A half-day trip to Katoomba, Blue Mountains using public transport

Since we’ve moved to our new house, we’re on the outer western suburbs of Sydney. This makes trips to places like Katoomba far easier. It'd been a while since we'd done a trip (last one was to Gosford) so we thought we'd try a short trip to Katoomba using Sydney Trains.

Transport for NSW runs the Blue Mountains Line (BMT) that is an intercity rail service starting from Central and travels west, covering Leura, Katoomba, Lithgow and in some timetables, going all the way to Bathurst. The closest train station for us to catch the train is Blacktown, so we made our way there taking a bus from our home. The BMT train runs about every hour and the Saturday morning 8am train was pretty full. It took about an hour and a half to get us to Katoomba. We hadn't had our breakfast yet so found a cafe - The Dingo Cafe to grab something to eat. We ordered the Chicken Pesto for Jo and the Reuben sandwich for me, and cappuccinos to drink. The food was pretty good - the sandwiches came on Turkish bread which were absolutely fluffy. No complaints on the coffee - not the best that we've had but nothing terrible. The place is pretty open and has a lot of tables so it's a good place to come and sit down.

Breakfast done, we decided to head to Three Sisters. The Three Sisters are about 2.5km from the cafe, but there was a bus stop nearby so we took the bus there. The bus runs every 10 minutes and does a city centre to Three Sisters Echo Point loop so you don't have to wait for long in case you miss it. We noticed there's also a hop-on-hop-off bus that runs every hour and does a longer Blue Mountains tour including the nearby places such as Leura. The Three Sisters are a rock formation going by the names of Meehni (922 m), Wimlah (918 m), and Gunnedoo (906 m).

There are a couple of bushwalking trails starting from the Echo point, but with thunderstorm warning looming, we decided not to take up any hikes and head back to the town center to check out some shops.

First stop was the Little Lost Bookshop - an indie bookshop that sells new and second hand books.

From here, we went over to Gift Shop Tora. This is one of my favorite places to visit as it is a cat-themed gift store. Last time we were here, we bought a pair of paws mittens for Jo. This time, we bought a t-shirt.

From here, we stopped by a couple of op shops. Jo's always on the lookout for new artwork for the house but she didn't find any that she liked, so we stopped by our last place - also the first place that we saw when we walked out of the train station - The Velvet Fog Record Bar. We didn't have too much time to spare as the train was set to depart in 15 minutes so spent a short amount of time, and during that found a great record of Santana to purchase.

By now, it was about 12:45pm and we decided to head back home. Though it was a short trip, we had a good time and look forward to doing a similar trip to Leura soon.

I was capturing various short clips with my Insta360 Go 3s and spliced it into a small video, hope you like it.