Canberra, the Capital

The drive from Sydney to Canberra takes about 3 hours, although they are through some of Australia's less photogenic locales.  Still, even with stops we made good time and were checked into our hotel and out to dinner before sunset.  For those of you in the middle of summer, I know that seems funny, but we've gotten used to sunset being around 5pm.  That and the chilly weather.  I love wearing sweatshirts in July!

Monday was the first day of the winter school holidays for much of Australia, and we had to share the attractions with quite a few families, but they were worth sharing.  The National Mint was an interesting start to the day, with all sorts of shiny gold coins to look at and history to learn about.  

The highlight of the day was a trip to Questacon, Australia's National Science and Technology Centre, the national children's science museum.  We are already fans of such museums, and Questacon is definitely a contender in the "best ever" category, and certainly makes the top 10 list.  In fact, after spending several hours there on Monday, we returned Tuesday morning!  One reason we could do so is that it is a memboer of the Association of Science and Technology Centers and has reciprocity with a museum we have joined as members.  A quick shout-out for joining your local museum!  Our trip to Questacon literally paid for our annual membership, and it isn't the only museum we are visiting this year.  We've also found that it's easier to really enjoy musuems and go more often when you don't have to worry about getting your money's worth -- they are great even when you only have an hour to spend.

At Questacon, Miriam remarked again on her desire to be an astronaut (while in the space section), but continued honing her engineering skills in several of the other departments (and Mick, you'll be happy to know that water remains a huge draw for her.).  I'm sure she'll figure out something over the next 8 years or so.  One of the highlights of the museum is a zero-gravity slide.  Participants put on coveralls and climb up the stairs where they take hold of a chin-up bar.  After hanging from the bar, arms outstretched, they drop down and experience free-fall for a split second, before being smoothly caught by the slide for a ride to the bottom.  This requires a huge amount of bravery, and we watched quite a few people back out, some of them even after hanging from the bar. It was fun to watch, but none of my videos is worth posting.  I also wore out my pitching arm using the radar gun to clock my throws (I topped out at 54 km/hour, so I won't be making any big league debuts any time soon).  Hans had some good throws, too, and he isn't sore today.  Youth!

We stopped at the National War Memorial to pay our respects there, noting that Australia has been a major military ally of the United States, and also enjoyed the National Museum, situated in a beautiful location in the lake in Canberra's center.  

After two nights in Canberra it was time to retrace our path to Syndey, for the last time.  Our month Down Under has come to an end, and we're heading off for Asia.  Until we meet again, Happy Birthday, USA.