Day 13 - Around Canberra

After a fairly slow start to the morning, we eventually headed up to the Australian War Memorial to have a look around and also gauge the lay of the land for the big Anzac Day services tomorrow.

We stumbled across a guided tour that was just starting as we arrived, so we jumped onto that and our vey informative (volunteer) guide took us to the amazing tomb of the unknown soldier - which is a combination of the most incredible mosaic (6 million tiles in total) and stained glass. From there it was passed the honour rolls, with the contrasting red poppies dotting the length of the walls.

I had forgotten how big the memorial was, and such a vast number of galleries with various war memorabilia and stories. There is a dedicated "kids gallery" which includes a lot more hands on displays and the opportunity to walk through a submarine and dress up in war uniforms. The kids loved it after having started to get a little bored with the tour - although ms10 remained interested for the most part.

One of the displays that grabbed my attention included on regarding a group of nurses who were killed in what was called the Banka Island Massacre. Amongst other things, the display included an electronic "slide show" of photos of each of the nurses that lost their life there. One of the names that flashed up was a young nurse who shares my maiden name. While not an unusual name, it's not a common name either - so I will be curious to do some sleuthing at a later date to see if there is any link.

After the War Memorial, we headed across town to the National dinosaur museum. This museum was "ok". I think given that we went to sites of dinosaur digs and the like in Outback Queensland 2 years ago, we have been a bit spoiled with seeing the real thing. These were a lot of recreations and some animatronic type dinosaurs - which were a little underwhelming to the adults of our family. There was some good geology history to go with it all but yeah - we were in and out of the dinosaur museum in around an hour I'd say.

After this, we drove up to the top of Mt Ainslie to have a look over all of Canberra from up high. The skies were clear, and the views were great.

Tomorrow we will be up super early to attend the dawn service at the war memorial. They're expecting about 30,000 people or so!