ANZAC Day

This past Wednesday, April 25th, was ANZAC Day in Australia.  ANZAC Day honours the Australian and New Zealand soldiers who fought and died at Gallipoli (Turkey) during World War I. Though Australia and New Zealand also celebrate Remembrance Day, ANZAC Day is considered one of the most important days of the year and is of much greater significance. Each year on April 25th, many memorial services are held around Australia with the biggest services taking place in Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra.

Stacy and I decided to attend the dawn service at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. The service took place at 5:30 AM (at the same time the soldiers arrived in Gallipoli many years earlier).  This meant that we had to get up bright and early in order to get ourselves a seat. We arrived around 4:45 to find that there were already about 25,000 people there ahead of us and that seats were filling up quickly!

Dawn Service - Early start to the day!

25,000+ People at the service

After the service, everyone was invited to lay poppies on the Wall of Honour inside the memorial and pay their respects to the fallen soldiers. It was a very humbling experience to watch thousands of people laying poppies on the wall next to the names of their loved ones.

Post-Service Line-up to enter the Memorial

Inside the War Memorial - Still dark outside

Someone Placing a Poppy on the Wall

WWII Wall of Honour

Rather than placing our poppy on the Wall of Honour, we decided to place it next to the tomb of the unknown soldier.

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

All in all, it was a good service and a great experience. We had hoped to go to the parade later in the morning (10:30 AM) as well, but we were both pretty tired after getting up so early and we had a BBQ at a friend's place to attend later in the day. Perhaps next year we'll attend the National Ceremony and Parade instead of the Dawn Service.

New Apartment and Kitty Freedom!

This past Wednesday, we picked up the keys for our new apartment/condo. As promised, here are some photos of it. We're very excited to move into this place!

Apartment

Entry

Main Living Area

Kitchen

Master Bedroom

En-suite Bathroom

The apartment building is well-known for its interesting design choices and artwork throughout.  It has direct access to the lake, a movie theatre, and a gym.  It also has many trendy cafes nearby, grocery stores, pubs, and Stacy's favorite -- Canberra's top spa is only 25 steps from our front entrance (literally). Here are a couple more pictures which should give you a feel for what the building is like.

Apartment Building

Front Lobby

Despite wanting to move into this place ASAP, we'll have to stay put in our temporary accommodations for the time being -- we found out on Thursday that our shipment is at least 2-3 weeks away from being delivered to us. The moving company has informed us that, although our shipment has arrived in Sydney, it'll be at least another 2-3 weeks until they can deliver it to us in Canberra. (As a side note, for those wondering, it took exactly 45 days for our shipment to travel from Ottawa to Sydney).

Moving on to some good news -- On Friday we woke up bright and early to drive to Sydney to pick up the cats! We were told we could pick them up from 8:30 am onwards and we were there at 8:30 am sharp! The cats were very excited to see us.  Likewise, we were so excited to see them that we actually forgot to take photos of them being released! Once we got them back to Canberra, we gave them a bath to wash the icky quarantine dirt off of them, and then let them roam free around the apartment. Within a few minutes they all noticed the big glass windows overlooking the lake (and the traffic passing by provided hours of 'entertainment' for them).

Chloe drying herself after her bath, while looking out the window

It didn't take long for all the cats to get comfortable and call the place home. They quickly settled back into their old ways... including hogging the bed! It's nice to finally have them back :)

All three cats laying on the bathroom counter

New Home and Running Festival

This week we finally signed a lease on an apartment! And we're super happy, even if it wasn't our first choice. (For background knowledge, the apartment we really wanted just wasn't meant to be -- we were told it was going to take another 1-2 weeks to receive approval/rejection on our application because of the fact that we had cats. Since we were not at liberty to wait that long, we ended up taking our second choice).

The apartment we signed for is actually in a better location than the first one and is in a brand new building that is currently considered one of Canberra's finest. It's a really nice place - it has a full gym and a movie theatre (for residents only) - and we're quite excited to move into it.  The move itself should be very easy for us though since it's only a few floors down from where we're staying now. Yes, we're moving down in the world. ;-)

For those of you who are curious, here's the Google maps view of where we'll be staying. It's very central and is within walking distance of many shops and attractions. Also, it's only 3 km away from work.  So we'll be able to walk/run/bike to it when we want.

We pick up our keys this Wednesday, but we won't be officially moving in until our sea shipment arrives -- which hopefully won't take much longer (fingers crossed). We'll post pictures of the place as soon as we can.

In other news, this weekend was the annual Australian Running Festival in Canberra. The 5km and 10km runs were held on Saturday, while the half, full, and ultra marathons were held on Sunday.  Blair decided to get his butt in gear and signed up for the 5km run. While he didn't set any land speed records, he was happy to get out and run just the same. Stacy was sick with a sinus infection at the time, but we've both committed to running the ~10 km Sydney Bridge run this coming September. Should be fun!

Blair after his 5km run

Finally, it's also worth noting that there are only 5 more sleeps until we get to pick up the cats!!!!!  We'll be off to Sydney bright and early this Friday morning to get them. It'll be nice to finally have them with us again!

Easter Weekend and The Grand Pacific Drive

This past weekend was an extra long weekend (yay for Easter!) and our first weekend with our new car, so we decided to do a little sight seeing and a small road trip.

On Friday we decided to cruise around Canberra and head to a few places we hadn't been to yet. This included a drive to Tuggeranong (a suburb just south of Canberra) and a quick trip up to see the Black Mountain Tower. The tower is a communications tower owned by Telstra and serves as a good landmark when driving around the city. Though we didn't go up the tower this time, there is an observation deck that apparently offers great views of the entire city.

Black Mountain Tower

On Sunday, we decided to check out the Old Bus Depot Markets located in the suburb of Kingston. The market offers a variety of baked goods, artwork, crafts, and lots of other things.  We managed to find a few items to purchase, but mostly had fun just walking around and looking at what the vendors had to offer.

The hat Blair almost bought..

Old Bus Depot Markets

Monday was road trip day! Over the course of the weekend, we decided that it would be nice to do the Grand Pacific Drive along the coast on our way to visit the cats. We got up early Monday morning and started our journey by heading to Bateman's Bay, a coastal town about 2 hours east of Canberra (map). While the drive itself was really interesting (lots of winding hills and nice country) the beaches around Bateman's Bay were really nice! Seeing as how it's so close to Canberra, something tells me we'll be back to visit this place many times over the next couple years. As an added bonus, the bay is also supposed to have a fair number of good dive sites.

The first beach we encountered at Bateman's Bay

After admiring a few more beaches (there were lots of them!) and grabbing a couple meat pies for lunch, we continued north onto Jervis Bay (map). There we found a handful of beaches that were even more spectacular than the ones at Bateman's Bay.  The sand was so white and the water was so warm that we just  had to go for a swim!

Clear skies and white sand!

We couldn't resist a quick dip!

From Jervis Bay we continued north up to Wollongong and stayed there for the night. On Tuesday morning, we continued to drive north and crossed the Sea Cliff Bridge, which was both very cool and very windy! The drive along this section of the coast also offered some of the best views and lookout points. From there, we travelled north through the Royal National Park (just south of Sydney) and then headed west  to Eastern Creek where the cats quarantine facility is.

A wind-blown Stacy at the Sea Cliff Bridge lookout point

Start of the Sea Cliff Bridge

Our 2 hour visit with the cats went rather well and they all seemed to be in good spirits. We considered performing a mini-jailbreak to help them escape, but decided against it seeing as how they only have about 10 days left to go.

That's all for now! We hope everyone back in Canada had a good Easter weekend!

New Car, Bushfire, and Housing Decisions

Yesterday was 'new car day'! Although our pick-up time wasn't scheduled until 4:30 pm, we skipped out of the office a bit early so that we could head to the bank to withdraw the funds to pay for the car and finalize our car insurance. It turns out that having that extra time was pretty important. An interesting thing about insurance in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) is that you cannot insure a car without its rego (registration) number. The rego number is effectively your license plate number, which is tied to your mandatory third party liability insurance provided by the State. This was all a bit new to us, as we're used to simply requiring a VIN in order to insure a car.

So why are we mentioning all of this? Well..it turns out that it's very hard to get comprehensive insurance on a brand new car that is only being rego'd on the same day you pick it up. We had to wait until about 1 pm to get the rego number from the dealership before we could get our comprehensive insurance. And while - yes - we could have driven the car off the lot with liability insurance only, we were just not comfortable with that option. As luck would have it, however, we were able to get our rego number from the dealer two hours before we picked it up...which gave us two hours to get the comprehensive insurance set up.  Talk about a time crunch!

Blair's never actually owned a brand new car before, so the process of picking a car up, signing all the paperwork, and having the salesman explain all the features of the car was a new experience for him!

Anyways...here 'she' is! Our brand new Mazda 3! :) (Name still TBD)

Zoom-Zoom !!

Stacy had the honour of driving the car back to our apartment in the city. Along the way, we drove through an area of Canberra that has a large amount of bushland (along Belconnen Way). To our surprise, we saw a pretty significant and fast moving bush fire that was throwing off a heavy amount of smoke. Several emergency service vehicles were driving around trying to keep it under control. It was a pretty eye opening experience to turn your head to the left and see such a large fire blazing only 50 feet from your car. We seemed to be the only ones alarmed by this though...all the Aussies didn't even give it a second glance. We guess they're used to seeing fires of this size?!

In other news, we're still struggling to make a decision on where we're going to live in Canberra. The biggest problem is that the place we really want stay at has not yet approved our application (due to having cats)... and time is running out. Fortunately, we do have two other great places that we can fall back on (they've both already approved our applications). Both alternatives are equally nice in their own way.  The first alternative is in a large swanky building (likely the most affluent building in Canberra)..but it does not have a pool and has a bit of road noise due to its central location. Choice number two is in a brand new building about a 5 minute drive to the city centre, in a quiet location with a pool, but the bedrooms are very small (by our standards). We believe that we will have to forget about our ideal place, and that we will end up at the first alternative which is in the city centre.  This will be an interesting change for us - moving to a more urban location - as we've always lived in a quiet house in the suburbs. Only time will tell how well we adapt.

Have a good Easter weekend everyone!