradition of Golf. Hey, nobody has done it for 112 years, so who is to say that is not how to define the ‘Olympic Spirit of Golf.’ Well actually junior golfers compete in the Junior Olympics for the first time in Nanjing China this summer. Maybe I should go ask them. I did try to go to Nanjing but no sponsors appeared!

CLICK here for VIDEO INTERVIEW with Jim Pearson at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Park.

I don’t know about me (well I do and the answer is NO) but Jim is a deserving NSW Champion in my mind. He knew there was golf memorabilia in this place!

So seriously here is how things go for Andy Reistetter on these journeys. I am driving through the Olympic Park area (it is vast) and see a sign for Golf. So I turn wondering what the heck Golf had to do with the 2000 Sydney Olympics? I mean Aussies are very sophisticated and forward looking people but this was 14 years ago? So, of course, I get to a dead end roundabout without seeing another sign or anything that looked golf related. I see a security guy so I pull over and ask him about it. “Yeah, they should have taken that sign down four years ago,” said Officer Jim Pearson. Evidently there was a driving range within Olympic Park that Australian golfer Bob Stanton would stage huge golf merchandise shows. Stanton won the 1966 Dunlop International at The Australian Golf Club by beating Arnold Palmer in a sudden death playoff. The range was also used for overflow parking during the 2000 Olympics. Golf is back in the Olympics in Rio in 2016 after a 112-year absence… I am thinking Australian golfers will excel there as much as the city of Sydney and Cathy Freeman excelled at the 2000 Olympics!

CLICK here for a BEAUTY VIDEO of driving through the CBD of Downtown Sydney!

I became quite intimate with Sydney, courtesy of an AATKings tour on Monday, Day 5!

My day concluded with a drive through downtown Sydney, what they call the CBD (Central Business District), and a trip across the Harbour Bridge with a glimpse of the Sydney Opera House. The still pictures at the end are from my exceptional AATKings tour on Monday (Day 5). I am taking the liberty of merging days since part of me is 15 hours behind and the rest of me is right here in Sydney, Time Zone UTC +10:00!

What a day of visiting the Olympic Park and seeing Sydney, Australia!

http://www.andygolftraveldiary.com/day-4-wow-sydney-hostin…/ Day 4 spent driving around Sydney and visiting the Sydney 2000 Olympic Park.   (Facebook Link, Andy Reistetter, 11/3/14)

Day 3 was a splendid day spent at New South Wales Golf Club with Club Captain Phil Banister.

After a restful though short night I spent my first full day in Sydney with ‘Golf’ being prominent for the first time in the ‘Golf Journey to Australia & New Zealand.’ I visited the New South Wales Golf Club and was astonished by her beauty. She is in a class all by herself as far as I have seen in the world of golf—links golf with significant elevation changes. ‘Spectacular’ as my friend Seannie would exclaim with a voice inflection that surely said the adjective was well deserved!

I was hosted by Club Captain Phil Banister. We spent a good five hours touring the golf course, meeting and conversing with several members. We sat in the clubhouse with a view overlooking the 18th green. From that vantage point one sees the pureness of this seaside golf course with its ups-and-downs meandering itself up and around on a bluff overlooking the sea and then down to the sea itself as if a horse lowers her head to drink. The original Dr. Alister MacKenzie design was modified by E.L. Apperly six and twenty-two years after it first opened in 1928. Since 1951 numerous architects have been involved and there is one who wished he had the opportunity to work on her a bit but never did—Jack Nicklaus.

CLICK here for a BEAUTY VIDEO of the New South Wales Golf Club.

The home hole and the clubhouse at New South Wales Golf Club.

I heard many stories of Australia, Australian golf and those who play our humbling game on the La Perouse links. None more fascinating than Dan Cullen who turns 100 years old on the 15th of November. He grew up near Perth and came to the game as a sort of forced indenture as a caddie after eating figs from a wealthy man’s fig tree. On the advice of Bobby Locke he came east to Sydney because that was where the money in golf.  In addition to playing competitive golf, in the late 1960’s he set up and operated a driving range still known today Cullen’s Driving Range. While we think of the 1977 Open at Turnberry as Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus’ ‘Duel in the Sun,’ it was Cullen setting a record for the oldest golfer ever to qualify for the British Open. He was 62 years old. Happy Birthday to Dan Cullen!

Surfers, not seals, in the water at Maroubra Beach.

After golf I explored the area a bit by driving north to visit Maroubra Beach and then Coogee Beach. Stunning, absolutely stunning. Australia, an island continent, has over 21,000 miles of coastline, that’s over twenty times more than what California has in the United States. I can see why most of Australia’s 23 million people live near the coast and love their beaches.

Saturday, November 1st, my first full day in Australia!

Staying in Kingsford I found a perfect location close to the historic golf courses of Sydney, the beach and the city itself. Two out of three wasn’t bad for the first day! Down Under Andy (-:   (Facebook Link, Andy Reistetter, 11/3/14)

I did not realize until we were already in flight that I would be losing a day on the way to Sydney. They assure me I get it back on the return!

Well, on Day 2 of the ‘Golf Journey to Australia & New Zealand,’ I made it to Sydney after a 10-hour flight from Honolulu! Or was today Day 3 too?

I thought I was leaving from Honolulu and arriving in Sydney on the same day but not exactly as I fly over the International Date Line. According to Wikipedia, the IDL is an imaginary line on the surface of the Earth that runs from the North to the South Pole and demarcates backward calendar day from the next. It passes through the middle of the Pacific Ocean, roughly following the 180 degree longitude. I have no idea what that means but the lady Sydneysider sitting in 27D aside me told me that when we land in Sydney it will be Friday, not Thursday. So I missed my first connection in Sydney which was scheduled for Thursday afternoon! Reminded me of how I lost my very first job out of college with Mobil Oil before I ever started But that is another story.

Hawaiian Airlines fed me like a King! They must have thought I was King Kamehameha from Maui or something!

Hawaiian Airlines Flight 451 was a good flight especially in terms of the hospitable staff and the fact that they feed you and feed you well! Being on time, not too bumpy and being able to pick your own premium movies when you want to also made it a great flight! I watched a Korean golf movie with English subtitles called ‘Mr. Perfect.’ It was the fictional story (I think) of Baek Se-Jin, an amazing golf talent, whose life spins out of control and bottoms out when his manager is killed when he is drunk driving, as they called it in the movie. He escapes to a small island where he saves a school while the young children, one who Se-Jin develops into a champion junior golfer, while they save him from a useless life. Good story and a testament to how popular golf is becoming in Asia.

Beak Se-Jin is Mr. Perfect in an interesting Korean golf movie.

Arriving in Sydney I had the distinct pleasure of watching a nice custom official empty completely my roller bag and backpack and open and search my rigid golf travel bag. No worries, I am a day late anyhow! The cell phone SIM card option didn’t work with my phone so I ended up buying a new phone but now I have GPS and a way to communicate with all my new Aussie friends! A rental car was still there for me a day later and also the room I am staying in for the first week near the University of New South Wales!

My little Nissan Micra, standard shift, in Berlin Blue, with the steering wheel on the wrong side! Left, Left, Left!

Driving the car was a bit tricky as like in the UK they drive on the left side of the road here in Australia. “Think Left, Left, Left” were words of wisdom from Dick Donovan the renown book collector  when I made my first trip across the pond to St. Andrews with my older son Joe. However, when a pedestrian crossing the street, you better look right because that’s where the cars in the closest lane to the sidewalk come from. My biggest challenge will be having the blinkers on the right side of the steering wheel as I turned on the windshield wipers a hundred times as I drove the 10 km. to my new home in Kingsford.

All in all, a great first, and second, day here in Australia! Sunset was 7:22 pm, sunrise will be 5:55 am with the days getting longer. It was another day (or two) with twenty hours of sunshine in it. I am 9,631 miles from home and 15 hours ahead timewise. So I here in Sunny Sydney heading to bed while my buddy Stokes is teeing it up back in Ponte Vedra Beach. Now that I am here it is time to find the golf!

Arrived in Sydney but not sure what day it was! (-:   (Facebook Link, Andy Reistetter, 10/31/14)

Following the Sun west, Catalina Island near LA, heading out into the Pacific Ocean.

Good first day! I am writing this in my hotel room near the Honolulu Airport on Thursday morning. I gained six hours of time I think flying from Jacksonville, Florida to Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas and then the 8-hour flight into the vastness of the Pacific Ocean finding the Hawaiian island of Oahu (which always makes me laugh to think it or say it out loud, kind of like Yahoo!) and safely and thankfully the landing runway of the Honolulu airport around 4 pm local time yesterday.

It was a day following the sun, sitting in my window seat simply amazed at how much an airplane can keep up with the earth’s rotation. I think I calculated about 18 hours of sunshine for me yesterday. I think I like breaking up the trip to Sydney this way as I stayed up to 10 pm yesterday and slept pretty much to 5:30 am this morning, completely refreshed and ready to go! Much different than ‘piercing into the darkness’ and the short night on trips east across the pond to Scotland or Europe. Following the Sun with thoughts of Ben Hogan. I am following the long days of summer and sunshine too with this second consecutive winter trip to the southern hemisphere.

I have much to be thankful for on the ‘Golf Journey to Australia & New Zealand’ that I made a list on the plane. This odyssey has been in my mind since the ‘Journey to Olympic Golf’ a year ago. Getting to know a few Aussies in the golf business over the last seven years on tour helped put definition to the trip. Meeting a lively bunch of them at the Masters this year sealed the deal for sure. About a month ago I sent out a few emails to test the waters. The GO decision was made a week ago Monday on October 20th and this airplane ticket that brought me to Honolulu yesterday and will take me to Sydney today was purchased. So much has happened as far as planning in the nine days before I left  So very thankful to so many people both back home and ahead in my new home for the next 2-1/2 months!

Upon arrival in Sydney I will secure the rental car, find a SIM card for my LG phone (never knew it meant Subscriber Identity Module but now I do) and hopefully it will work and give me internet & GPS and a way to text back to the States. I will drive 6.1 km to my room off campus near the University of New South Wales (UNSW), meet some new friends and stay awake as long as I can.

Well it’s time to leave for the airport and hop aboard a Hawaiian Airlines flight to Sydney and thankfully and happily follow the sun ‘Down Under’ for another day!

(-:

Andy

Aloha, Mahalo. Aloha… made it to Honolulu, heading to Sydney to day on the 2nd day of the ‘Journey to Australia & New Zealand’ Hello to new friends Down Under, so long but see you soon to old friends in the USA! (-:   (Facebook Link, Andy Reistetter, 10/30/14)