Canberra Pie

We decided at the last minute that we would indeed drive down to Canberra to see my friends; it's about 3 hours south of Wollongong, and more than half way to the snow fields, so it seemed like a good idea.

After getting only slightly lost, we arrived, happy to see our friends, B and J, who were waiting patiently with Turkish Pizza and home made Pumpkin pie!

The pie was delicious, made from their home-grown pumpkins, no less :) I'd never had American-style pumpkin pie before; actually I don't think I've ever had any kind of pumpkin-based desert. Now I'm a full convert, of course.

Littletree got on great with J, and spent ages playing games and taking photos of each other.

Though we'd planned to drive 2 hours further south into the Snowy Mountains to see the snow to fulfil Littletree's dream of seeing snow, she decided that it would be a bad idea, since she wouldn't be able to wear her princess dress, and we would have to buy her gloves. Yep. Littletree would rather be cold and beautiful than warm.

Instead she chose to go to the National Museum, which I later realised was because she saw characters in Bridge to Terabithia going to the museum, and they had a cup of tea in the museum cafeteria. We could have stayed home and had tea, but there you go.

We walked around the museum, looking at the exhibits. Some of it was very interesting, some was a bit boring. I could have stayed longer and looked at more things, but Littletree got bored in the end. They have a cool revolving cinema, where the whole room rotates around so you can view different screens. It's nice, but anyone who doesn't already know a lot about Australian history and culture probably wouldn't understand more of the images.

For me the funniest thing in the museum was a display about bushfires and controlled burning (where they deliberately set small controlled fires to burn off the undergrowth, thereby reducing the risk of big bushfires).

There was one wall that had a big picture printed on it showing a man lighting such a fire, and in the wall was a door labelled "Fire escape Emergency Exit" and a fire alarm with emergency telephone mounted on the wall.

I'm quite sure the fire alarm and exit are legally-required safety features, and I'm sure the display about bushfires was planned to be there anyway. But I'm also sure that the particular placement was a typical example of the Aussie sense of humour. I really got a kick out of it anyways.

Here's a zoom of the alarm: