On the road!

Eventually we left our fantastic digs on Sydney Harbour and hit the road. We didn't go very far, though. The advantage of travelling with Nan Nan is that we get to cash in on all of her friends' fabulous homes. Our first stop was therefore up the coast to Palm Beach. Mum's friend has a house with a seriously primo location. The view from the balcony, if you please:




Andy and I took advantage of the Nan Nan babysitting services and went for a hike up to the Barranjoey lighthouse, which you can spot from Anne's house. Here we are on the opposite headland from where we are staying. If I knew anything about the geography of the place, and had taken a decent picture, I could point out the house we were in, but I don't and I can't. I can tell you that I had quite a scrumptious chicken wrap after this hike on the way back to the house. Wraps are easy to eat one-handed.



I also enjoy how Andrew's got the Jennifer Aniston starlet one-leg-in-front-of-the- other pose going on here, not that my lanky man needs to try to look skinny.






Here is Anne's lovely interior. A very easy place to chill out. I will remember it fondly when I am freezing in a cramped and stinky campervan in some earthquake ravaged spot in New Zealand as my 10 month old decides to sprout her first tooth, or something equally as horrifying.




Not a travel picture, I know, but COME ON!



Eventually we tore ourselves away from the fantastic hospitality and babysitting provisions of my mum and all of her friends, and hit the road.

We picked up our rental car in King's Cross. I had requested the smallest and therefore cheapest car they had, but the Avis dude took one look at the insanely huge amount of crap we were carting around with us, and said, "I think you need a bigger car."

Fair enough.

First stop in our wrong-side-of-the-road, wombats-as-roadkill, roundabout-laden odyssey was Canberra, Australia's capital. I had been before when I was in my early 20s. I remembered a dirty hostel, going to see an old movie at a repertory house and being pretty unimpressed. This time we stayed in a clean hotel and I was carting around two Horralls, but I was still unimpressed.

Canberra is a planned city, which sprouted out of bush only in the 1950s. It's definitely got a "Car is King" vibe, because Andy, Violet and I nearly died from exhaustion, blisters (me), fatigue-induced crankiness (me again) and extreme hunger by the time we had walked to the Australian war museum, seen here in the distance:



and then walked the wrong way in an effort to cross the bridge to get to the Parliament buildings. Even though we could see them, and they were RIGHT there, they are inconveniently located on some sort of irritating man-made peninusula thing with only two bridges connecting them. One of the bridges (the one we picked, obvs) was under construction, and although we could see that the bridge itself had a sidewalk, there were no actual sidewalks, or crossing points over the 6 lane ring road thingee to get to it. All in all, by the time we showed up at the National Gallery and ordered emergency lamb pies and restorative side orders of french fries, we were fed up and cranky.

The other weird thing about Canberra is that there didn't seem to be any people around (probably because it's so pedestrian unfriendly, but possibly because it's a city of zombies, sort of the way Almont is a village of vampires --seriously, no one with a pulse lives in Almont).

We didn't even bother with the parliament buildings at that point, but gave up and slunk back to our hotel to collapse. We DROVE there the next day, but really, by that point I was fed up with Canberra and pretty profoundly uninterested in what the Parliament buildings had to offer -- lots of portraits of white men and some boring panels on Australia's constitution, which somehow manages to be MORE BORING than Canadian constitutional history. At least we have the linguistic divide to spice things up.

This was even though there is an actual drama going on in Aussie politics at the moment, like Britain, they've got themselves a hung parliament and the incumbant Labour leader who is a woman (aka a Sheila) has to woo these three crazy independent MPs who seem to be later day Crocodile Dundees into joining her party so she can form a government. One of them might be genuinely certifiable, but at least he provides funny radio clips railing against the evils of the media.



All in all, Canberra gave me a renewed appreciation for Ottawa as a capital city. Ottawa may be full of Ottaweenians and it may have a reputation for dullness, but it's actually quite vibrant and it not only has sidewalks, but actual walking paths.