Australia? Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.

We’re sitting at the Sydney airport now, awaiting our 10:10 a.m. flight to Los Angeles. I will arrive yesterday.

We have loved Australia but even more have loved the Aussies. I love how friendly and grounded they are. I love that even a breakfast order is “lovely” or that when they like something or are in agreement, they don’t say “Yes,” they say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

We spent the last three nights of our Australian tour in Sydney. We met friends from last year’s golf trip—Storm, Sharron, and Les—at Sydney’s oldest pub, Fortune of War.

The Fortune of War would’ve been in Sydney when my dad was here during WWII.

In a photo album my dad kept during his war years, I found pictures of him with someone named Norma. It doesn’t take much more than a photo for my family to invent suppositions. My mom, never one to allow evidence to override her intuition, told us all that we were probably related to Elle Macpherson.

You’ll need to pay close attention to follow this math: Norma was Australian + Elle Macpherson is Australian + Elle Macpherson has a face + the Pierman girls have a face = Elle Macpherson is my half-sister. This is an established fact. It is of no consequence to my mom that Elle has no one in her lineage named Norma or Ralph.

My dad had scribbled “Manly Beach” on the photos, so The Husband and I took a short ferry ride to Manly Beach to find the exact spot where he and Norma had posed. We immediately saw similar stone columns. AI said there was a 90% probability that they were the same columns! With more information, AI changed that to 75%, then 40%, then “Meh.”

On our group’s first morning here, we took a backstage tour of the Sydney Opera House (originally Design 218). We learned why they say “Break a leg” and “Pull out all the stops.” We learned that only Aussies say “Chookas” for good luck. Our group was so inspired by the tour that we went back on our last night for a show.

The whole trip was…lovely.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

More photos from Sydney: