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Published: February 24th 2009
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On Valentine's Day we said goodbye to Kosciuszko National Park and drove north to Tumut and then headed east, taking the back way into Canberra via the state forest trails and Brindabella (although we don't actually recall passing through Brindabella)! We arrived in Canberra, stopping for lunch at Commonwealth Park, and then drove to the Canberra South Motor Park in Fyshwick. We decided to stay for a week and this place offered us the best rate as well as being centrally located not far from town.
On Sunday we met up for lunch at Commonwealth Park again, but this time with the King family (Tracy, Brett, Daniel, Grace & Chloe), whom we had met at Lakes Entrance. While there, we visited the National Capital Exhibition. Afterwards, we drove into Queanbeyan to catch up with some ex-Fiji and ex-Darwin friends (Vinord, Shobhana, Roma & Tanish) for a lovely curry dinner. It brought back fond memories of all the delicious curries we used to have when we lived in Fiji, and we even got to take home the leftovers, which were just as nice when we ate them for dinner on Wednesday.
On Monday we spent the day at Questacon -
the National Science & Technology Centre, which was good fun, and then caught up with friends Neville and Jason at the Kingston Hotel for dinner.
On Tuesday we spent most of the afternoon at the Australian War Memorial, which gave us all a great understanding and appreciation of what went on in past conflicts. For dinner, we drove out to the King family's home in Amaroo, and for the third time we left with a stack of yummy home grown produce (eggs, juicy tomatoes, cucumber, etc) - the first time was at Lakes Entrance and the second at Commonwealth Park.
On Wednesday we visited the AIS (Australian Institute of Sport), Black Mountain, and the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, which was well worth the drive.
On Thursday we visited the National Library of Australia where we did a 'Behind the Scenes' tour. Thomas was highly amused by the system of vacuum pipes that were once used to communicate user requests to different areas of the library. This manual system was in use for 30 years until finally email automated it in 2001! After the tour, Alex, Annelies & Thomas had fun looking at old 'NT News' newspapers
War Memorial
Roll of Honour wall on microfilm. Thomas loved loading the microfilms onto the reels. From the library we drove to Parliament House where we also went on a guided tour and learnt lots of interesting facts (eg. there are 4700 rooms, 22km of corridors, 17 courtyards, 2500 clocks, and the flag is as big as the side of a double decker bus - 12.8 x 6.4m). Annelies was a little disappointed as she thought she may have bumped into Kevin walking down the corridor. Later, Jason came for dinner.
On Friday we spent the day at the National Museum. It was a great day out at a very interesting museum with Annelies & Thomas both raving about what a great time they had. Thomas' favourite was 'sea beads' from the discovery trolley while Annelies' was the Yothu Yindi 'Treaty' song and film clip. They both enjoyed the cubby houses.
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