Dawn Drifter

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It wasn’t exactly the weekend that we had planned, the recent weather has taken its toll in New South Wales and the ACT, with a number of regions flooded, roads and bridges washed out and a significant number of national parks closed including the dirt road into the Brindabella’s, in Fact 82 National Parks are closed and the flood area is the size France.

I am not complaining, the only thing the weather has impacted is our fun in the outdoors, many other people have suffered with homes and businesses flooded and lost.

Before I talk about the weekend, I will just give you a brief of our last few weeks.

Some of you may remember us meeting Lee and Marilyn Harris when we were in Tasmania 3 years ago and we have kept in touch, well their son Matt got married the week before last to a lovely lady called Renita, it was a Sunday wedding and despite the recent rainfalls, the rain stayed off for most of the wedding and it turned out to be a lovely evening.

For the wedding itself Renita wore a traditional white wedding dress, but when they arrived at the reception, Renita had changed into a traditional Chinese dress in red with gold embroidery, she did look stunning.

Anyway, work took a hold again and I flew out to Perth the following day for a week, the strange thing is that when I went down to the boarding gate to board my flight I bumped into Renita saying goodbye to her Bridesmaid who happens to live in Perth and was flying home.

Despite the hard work the weather in Perth was simply stunning, sunshine every day and of course it was in the 30’s every day, fortunately because of the 3 hour time difference I found that I was awake at 5am, so in the mornings I would walk down to the Swan River and walk along the river bank up to the Bell Tower, back up through the Court House gardens and back to the hotel to get ready for breakfast and the day ahead.

I felt a bit aggrieved by the time it was ready to come back to Canberra, leaving the sunshine for torrential rain and when I phoned a colleague they advised me that the airport was border line being closed, I could only but have hoped, no such luck we took off as scheduled.

Back in rainy Canberra, a few days later we had the return visit for our citizenship tribunal. I won’t bore you with all the details, but in a nutshell, we are stuck on legislation, despite Immigration “stuffing up” (Words of the Head of the tribunal) there is nothing in legislation that allows for a decision of such a nature to be amended. Therefore we will have to wait until November to get our citizenship, but that’s fine we came to terms with the realisation that we had to wait (does not excuse Immigration for making such a mistake though!).

We are just trying to reach agreement on a few caveats with immigration, such as we want an actual agreed date that we can submit our documentation without being penalised. We have also asked for them to pay costs of the tribunal, their letter to us suggested that we had the right to appeal, however they equally knew that legislation would not allow the decision to be altered, so why give us false hope by offering the facility? Above all Immigration has admitted their mistake.

I also want to see something go through parliament that allows a tribunal some leeway in legislation should this situation occur again. Immigration admitted that this was the first time it had happened, I would question that, it happened to us so why has it not happened to anyone else? Or is it that no one has challenged them before?

Anyway, back to the long weekend. It is Canberra day today, so everyone in the ACT is having Monday off, we decided to make it an extra long weekend and took the Friday off too, however when we realised that going away was not an option we decided that we would still have the Friday off anyway and enjoy a long weekend hanging around Canberra.

After a well deserved lie in, we headed off to the Australian War Memorial for a look around, it is 2 years since we had done that and of course the exhibitions do change from time to time, this time there was an exhibition on Nurses at War. It is easy to forget that the Nurses (&doctors) were on the front line too. It was a terrific exhibition and if you are in Canberra, you really should see it.

We mooched around some of the exhibits that we really wanted to see again, such as the Iroquois helicopter that is in the Vietnam section. I won’t say too much but the display does make you feel as if you are part of it.

We had lunch in the new Terrace restaurant and then we headed off to do a few chores. That evening we had planned to go to the cinema, but there really was not a lot on so we stayed in to watch a film on TV.

Saturday morning brought me a skype session with my girlfriends back home, they were partying hard as usual while I concentrated on my toast and marmite washed down with a cup of tea. The rest of Saturday was spent on housework, Andy worked on the truck amongst various other tasks that I had set myself for the day it was a relatively easy day.

Sunday morning brought an early start, we headed out early to the Canberra Balloon Festival which is held on the grounds by Old Parliament House, we did not make it last year due to work commitments so we were really keen to make it this year. By the time we arrived just before 7am the grounds were just full of people and balloons, some of the balloons were ready to take to the skies and others were just in the process of being rolled out ready for the hot air.

The most spectacular balloons this year seemed to be the two giant kangaroo’s one of them had 2 joeys in the pouch, an amazing site when they were standing side by side. Being a cloudy morning was not the best for ballooning but it still didn’t stop the crowds from coming.

We stopped at Macca’s for breakfast on the way home and grabbed our regular order of a skinny chai latte each. It comes to something when the barista asks where you have been as he has not seen you in a while! I guess we had become a bit too regular.

After a short rest we got the bikes out and took them down to Lake Burley Griffin for a cycle, we were doing well until we got towards Molonglo reach where we found that the path had completely disappeared. This was the stretch of path that was damaged and had subsided in the previous spell of bad weather that hit Canberra some 18 months ago, this recent bout of weather had finished the job, the lake now goes up to the wall of the road. So we turned around and headed back to the Kings Avenue bridge to take us on the other side of the lake.

The remainder of the weekend was uneventful, but I did get around to adding a 9 minute video to youtube of photographs from our trip around Australia, you can only find it using this link