Canberra Balloon Spectacular

The Canberra Balloon Spectacular is an annual festival considered to be one of the best hot air balloon events in the world. It features over 50 hot air balloons that are shipped in from all over the world.

The balloons all launch from the the grounds in front of Canberra's Old Parliament House. The event itself lasts about a week and anyone can purchase a (rather expensive!) ticket for a balloon ride.

The balloons take off each day at about 6:30 AM, so we decided to get up early one Sunday morning to watch all them take off. We made it just in time to set up at the end of Anzac Parade, across from the lake so that we could see the balloons flying over the government buildings.

First few balloons take flight!

The Skywhale balloon!

Within 30 minutes, we could see balloons everywhere!

YIKES!!!


The Skywhale balloon was a featured balloon this year. It, however, happened to make headlines before the festival for crashing into someones back yard!











Another cool balloon that made headlines was Pegleg Pete, which came crashing down onto the highway outside of Belconnen Town Centre! 

Canberra Enlighten Festival

Let's face it, Canberra isn't exactly a tourist hotbed. It's a great place to live and raise a family, but if you're only here as a visitor for a few days/weeks/months, Canberra can get boring pretty quick. There are, however, a few events throughout the year that tend to attract a lot of visitors to the city; the annual Enlighten Festival is one of them.

The Enlighten Festival is an outdoor art exhibition and cultural festival which features architectural projections on several buildings in Canberra. It also features musical shows, food tastings, and film events. We missed out on the festival last year and decided that we (at the very least) needed to see the projections on parliament this year.

The projections on the front of parliament change approximately every minute or two, rotating through a series of different artful images. They turned out to be very cool and we were able to snap some great photos of a few of them.

 

New Zealand

We're starting to lose track of the number of visits we've had to New Zealand. It's such a beautiful country - quite similar to Canada, in fact - that it's been an easy decision to visit it often given our proximity to it from Canberra.

This visit, we focused entirely on the North Island.  We visited Lake Taupo to relax and view geothermal sites, Hobbiton to see the set of LOTR, and Paeroa to visit the L&P cafe (for Blair). Last, but not least, we finished our tour by spending a lovely week in the beautiful city of Wellington.

Here are some photos from our visit to Lake Taupo:

Geothermal spas at Wairakei Terraces

Stacy enjoying the naturally-heated spas!

Here are some photos from Hobbiton:

And for Blair, here are some photos of our tour around Paeroa (where his favorite soft drink is/was made):

And finally, photos from the beautiful city of Wellington:

Oriental Bay

Matty meets the Beehive

The Canadian Minister of Finance was visiting on this day

LOTR characters in the Wellington Airport

LOTR characters in the Wellington Airport

Canberra Multicultural Festival

In February, we had the opportunity to visit Canberra's Multicultural Festival (now called the National Multicultural Festival). We missed it the first year we lived here because we didn't know about it (!!!) but this year it was marked in our calendar at least 8 months ahead of time. We even planned some of our vacations around this event. In other words, there was no way we were going to miss it again! This is, in our opinion, Canberra's best festival.

There are literally hundreds (thousands, perhaps) of booths/stalls representing countries from around the world (what better place to do this than in a city full of diplomats!).  Each booth represented a single country and served traditional dishes, wines, and beer from their home. You name the food - they had it there! Everything from Spanish paella, New Zealand hangi, American hot dogs (haha), Croatian cevapi, Hungarian langos (these were awesome!), Bavarian pretzels, Korean bulgogi, Indian/Malaysian/Indonesian curries and noodle dishes, Irish stew, Yorkshire Pudding, Canadian pancakes with bacon and maple syrup, etc. You get the idea!

Here are some of the very few pictures we took while we were there - we were too busy eating!

Adelaide

In January, we had the opportunity to re-visit Adelaide - this time for a friend's wedding!

We were planning a visit out to Kangaroo Island during our time there, but it proved to be too difficult to squeeze in. Instead, we threw in a beach day in addition to another tour of the Barossa Valley. Although we visited many of the same wineries that we toured in 2009, we also stopped by a few others that we didn't have a chance to visit last time. And...just like our visit in 2009, the temperatures were up above 40 celcius. Very, very hot!

And here are some shots from Glenelg, the beach town we stayed in for the wedding!