First Friday in Sydney, the spooky Friday the 13th April we decided to go to Sydney's Royal Easter Show :) We had seen it advertised on posters at Central Station and various bus stops, however, the advert didn't do much for attracting people to attend. It was Mandy who told us to go because she loved it and it was well worth a visit. So got train to Central and bought our tickets at the ticket office it cost $36 each the travel and entrance was all included in the price.

The show is at Sydney's Olympic Park which is pretty cool, when we arrived we couldn't believe the size, the atmosphere and the amount of people, families. The first stretch which was half a mile or so was filled with funky stalls, displays of fishing, some animals from a wildlife centre, that was cool we got to hold a snake and see a bilby for the first time, only 400 left in the wild, terrible shame. There was hermit crabs to look at and buy to take home, towards the end of this was a huge circular section of amusement stalls and rides for kids, was lovely. To the right was vans of food, burgers, kebabs, chips everything you could want. In each building, there was an event going on from 8am to 8.45pm there was something happen in the show, incredible. With it being an Easter show there as a lot of farming animals, shearing shows, donkey rides, llamas and barns with goats, pigs and alpacas. In the park, a big open space was an outdoor stage with food stalls surrounding, live performances performed throughout the day. Moving through the grounds there was Flower and Garden Heritage, Food and Wine garden and Fashion and style stalls and demonstrators. We came across another stretch of stalls and these were my kind of stalls, hippy style these, jewellery, there was also goth stalls and stalls for the geeks, with Japanese comics and anime galore! Performances of young lads performing motor cross tricks and the Hollywood horrors, which looked terrifying, so we choose not to go in as it was a kiddy thing, you know!! hahaha.

We came to a big dome, the Woolworths Fresh Food Dome, oh my, there was over 100 stalls of food, wine all kinds of foods and drinks with a lot of free samples Gary and me enjoyed :) We also came away with free goodies, like Gary got temporary tattoo (such a big kid) and a free egg timer thing woop woop. Gary did buy a bottle of wine so we did contribute some money after all our freebies. Within this dome there was also stalls of arts and crafts, home and lifestyle and also a showbag hall (we didnt look into this).

Both hungry we went in search for food, Gary had first a hot dog on a stick which he enjoyed, we got some thin chips which were like crisps really, tasty and quite addictive but no way a replacement for proper size chips and we had lovely burgers each, sitting on a hale of hay ;) yum yum.

We continued walking and walking and came to young kids performing skateboarding, scooter and roller skating tricks, very good, young girls dancing on a stage, a sports section with motion race driver, archery and cool kayak things to try. As we walked on we could see in the distance rides, as it was now dark and the lights were attracting us. We followed the screams as we got closer, this was the Coca Cola carnival, a strip of big rides, a mini theme park. So we decided to go on two rides only $7 a ride which is pretty good and we had lots of fun!!!

Conscious of time we headed to the Commonwealth Stadium (the Olympic Stadium) yes where Adam Garcia and Kylie Minogue performed their openings sequences in the Sydney Olympics back in 2000, was pretty cool. At 6.30pm a rodeo show began this was really good, watching horse racing and bull riding. Then it was the RAS Stockmans Ride, we went for walk to get some sweet snacks for the shows, heading back to the Woolworths stalls we got a waffle and some coconut sweets. The RAS show was really good, it was like horse show but the horse saddles and riders where light up with fairy lights and so in the dark it was very impressive. 8.25pm was the Freestyle Moto X performance and wow I couldn't even eat our waffle as I couldn't take my eyes off these crazy bikers. Doing crazy tricks one after the other, it was really interesting as they were showing the progression of freestyle motorcross over the last 10 years or so and the tricks just get crazier and crazier. A special guest from USA came on, he is a quad biker and he performed a back flip on it, something no one else can do, how insane is that!!! A quad bike, think of how heavy a quad is to do a somersault with!!!!

The show ends every night with a firework display in the same stadium, wow never seen such as amazing display, it was fireworks performed with live music and the show went on for over 15 mins easy. I now couldn't wait even more to see their New Year fireworks!!! Heading home now 9pm we were pleasantly surprised at the amount of fun we had at the show, what a lovely tradition for kids and families to look forward to every Easter. The show runs for 2 weeks from the 5th April to the 18th April this year. I would definitely recommend to anyone who comes to Sydney this time of year.

Thanks Mandy :)