After a busy Christmas Day, we had an early night and a good sleep in.
We packed up, had breakfast and left Wollongong on our way to Canberra where we will stay two nights.

Rather than going straight down the highway, we wanted to look at a motel in the town near where our grandsons and their parents live. This motel used to be really rundown, but we were told it has been sold and renovated.

We stopped in and found the owner/manager who was more than happy to show us a couple of rooms. We were very happy and will be booking in when we come done for the little guy’s first birthday.

Back on the highway, we decided to detour through Mittagong, Bowral and Mona Vale before coming back to the highway.

There were fires about to the south west of us and the sky was very smoky. We got a text from the family who are also travelling south for a few days. They are travelling the coast road and they relayed that the fires had been VERY close, and the Rural Fire Service have done well to save houses and caravan parks.

We stopped off in Goulburn and swapped drivers. I little further along, the map on the navigation, showed we should have had a very large lake on the left of the highway. All we could see were grass paddocks?? I ‘Googled” Lake George on my phone and found that it is a very odd phenomenon. The lake has no surface outlet and the depth rises and falls depending on rainfall, run-off and evaporation. You can read more here. Hubby sent a photo from his phone to his Dad showing the “lake” and Dad sent back a text saying he knew a boy from school who drowned in the lake!!

• 

• 

• 

• 

We arrived in Canberra in time for lunch. We were planning on a restaurant that we had a voucher for, but being a public holiday, it was not open. We saw a “Hog’s Breath” for which we also have a 25% off, so decided to go there for a nice steak lunch.

After lunch, we found our AirBnB in a brand new suburb on the outskirts of town. We did have a little bit of an issue opening the gate we need to get through to access our unit, but we managed in the end.
After we unpacked, we headed back to the city to catch a free “Culture Loop” sightseeing bus. We chose to drive the National Sound and Film Archive as we could park there and catch the bus. The plan was to just do the loop (which takes an hour) and decide on an itinerary for the next day.

We had a 15 minute stop in the middle of town, so we strolled down a mall and came across a carousel!!

We did the loop and returned back to the Film and Sound Archive. I decided we should have look around. Unless we missed something, there was not a lot to see 🙁 There was a theatre that was playing a short film about life in Brisbane in 1964. So, of course, we had to stay to watch it.
You can watch the video here…It was fun to watch and see familiar sights.

There are 14 videos in this “Life in Australia” series. You can view them all here

Back in the car, we found a Woolworths and bought enough groceries for the next few days. We were surprised to see that the suburban supermarket did not have free parking. Luckily it was free today as it was a public holiday. $2 an hour for parking would make you quicker with your shopping.

Back to the apartment, we settled in for the evening and work out what we would do the next day. I did plan on going to the Telstra Tower but it is so smokey, I don’t think we will bother 🙁

• 

I am pleased to see that one week in, our budget is at an acceptable $0.74 per km. Many of the caravanning travel blogs I read say that $1 per km is the budget to aim for. You can see our costs at the bottom of this post.