We had to get up early to get our Greyhound to Canberra which left at 9am.

We arrived in Canberra at 1.30pm and weren't sure what to do as we had our backpacks with us until 4pm when the people we were staying with were coming to pick us up. We spent about an hour sitting in McDonald's reading magazines and then started to walk towards the parliament building, or so we thought. It turned out I had read the map wrong and we were walking out into the suburbs, so we got a bus back. It was too hot and our bags were too heavy to walk back! We ended up sitting in a park and reading until Neil, the husband came to pick us up. He very kindly took us on a whistlestop tour of Canberra before driving us up to the top of Mount Ainslie, where we got spectacular views of the very new and neat town (city?) of Canberra - it is only 98 years old!

Afterwards he drove us to his house in a suburb of Canberra. The couple are called Neil and Sian - Hannah's mum used to work with Sian before they emigrated about 18 months ago - and they have two kids; Cerys who is 15 and Gavin who is only 11. Gavin had just got back from Scout Camp which was cute.

They live in a modern, open plan bungalow but it still felt really homely. Sian kindly let me use their phone to call my mum as it was Mothers' Day, so I spoke to her for a bit before dinner. We had a nice dinner with a couple of glasses of red wine before heading to bed. The kids went to bed earlier as they had school in the morning - routine is a concept which now seems quite alien to us after two and a half months of not even knowing what day it is!

xxx