5th Dec - Biking Round Canberra - Make-over of Bike

This page is devoted to Amanda Sullivan whom I found out died on the 22nd of Nov. Amanda was a great friend up in Scotland. A lovely, generous and fun person. You will be missed. Thoughts and HUGS to Hannah.








I was planning on having today off the bike completely but Paul kindly offered to show me Canberra by bike. We had a fun day pottering round the city (50km).

Within the first hour we saw 2 strange things: a steam train and a cool old car :-)

The route took us from Jerrabomberra to the bike path that goes round the large lake in the middle of Canberra.

Along the way we found a part of the bike path closed as there had been a land slide yesterday with all of the rain. We biked past it. There was so much heavy rain when I was there and the fields where all flooded. It turned out that they then had even more rain the following few days after I left. Paul sent me the link below (of the same area):

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/12/09/3088626.htm?site=sydney

Canberra is a strange city. It does not really have a business area - only businesses to support the government workers etc. It has the feeling of a small town. There is loads of space and the downtown area is really quiet.






We biked round the lake where you can see all of the important buildings with the flags on the other side of the lake.


We then headed into town to a few bike shops to get some butterfly bars for my bike. Paul was extremely generous and bought me the bars for my trip :-)




We went from there to see the parliament buildings. This is the old parliament building. Outside there is what they call the "Tent Embassy". It is a perminant camp (set up about 30 years ago) outside the parliament building set up to protest about the treatment of the Aboriginal people. This sign read "Stolen Land, Stolen Generation, Stolen Wages". The shocking treatment of the Aboriginal people is probably most talked about topic across all of the people I have met in Australia. As a race the Australians are really ashamed that this happened and want to do something about it now but don't know how to fix it. It is so sad.
We took a walk round the new Parliament buildings. It is open to be public (once you have gone through security) - unlike in the UK. It was interesting to see. We had lunch at the Cafe :-)























After an awesome day round Canberra we went back to Paul's house and I then spend hours trying to fit the butterfly bars and getting it all set up. It turned out that it was more difficult than I thought it would be because the new set up had to accommodate the tent, front pannier rack, video camera and gps recorder as well as be comfortable etc. Paul helped me try many different settings and came up with an ingenius idea for how to attach my gps device :-). We had a lovely meal - late though. The new position of the handle bars effected the gears and so after several hours of faffing they finally worked again.




I was really happy with the final result as the video camera could easily be controlled from the handle bars now and the gps is in full view. A much better solution :-) I also had some problems with a corrupt external hard disk. Ended up being up till 2 sorting it all out.....