Canberra Weekend 26-28Aug06

Saturday 26 August
Well I had a 7.45am flight and as I didn't really want to drive (I just hate driving, or the matter was that I would have to drive back to Melbourne City in peak hour Monday morning) I caught the train & the skybus out to the airport... so it was an early morning. The flight was nice and I took a nice photo of the Telstra Tower from the plane and also saw the snow of the tops of Snowy Mountains as well. I arrived in Canberra on schedule and Gemma, my friend from Canberra, met me at the airport. As her mother was flying out that morning too we decided to stay and have a coffee and chat. We left the airport about 10.20am and headed off to my Gemma’s flat in Reid. I settled in for about 1 ½ hours and then rang a family friend who lives in the suburb of Charnwood to take me to their house to say hello to her family.

The family has 5 kids and they are very energetic and conversations run none stop. All of them were at home, including their eldest son who now lives in Roma and broke his ankle playing rugby union. In the afternoon we headed off to the Raiders Storm game. It was a very entertaining game… including fight & sin bins. The people I was sitting with had some kids and they were all dressed in Storm gear so it was quite a lot of fun as they wanted to borrow my “King of the Storm” banner. I let them occasionally but not towards the end, or when Kingy was off in the sin bin J

After the game there were loads of Storm supporters waiting for the players to come out and there was a barrier from the dressing room to the bus. The players came out and did lots of autographs but they had to get going quickly.

I rang my friend Gemma, she picked me up and then we decided to grab a bite to eat for dinner. We went to dinner at this lovely Indian resturant in Canberra Central. There wasn’t actually very much left. Then we went back to her unit and watched “Six Feet Under” Series 2.

Sunday 27 August
I slept in until about 9am, which was quite nice as I don’t think that I’ve actually done that for about 3 months. As it was turning out to be a lovely day, after a cool start to the morning I decided to take a walk.

I walked over the road to a park and decided to take a couple of photos of the entrance to the park. Whilst I was taking photos of the pillars I heard a voice in the bushes say, “excuse me”. I realised that there was a male having a pee. I then proceeded further into the park & found Gandi's Guidelines. I thought they were great! Anyway I proceeded for a walk and decided to go shopping. I managed to find a black jacket in the exact style that I had been looking for for about 3 years so I proceeded to make that purchase.

I headed back to Gemma’s flat about 12.20pm and then we headed out to get some lunch, had lunch & then went to the church they sing in and started rehearsal about 3pm. We sang evensong and managed with only 2 sopranos, of which one was me & my voice was still not 100%.

After evensong we headed back to the flat and cooked dinner, which was a nice mixed meat grill with veges and then we also had ice-cream and strawberries. The three of us, Gemma, Gemma’s boyfriend & myself talked quite a bit during the evening until I decided it was time to go to bed as had an extremely early start to the morning.

Monday 28 August
Woke up at 5am and then headed off to the airport at 5.40am. Gemma’s car had frost on it so she proceeded to try and clear it off. My flight was leaving at 6.45am so we had plenty of time to clear through although after having a coffee in the morning and then talking I nearly managed to miss the flight… they were calling my name quite a bit. Luckily Canberra airport is not very large.

It was such a lovely relaxing weekend and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I’ll have to spend a couple of weekends there next years, especially as another one of my friends is moving there.