To the Capital Monday 2/18/08

We are into cooked brekkie again this morning starting with some fruit and homemade meusli and followed by a "fry-up." Mary, who is unaccustomed to all this fried food is ably assisted by John who knows the ropes. Our hosts are new to the business and still worried about pennies, which in turn leads to hospitality mistakes. Hopefully they will figure it out in the future.

We start back south for a bit and are anxious to tour the gold rush towns of Central Tilba and Tilba Tilba. Central Tilba is only a block long so we decide to move on to Tilba Tilba which turns out to be smaller. Those were quick tours. We are inland now and the scenery has gradually changed from brown to green as we have moved east over the last few days. Yesterday we saw Easter lilies lining the side of the road and today we have little purple wild flowers.

Our next stop is in Bega, and being inland this is farming country. Bega is the home of the Cheese Heritage Center and since we have seen Cheese World we think we need to compare. The Heritage Center is in fact better than the Cheese Museum at Cheese World, but the cheese isn’t as good so we don’t load up. We wander around Bega for a bit and find it to be an active little farming town, not unlike those we see in our part of the world.

We take off to the north through the "Snowy Mountains" which are neither. Today they are lovely green hills and valleys that remind us of parts of Ireland. We climb to about 1000 meters where it does snow in winter and on this clear day we can see all the way back to the ocean on the horizon. In California the real estate people would call this a blue water view. We stopped in Cooma for lunch and both had the "little" burger with fries at Grumpy’s Café. We chose to eat in their courtyard which was a wooden table with plastic chairs on gravel in an apparent storage area. Not exactly charming, but the burgers were better than expected.

We now have only an hour and a half to Canberra, the National capital, and the land flattens a bit and we are back to brown as the dominant color. More about Canberra tomorrow, but today we arrive without incident (only one irritated horn honker) at our hotel in the central business district which is just a little north of the capital complex. John runs some errands and checks out the locale while Mary throws in some laundry and enjoys some quiet time.

We have a choice of three recommended restaurants for our two nights here so we have an abundance of options. We pick the Italian (Mezzalira) tonight where Mary has the Puttanesca Pizza and John has the veal chop with roasted garlic puree. While we were eating, waves of young folks in semi-odd clothing kept marching past reminding us of the penguin parade. We ask our server what might be going on, and she tell us that these are "Uni" students out for a pub crawl, financed by the government to the tune of $30,000. She is rolling her eyes and we are confused so we will try to get to the bottom of this. We know the government trough is bottomless, but this seems a bit over the top, even for here.

The streets are beyond quiet as we stroll back to the hotel and bed.

Today's local headline: Fat Crisis Herald Sun (obese kids are swamping hospitals with cases of diabetes)