Today we wanted to ‘do Canberra’. We had been reliably informed that you could in fact do it in one day, although I’m not sure that person had in mind that the day would include starting in Sydney and ending in Melbourne. We got to Canberra just in time for a lunch on the outskirts overlooking a large flat area that used to be a lake but has dried up creating the perfect place to fly model aircraft, or so the locals seemed to think. We made it into Canberra itself and went to the tourist info place where it informed us that the night time temperature forecast was -1! That was the point at which we phoned James and decided to ask him if we could come home that night and sleep in his house rather than early tomorrow morning and sleep in the van. Luckily as he knew how cold it was he had thought we would do that and had already put the spare mattress down for us!
Canberra was very bare. Even on a Sunday you would expect the capital city of a country to be busy, probably even teeming with people like London or Paris, not Canberra. There was hardly a person to be seen in the shopping areas we drove past, and even a lot of the shops looked closed. We drove up to the parliament building as it seemed to be the best thing to look at for free, the only other being the mint, and indeed it was a very interesting building. We went inside and did a bit of a tour and read all the guide books and went right upon the roof. I asked Vincent lots of questions, he knows more about politics than me by a lot, but sadly we couldn’t find the answers to the most interesting ones. (I.e. is the speaker a hereditary position or is he appointed, if so by whom?) We learnt a lot about Aussie politics but by early afternoon decided to head for Melbourne.
It was a very, very long drive!
Eventually after getting stuck in road works we had managed to drive in shifts until we got back to James’ house. When we reached it we had done 4990 kilometres and planned to drive the last 10 to make it a round 5000 the next day before taking back the van.
The kittens were very pleased to see us back and showed their affection by deciding to have a battle of epic proportions in our bed when we were trying to sleep. But at least it was warm.