Following Old Parliament House, we attempted to visit the Art Gallery (or the Film and Sound Archives, or something). Unfortunately, we took the wrong turn off and ended up at Floriade (Canberra's garden festival) where we battled traffic for twenty minutes just so we could turn around and leave again. In the end, we did find an Art Gallery - not the National Gallery, but a Gallery nevertheless. There were paintings and sculptures and ladies singing a song about frozen peas. Most entertaining.
As it was five of the evening clock by this stage, we made no further attempts to visit indoor tourist attractions, instead opting to go home. On the way home, however, I was distracted by the dam at the end of Lake Burley-Griffin, so we took a detour, which proved quite interesting. After much searching (and driving in a circular fashion) we found a road that goes over the top of the dam, then passes the National Zoo and Aquarium (which we declined to visit) and vanishes off in the distance. Driving over the top of a dam is quite an odd experience. Although the photos don't fully do it justice, I've decided that, in the spirit of boring everyone with What I Did On My Holidays, I'll show them to you anyway.
Here is Lake Burley-Griffin (complete with cyclist - it wouldn't be Canberra without a cyclist):
And here's the view from the other side of the dam:
Notice how small and far away the water is (you can't actually see it at all when you're driving). It's much cooler in real life.While investigating the dam, we also found the Governer's House Lookout, which, as it turns out, is a lookout aimed at the Governer-General's very own house, allowing you to fulfill all of those Governer-General watching fantasies you've always had. I know you're dying of curiousity, so here's a photo:
And so ended our tourist adventures for Sunday.
But the story doesn't end there! On Monday it was Labour Day in Canberra (yes, I got two Labour Days in one year, aren't I lucky?), so we had a whole other day to tourist. For our last excursion we decided on Questacon and the Museum.
Questacon is much like the Science Centre in Brisbane. Not only is it full of cool things to do, you learn stuff at the same time (apparently). I learnt that I can't balance on a balance beam or shoot an air cannon accurately. There's all sorts of cool stuff, like a zero gravity slide, real life holograms, an earthquake room and a lightning generator. Unfortunately it was the beginning of the school holidays, so the whole place was infested with small children. I did try to chop Dale's head off though:
Following Questacon, we visited the museum, which contained much amusing and informative Australiana - from pickled platypus specimens to recordings of Australian story-telling, complete with fair dinkum Aussie lingo and everything. Unfortunately we were a bit too footsore and weary to fully appreciate the exhibits, but I did make sure to visit The Future, where Dale and I designed a futuristic house in four minutes or less, then viewed it in 3D, along with a whole city full of the creations of our co-inventors (who were, almost without exception, aged 12 or younger).
Unfortunately, it all came to an end on Tuesday when Daniel returned home, after a frantic game of car trading in which Daniel and I drove Dale to work, Daniel dropped me off at work then went to visit a friend at ANU. Following this, Daniel picked Dale up from work, Dale drove Daniel to the airport and then drove himself to a job interview. A friend from work then drove me to Woden, where I quickly swapped cars back to my car and drove home with Dale.
A good time was had by all.
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