Day 16: Saturday March 28

    I’m always torn on the weekends between relaxing and doing things (I know some of you are yelling “Do things! You’re in Australia!” but we do still have a work week here). This weekend there was a nice balance though. Saturday morning started with a boat tour of Lake Burly Griffin. It’s a man-made lake in the center of Canberra named after the designer of the city, who was actually an American. It was beautiful and sunny out and there weren’t many people so we got to sit on the front of the boat the whole time.

    They gave us descriptions of everywhere we went and we got to see all the monuments and a better view of the parliament house. The center of the city is designed like a triangle with two bridges being the two sides, the parliament house being the peak, and the civic being the bottom.

It was about an hour long and it really did give us some great views of the area. Plus, we had some champagne, which makes everything better.

Jason and John being weirdos in the backseat

 
    Back on land, we split up and I headed back to the villa for some leftover fajitas. Refueled, Christy and I dragged the boys out and we all hit up the botanical garden for the Flora the Explorer tour! Which was actually just a one of those long golf carts driving us around but it was still cool.

The lemon tree

A bottle tree that stores water in it's trunk

Australia's desert biome

In the rainforest

We saw all the different biomes of Australia and some seriously funky looking plants. This also included a tree that straight up smelled like lemon pine sol. We walked the boardwalks in the rainforest then headed home.

Me with the bust of Sir Joseph Banks, an Australian naturalist 

 


















The rest of the day consisted of my relaxation. I spent 2 hours just lying in the sun by the pool then another hour actually in the pool. Well, technically the hot tub. But the pool is ice cold and the hot tub is like luke warm so it evens out. After the sun went down, the goal was to lesson plan. But I discovered that Forest Gump was on and it was the very beginning and I’ve never seen the entire movie all the way through (I know, shock, gasp. But it’s always only been bits and pieces). Turns out though that that movie sucks! I mean obviously it doesn’t actually suck, it’s actually so good but it does suck because it’s so sad! (SPOILER ALERT) Like the love of his life just doesn’t get it and is kinda not a nice person to him and then they finally get together and then she abandons him and then keeps a son from him and then eventually they get married and then she DIES. WHAT EVEN. And don’t even get me started on Bubba or Mama. After that emotional roller coaster, I left a note for Emily and then decided it was time to get some sleep.