Riding with Grandad

Another gorgeous autumn day just perfect for another bike ride this time with Grandad and neighbour Sofia. First we had to pull the girls away from their knitting!!

 

We loaded the bikes on the car and drove to Lake Burley Griffin with the intention of riding around central basin, a short 5km loop.

Our ride began heading over Commonwealth Ave bridge towards the National Library. It took a little while to drill into the girls that this wasn't a race, it didn't matter who rode first and the most important thing was safety - looking out for others walking, running, riding around the lake.

Seeing though we were all still excited about our geocache finds from yesterday, we loaded up the app once again to see what was nearby. Our first cache was a nano with Grandad getting line honours. The girls were slightly disadvantaged with a lack of height - the nano geocache was on top of a utility box!

Our next port of call was a walk around the sculpture gardens. No caches here only interesting sculptures!  The shiny stainless steel sculpture known as Cones was an instant attraction due to it's distorting images. Grandad was fascinated by his reflections and was almost in tears with laughter which then had everyone cracking up!!

Onwards we crossed over Kings Ave Bridge failing to find the nano in the middle and so continued on to the Carillon. An easy find there with the bells playing in the background. Up to the Boundless playground. Turns out the girls weren't really interested in playing here so it was off to the next cache located behind the playground.

Here we bumped into Shannon and kids who were also looking for the cache! It was discovering hanging in a tree disguised as a bat! Container was tricky to detach but we got there in the end. Kids were disappointed with the lack of goodies to swap.

Waving goodbye to Shannon and kids, we continued on to the next cache located somewhere close to Blundell's Cottage, a stone cottage built in 1860's. It's named after Flora and George Blundell, the second tenants of the cottage who raised their 8 children and lived in the cottage for 60 years. Recently restored the cottage sets to reminds us of a way of life of an era long since gone. It was closed so we couldn't go inside, instead we focused on finding the cache but for the second time today, we came up empty handed.

Back on our bikes, our route took us past the Rock Castle and instantly the girls pleaded us to stop for a play. How could we resist? Grandad and I camped on the grass while the girls explored the tunnels. It wasn't long though before we decided to search for the next cache located near a small creek on the northside of Nerang Pool. Our last cache for the day was an easy one. Post cache find, we discovered a bamboo forest with many little criss crossing tracks and enjoyed running around scaring each other!

It was a short, flat ride back to the car with a parking inspector issuing tickets. Luckily for us we had timed it perfectly with 2 minutes to spare!