Yesterday was fun! I completed three cities in one run! Not very big ones though
. Sidney has some very small nested cities! A 10 km run gave me 30 completed streets, and completed The Rocks, Millers Point and Dawes Point (I had already done Barangaroo lastweek)
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I have no idea why all those ''suburbs" are separate - either from each other or from Sydney city.
If you’re still in Sydney for a while, there’s an opportunity to do another three-in-one, though you’d have to travel a little way out of the CBD (not too far though). I didn’t do them all at the same time but I imagine Henley, Huntley’s Point and Huntley’s Cove could be done at the same time. Henley is by far the biggest of those three, but still just ten streets and a few km. The other two are just a couple of streets each.
There are frequent buses that will take you there. They leave from near Hyde Park or QVB. Unless you’re unlucky with traffic through Rozelle and Drummoyne, it should take more than half an hour. But a more scenic (though slightly slower and a little more expensive) route would be to catch the ferry to Huntley’s Point from either Circular Quay or Barangaroo - it’s quicker from Barangaroo as the trip from Circular Quay to Barangaroo takes a surprisingly long time). You could then walk/run up the western arm of Huntley’s Point Road, which will take you up to Henley and Huntley’s Cove, and then return down the same leg (or take a short cut through the park) and walk/run up the other side.
You’ll need to do a little route planning if you want to make sure you complete them all. You’ll need to traverse a section of Victoria Road (a very busy trunk road) that is included in Henley and you might need to walk both sides to pick up all the nodes. Although I’ve completed this, I do have a couple of red nodes on one side of the road that weren’t picked up - I’m not in hard mode so I still got credited with the street. And you have to cover a very short section of Victoria Road beyond the main road down into the main part of Henley.
Be aware that pedestrian access to the main road as you get close to Gladesville Bridge is complicated. You can walk over Gladesville Bridge but only via a convoluted pedestrian path. You can’t actually walk along Victoria Road itself close to the entrance to the bridge. That also means you can’t catch a bus from that section close to the bridge,
If you did the eastern section of Huntley’s Point at the end, you could instead walk over the Tarban Creek Bridge up into Hunter’s Hill and catch a bus back to the city from there. You will again be forced off the main road for a while but it’s only a short section. You’ll soon be back onto more traversed streets and will be able to cross the main busy trunk road via an overpass. There are buses that leave from either side of that main road back to the city (different buses from each side) but they’re not quite as frequent as the buses to Huntley’s Point / Henley.
You might already have worked out that Sydney is quite hilly, especially near the water. The main roads tend to be the highest local spots and as soon as you walk down towards the water you’ll be going downhill (and uphill on the way back). From memory, these three suburbs aren’t too steep. If you were tempted to continue your walk/run east through Hunters Hill to Woolwich (from where you can catch a different ferry back to Circular Quay), bear in mind that veering off the main road could lead to you some pretty steep streets.
You haven’t experienced Sydney until you’ve caught a ferry or two, so whether you take up this second three-in-one challenge or not, make sure you do catch some ferries somewhere. That’s how you appreciate how magnificent the harbour is. They are a quite expensive way to get around but there is a daily public transport fare cap of around $10 a day at weekends, which makes them far more economical. And in their generosity, the state government has decreed that, for public transport fare purposes, weekends start on Friday!
Wow, thanks for all these tips! Unfortunately we have already left Sydney, in Uluru now.
This was our second visit to Sydney, in 2018 we did some sightseeing, and took the ferry to Taronga. This time jt was the marathon, but we had time for a sunset cruise, Blue Mountains and Featherdale Park
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Yeah, Sydney has a lot of nested cities. They’re all admin level 9, which can be quite small.
It looks like this huge Sydney recently lost its admin level status in OSM. I don’t know if that really matters for our use here … I typically gravitate towards relations with some admin level value as a good indicator of cities in an area, though, so 
maybe that huge Sydney never deserved to be in CityStrides at all? I really don’t know.
There’s full coverage of New South Wales at admin level 6 (click the top left run button) which includes Council of the City of Sydney
There’s also full coverage at admin level 9 (those tiny places) which includes this tiny Sydney
This conversation has come up before & @liz attempted to help me understand, but it’s all a bit complicated … mainly around the fact that this massive Sydney exists - if it didn’t exist, I’d be able to add level 6 and go on about my day. 