Smokey Blue Mountains

This past Saturday, our group took an excursion to the Blue Mountains. I, of course, being an uneducated person who did not research Australia before packing up and moving to Sydney for three months, had no idea what the Blue Mountains really were or what to expect before I hopped into an incredibly warm bus for an hour and a half long ride outside of the city.

For those of you who have been reading along over the past couple of weeks, you may remember that I had the most eventful week of my life last time and befriended an emu, kangaroo, wallaby, and weird lizard all in the span of 48 hours (well, I thought I befriended them. The emu might think differently).

The Blue Mountains immediately had my attention when our tour guide, Adam, said that we would have a chance to see wild kangaroos. Wild. Kangaroos. The time for me to fight a kangaroo with my bare hands had finally arrived.

Not really, unfortunately. But I did see a bunch of kangaroos and it was pretty cool.

By the time we got to the first outlook point, I felt like I was home. Not home specifically because there was no Sunsphere or Kingston Pike or University of Tennessee construction sites, but it felt like the Smokeys, which made it feel like home.

I've been dealing with a lot of personal stuff, some of which I talked about a little bit in my second blog post, and I've been feeling homesick because of it. Walking out onto the lookout and seeing all the trees and mountains, just like in the Smokeys, really hit me and gave me a little more comfort than I'd been feeling over the past couple of weeks. I really appreciated having the chance to relax and be reminded of home and go hiking before returning to an incredibly stressful last week of university.

The hike was difficult and strenuous, much like a lot of my time here has been (mixed in with some of the best times of my life, of course), but well worth the view, and I take that to be sort of a metaphor for my experience in Sydney. Things can get difficult and seem hopeless, but at the end of the day, you can come out of a situation smarter, stronger, more mature, and with a great view in front of you.