Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Darwin trip part 4, 10-17 July, 2010
Darwin Botanic Gardens, Museum and swimming

We started Thursday morning off with a slow wander down to the Botanic Gardens. It was a very unhurried stroll, which was nice in the heat - though we did run out of time to really look around the Gardens. Next time I will allow a lot more time for that, we only ended up with around an hour and with Sparrow most of that hour is not walking around but staying in one spot and playing. Still, it was lots of fun and quite beautiful. Sparrow really loved these fountains and desperately wanted to have them. She made a beeline straight for them when we unstrapped her. Thankfully she kept getting distracted on the way.

I'd taken a list with geocache coordinates on it, just in case we happened to be passing any. I was more interested in walking around, but it gave us an extra excuse to check out a few spots. We went to the visitor centre and then walked towards the Rainforest Loop which was the spot I was most interested in (with the Tiwi Monsoon Forests a close second, but we didn't get to those). As we walked down the path James had a look at the list and said "Hey, we're right on top of this one". It was titled Livingtona Australis, the Cabbage Palm. We looked around and saw maybe ten types of palm growing next to the path, and checked the labels til we found this cabbage palm (the one above James). Then we had to find the cache! That took a little searching, but Sparrow got to sit on the grass, play with leaves and eat some morning tea while her parents tried to work out which rock in this wall the little tin was behind. So it worked out.

Flowers in the Rainforest Loop.

In the Loop. There was meant to be a geocache quite close to here, it was the only one I'd originally planned to look for. But the GPS couldn't get a good signal with all the tall trees, so we just enjoyed the forest. At the end of the loop we managed to meet up with Mum, and walked on through the savannah parts of the garden to the Museum.

We had lunch at the museum cafe (Cornucopia) with Heather and Marion, family of Karen who I used to work with at Scienceworks. It was a lovely chat about a range of stuff, libraries and policy and gardening and all kinds of bits and pieces, over quite nice food. My only disappointment was that the luscious sounding iced chocolates turned out to be coffees when they arrived, but that happens sometimes. We should have expected it - there is apparently a Thing in the NT about drinking iced coffee. It was really hard to find chocolate milk, but every store had a whole fridge full of different kinds of iced coffee. Even in the supermarket there was as much shelf space given to iced coffee as to ordinary jugs of fresh milk. People just don't order chocolate. One store guy tried to tell us he doesn't carry chocolate milk because nobody buys it. Of course, as Mum pointed out, if you don't carry it nobody *will* buy it. So I think our waitress was just a bit busy, good but busy, and heard what people normally order instead of what we said.

Sparrow slept through the first part of the meal, shared the second part and then she and James went down to the beach below the cafe to dip her feet in the water. If you look carefully in the middle of the photo, through the pandanus and other bushes, you'll just see them walking across the sand.

And our adventurers return.

We all split up to explore the Museum and Art Gallery (it's all one). James, Sparrow and I went straight for the Children's section, and had fun playing with stuff and reading books. I saw several books I'd love to get. One was about animals, but all the pictures were taken from interesting paintings in the Gallery's collection. Another was about a sheep-sheep (as opposed to a sheep-dog) who took up a new career in sheep hairdressing. Unfortunately, none of the books I liked were in the museum's store.

Sparrow was quite taken with this giant plastic ant. She's never been into the stuffed toys particularly, but something about this was more interesting. Maybe because it was shiny and had lots of legs, I don't know.

This little boy is carefully explaining to Sparrow how you can touch these bones but you have to be gentle and careful with them and hold them nicely. Sparrow is listening seriously, and sussing out which one she wants to chew on.

The rabbit ears were a hit too. I couldn't get them off her, and then when I did she found another pair somewhere within seconds. I hadn't even realised there was more than one pair around. Though she was more interested in eating the headband than wearing them, it took a couple of goes to get a photograph with them on her head. After this we figured she'd had enough play and took her for a walk looking through the rest of the building. No photos permitted in most of it. Sparrow was definitely interested in all the Aboriginal weaving, and also in the big woven life-size truck (which really was impressive). She also enjoyed opening the drawers in the kids' exploration wall in the Crocodilians exhibition. But mostly she just watched and flirted with the people.

Having a nice quiet swim afterwards, back at the hotel pool. Sparrow really took to swimming in the pool. She loved watching her Uncle Chris "set her a good example" by doing crazy stunts (I approve :-). She had a lot of fun playing with Grandma with the bowls of water too, though she didn't quite get the hang of pouring the water in and out of them. OK, she understood tipping it out, but not back and forth. She also worked out how to get her mouth underwater without getting her nose under, and once she got that it was a lot harder to stop her trying to drink the pool.

Roughhousing and rough play is always fantastic! Daddy is bouncing her up and down at full speed and she is squealing with delight in between bounces. She's loving this.