A Day Out

As usual we get to the school holidays and I haven't planned any activities.  I think I just like to live in denial, the holiday thing is a distant memory and if I don't think about it, I won't stress about it and it will be all right.

I don't know why kids these days demand to be entertained and the caregiver for the day is the entertainment unit but that's what the deal is at least in our house. Well movies are out they have either seen it or it is not age appropriate and we have already done that this week.  Looking on the internet most of the stuff you had to book months ago.  I had in the back of my mind to go to the Botanic Gardens we can look around for a bit and we can at least be in the sunshine.  

Because we got there just after opening we had the pick of parking, so I pulled up along side the big fig trees, which obviously I had never done before because the kids just took off.  "Can we play in those?"

After 20 minutes I dragged we headed to the Conservatory.  They've turned the heating off in the Conservatory (cost savings... thank you Adelaide Oval redevelopment) so most of the exotics are on the way to dying.  It is free though, but it isn't the experience it use to be and the wildlife that use to be in there is pretty much all gone (we found 1 bird).  We didn't spend much time there.

We walked around the Gardens for a good couple of hours.  Squid is an expert and finding and playing in every water feature in the place.  It was only 14 degrees yesterday and that is her with short sleeves on (I had 3 layers on its probably because she makes me cold just looking at her).

We trudged through the the undergrowth looking at the various trees and didn't stick to just the formal gardens.

I was happy to find the wisteria lane that I couldn't find in summer when I was taking photo's  of Blueberry Botanical, I think it was 42 degrees that day so you will excuse me for not going to much out of my way to find it.

There was an exhibition of Banks illustrations (the Botanist on  Cook voyage of discovery of Australia) in the Museum of Economic Botany.   I had never been in this building before.  The inside of the building itself is quite lovely and the illustrations were amazing, such fine details.   The kids were not so impressed, luckily there were a few bits an pieces in there that kept them enthralled while I looked at the artwork.

It was time to head back to the car, I needed to put in some more money in the meter and the lure of the big trees was too much.  So we spent another hour just playing in the trees.

 Take a picture, I'm a reindeer (it is Xmas in July after all).  

There was the couple of minutes while he worked out, how to get back out of the tree after this photo that were interesting (I did tell him not to do the first thing that came into his head which was just to jump), 2 minutes later he was back up there again.

A couple of games of hide and seek were in order and then we headed home.