Sparrow Lorelei and Robin Artemis photo gallery

To Narrandera and back, 24-26 July, 2011
Saturday morning

Next morning, here's the view from our lakeview cabin. I was fairly sure there was a lake out there somewhere. When I first got up I couldn't even distinguish for sure where it would be. By this point we could see a bit more of where it was.

We went into the centre of town and had second breakfast at the bakery. Tasty food. Sparrow was very specific about making sure she had some of her dad's cinnamon donut after her sausage roll, and some of my chocolate milk. You can see out the window that there wasn't much of the main street to be seen.

It was starting to dissipate a little, slowly, as we ate - this is the main street at maybe 10:30 am. The sun was just a white disk in the grey, and we couldn't see clearly more than a block still.

Fog clings to everything.

We walked up to the Piper Moth memorial in the main park that's sort of in the centre of town if you count the highway through as central. The main street is one street over from the highway. Sparrow was pretty impressed by the plane. Less impressed by not being allowed to go touch it and climb on it.

Planes! A whole display case of them! The only things she loves more are helicopters, and the moon. Though tractors are catching up.

The world's largest playable guitar, or at least it was back in the 90's sometime. It was in the Guiness Book of Records until someone else built a bigger one. Sparrow wasn't jumping to play it - I think a sense of "don't touch" is well ingrained on anything she's actually allowed to play with. We had to heavily encourage her to try. Not that it was a good sound - the strings were completely untuned. Then we spent a lot more effort trying to keep her from taking all the stuff off the shelves that she *wasn't* supposed to play with, like glass jars of chutney and marmalade. We were tempted by the animal puppets they had, but I ended up buying her a souvenir ruler with photos on it, as James says, "of everything there is to do in Narrandera". Which is almost true but not quite. I bought some Junee chocolate-covered liquorice for us too.

In this park there's an adventure playground. It's sized for much older kids, into teenage range, and has a lot of unusual non-standard science-y and heavily skill-dependent play equipment so Sparrow didn't get much out of it. Even the fenced-section which is usually meant for younger children was still a bit difficult for her. I had great fun on the flying fox though. The "horse" that she rode - the thing with springs - is different because it spins around, usually they're fixed. It's also unusual in that the seats are mechanically separate so one person bouncing doesn't affect the other seat. Usually the seats are connected by a fixed bar and the springs are underneath so that it has some vague semblance to a seesaw (which I think must be disapproved of nowadays, you never see any anywhere). This doesn't even pretend to be a seesaw. Unfortunately it's definitely kid-use only, as when I sat on it the seat bent all the way down to the ground and then I couldn't work out how to get off it without just falling over.

"All done park". Sparrow is carrying the towel we used to wipe things down from the fog so that we didn't get soaked trying to play.

On the walk back to the main street we passed a fruit and vegie shop. Sparrow selected her own fruit - apple, pear and avocado. I also got some snow peas, peanuts-in-the-shell, yoghurt and fruit salad for later. The posters at the counter cover the entertainment on offer for the next little while I think - the circus was visiting Narrandera the next week, and there was a highschool talent show coming up in August. We saw those two posters everywhere.

Sparrow took her pear and wandered up this ramp to the window, where she had quite a serious conversation with herself. Lots of talking, and telling her reflection about the pear, the shop, various things that she thought were important.

Oh, so that's what the view looks like. Back at our cabin having a munch after touring the centre of Narrandera. It's just after noon, and the fog has finally completely lifted. So I guess that's where the lake is, down there.

If we want to go have a look, we need to do another double nappy change first. What was it Mum said about a trip away meaning doing all the same things as you do at home, but in a different surrounding? -grin-

At the lookout just up the hill from the cabin, which is also the start of a walk to the eastern half of the lake (which we didn't take). Smiley boy likes the birds. Robin spent a lot of time watching the birds in that big tree that's just outside our cabin, too - lots of little green birds hopping around singing and chatting to themselves. I was carrying a bird book at this point, as Sparrow has discovered the delights of looking at pictures of birds and suddenly seemed to understand that it related to real creatures when we saw a Whistling Kite go overhead.

Then down the road to the lake. There was mud! I promptly removed everything on Sparrow's lower half apart from the nappy, in the interests of not having to try and wash it all in the bathroom sink later. She quite enjoyed exploring the mud and walking along the edge of the lake.

Pontoon on the lake.