Lithgrow Prison Tour / Katoomba Bay Weekend

So I know I'm posting this wayyyyy late but I'm trying to catch up on everything or else I'm never going to remember by the end of the trip!

Friday morning we departed at 7:45am to Lithgrow Maximum security prison; my alarm went off at 7:15 and I apparently pushed dismiss because I woke up at 7:41 and looked nice and pretty for the bus ride there.  The prison was actually ridiculously nice compared to the one I went to in Ionia, MI.  The pods were pretty nice, and relatively new and they weren't as dumpy or smelly as the other one.  They also make a ton more money than the prisoners do in Michigan -- they get $1 an hour for prison jobs like working in the kitchen, etc.  Back home they get $0.06 an hour... not too shabby here!  It was a pretty cloudy day so it wasn't unbearably hot while we were there which was nice.  We weren't sure how the weather was going to hold up the next day so we went straight from the prison to the Three Sisters rock, and got to take pictures and what not in our office attire, classy!

The scenery was beautiful!!  Picture's really don't do this place justice; its so hard to capture the beauty of everything in a small lens, you almost need panoramic pictures but even those just couldn't compare to the natural beauty of the rolling hills and cool rock structure.  The legend behind the "Three Sisters" rocks was that during a war, a witch doctor turned three sisters into rocks to protect them from being hurt or killed, but eventually died before he could turn them back.

We got to the hostel after the Three Sisters, and they just reminded me of somewhere you'd see a murder mystery.  Yes, it's probably because I'm a whiny baby but at the same time it was scary and smelled funny.  Everyone went out, but I just stayed in and went to bed early, I feel like I had a lot of sleep to catch up on and plus we were going hiking in the morning!

The hike was so much fun, and I'm totally not a nature person.  I got my shoes pretty muddy though, but I guess thats my badge of honor for conquering all those waterfalls and trails in the woods!  My camera died after like one picture, so I had to take everything else on my blackberry which kinda sucked.  We rode a gondola back to the top, and it TOTALLY reminded me of a Jurassic park movie... didn't get to see any dinosaurs though, but you better believe I was looking everywhere just waiting to be eaten!

Headed back to Sydney after our first weekend away!