Araluen

Listening to Here With Me by Dido

Today was a well deserved Pupil Free Day, so my family and I spent the day at Araluen Botanical Park. The drive to the park was amazing, with beautiful views of the hills and trees.

When you first walk into Araluen, you come across the old swimming pool, with a beautiful background of the main area of the park.

As it is nearly spring time, the hundreds of tulip bulbs that the many volunteers have planted were in full bloom in an endless array of colours.

They had set up a new attraction this year called, "Surf the Floral Sea" where they made garden beds look like the ocean. They brought in beach sand and mannequins dressed up as surf lifesavers and swimmers.

We had a barbecue lunch of sausage sizzles and two ducks came to visit. They came right up to the blanket I was sitting on, but it didn't like to be touched. We had a bag of hot dog buns on the blanket and one of the ducks came up and pecked at the bread from the outside of the bag. I gave the duck some bread, which it ate from my hand. I was able to get a photo of it to should how close it was to me, without zooming.

We went and parked the car on the other side of the park where there were other trails to go on.

We visited the Roundhouse gift shop where I bought lemongrass lip balm which smells absolutely wonderful.

The park is having a competition where you had to find 8 signs with "Yates, Have a Grow" written on them to win an iPod. We found 5 before we moved the car and found two more on the other side of the park. We still had two more to go so we decided to go on the gold coin donation "train" ride to see if we could see any more. Dad spotted one while on the ride and we found another. We could not find the other one so we went to the gift shop to see if they had any clues, which they didn't. So I marked on the map where I thought it might have been and put it into the barrel. When we got back to the car, there was the final sign. It had been hidden behind a man who was working on a machine who was there when we parked the car!

It was such a relaxing day!

Signing off.