Canberra

From Barossa we decided to head toward Sydney where we will be spending Christmas and New Years with Luke's cousin and her family.

Our first stop on route was Mildura where we camped at the Lawn Tennis Club next to a grumpy lady in her campervan. We played on our long boards and I taught Luke how to use the Poi (Maori fire balls on chains, without the fire). We hit the library to let our parents know we were alive, stocked up of food and fuel and hit the road again as the weather was awful and wasn't showing any signs of improving for the next couple of days.

We stayed the night at a trucker's rest stop beside the main road. The rain was SO LOUD on our campervan roof - loud enough to even drown out Luke's snoring!
The next day we hit the road again in the rain and, with just 5 hours journey estimated on our Tom Tom (Bruce we call him and yes, he has an Aussie accent), we aimed to reach Canberra.

Siesta in the park

We arrived at Canberra in torrential rain and hit the supermarket for some more fruit and veggies - when it's hot it's very hard to keep fresh food in the camper in our little cool box, even when we do abuse the supermarket's freezer section and place our freezer packs next to the ice-cream tubs... So, with the arrival of cooler weather, I'll be damned if I don't at least get to enjoy a nice pear or two!
We parked up next to the lake for the night and work early on Thursday to a run and porridge then set off on our longboards to explore the city, we got a subway for lunch and had a little nap in the park. I love siestas. My overall impression is that the city is very clean. It feels a bit empty too which isn't surprising - Canberra is geologically half the size of London but only has 400,000 inhabitants, compared to London's 8,000,000!!
I found the atmosphere pretty laid back and certainly very friendly but there didn't seem to be much diversity in cafes and bars so I would imagine the night life would be a bit lacking.

Ultimately, Canberra is a very well thought out city. Parliament and the National Gallery & Library are on one side of a large lake and the city centre is on the other side. There is a cycle path that runs the entire circumference of the lake, which is split in three by two bridges. The distance of the largest loop (Western) is 18km which we foolishly decided to run around on Friday morning - exhaustio!

National Bonsai collection

Canberra War Memorial

The weather was very good for us throughout most of our stay. Saturday we decided to visit the War Memorial as we figured it would be very busy on Sunday 11th but, when we arrived, it was extremely crowded... Little did we know we had chosen to visit the same day Prince Charles and Camilla had too (we're convinced they followed us over from Windsor). It's the first time i've seen Charlie or Camilla up-close so it was a pretty cool experience. Not sure if they appreciated my sitting on Luke's shoulders but, hey-ho! We returned on Sunday for the memorial service and explored the National Bonsai collection on the way back to the camper for lunch - Bonsai means 'planted in a pot', which was interesting to find out as I assumed it meant 'little tree'?! Later that afternoon we decided to hit the road to Wollongong, getting further up towards Sydney.