Australia closes Sydney

We heard as we got closer to Sydney that it was pretty much closed. How can a major city like Sydney be closed!!? Because of the APEC(Asia Pacific Economic Conference) in which George Bush was attended. The security was soo tight and the Australian government were soo paranoid it was untrue. I don't think they wanted Bush to be assassinated on their soil! It was soo over the top it came across as totally pathetic.
All this meant we had to head a bit south for a couple of days before everything died down. Everyone in Sydney had been given the day off so they would get out of the city on the day of the conference. This again affected us as everywhere we wanted to go was packed full of people.
We passed through an innocuous town called Goulburn on the way to the coast. When we got to a campsite there we asked if they could lend us some extra blankets as it wasn't getting any warmer. The lady who worked there offered to give us 2 sleeping bags! She actually lived on the site itself and took us to her place and gave us two sleeping bags and a hot water flask to keep! Amazingly generous and very handy indeed. From this moment on sleeping in the van improved ten-fold. The morning after we drove up to the war memorial in Goulburn for a view over the place. It's an odd memorial but quaint. A lighthouse on a hill but it's totally land-locked with no sea for miles. Every night they put the light on to shine around the town. Whilst we were up there we got chatting to a couple from Tazmania, or 'Tazzy' as everyone calls it. They were really nice and after we told them about the trials in our van they gave us a water bottle! The generosity at times was really cool. They also offered to put us up for a couple of weeks if we were going to Tasmania, we werent but a nice offer either way.
Off to the coast, the Tasmanian guy told us it would be warmer nearer the coast due to the sea actually heating the land at night. Not sure if this was true because normally it's the opposite but as soon as we got to the seaside town of Kiama we felt instantly warmer, the sleeping bags clearly helped too.
Kiama was heaving. The busiest campsite we'd been on, we had most campsites up and till then to ourselves but this was totally rammed. A cool little town Kiama. The 'famous'(?) blowhole was here, unknown to us, so we checked it out. Basically its a smallish hole in a rock where the waves come crashing in that when water pummels it there`s a high gush of water jetting out into the air. It's not bad for 5 minutes or so. I was itching to get to Sydney but at least we had a couple of days just generally doing not much in a nice place.
We headed north through Woolongong, a lot of surfers here but the place is fairly grim. Already it's a lot busier on this stretch of coast than it has been anywhere else in Oz. Plenty of surfers out and a large amount of people watching too.
Enough is enough. All our lives we've seen pictures of the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge and heard soo many good things about the place that we really wanted to see if it matched up to Melbourne. APEC or not, we're going.