Canberra CODA Conference Friday 5 October

There I was, lying in bed, thinking it was 5:45am and that I could watch a bit of TV before getting up. There was a company sponsored breakfast that started at 7am and I'd told Gillian I'd be there at 7 while she was aiming for 7:30.
Put the TV on just in time for the person to announce it was 7am. I leapt out of bed and was showered, dressed and downstairs before I'd woken up. Still, Gillian had beat me down.
Listened to more STUFF. Worked out that there were a couple of sessions after lunch where we'd either heard it before, or they were about products we don't and won't use so we decided to play hookey for a few hours and went to visit Old Parliament House (OPH).
It being school holidays, it was very busy at OPH and very noisy in the foyer where there was a bushman type doing a song and dance routine. We didn't have the time to wait for the guided tour so pottered about by ourselves using a brochure to work out where we were. Thoroughly enjoyed it and am keen to come back and do a tour properly.
Back to the conference for more boring bits then at the end we decided to head out and do something active. We'd been talking for weeks about hiring a bike and riding round the lake but when I rang to make enquiries we were too late and it was rather expensive anyway. I also wanted to go again to Parliament House but by the time we'd had a cuppa and changed our shoes it was getting late.
We headed out in the car to see if we could find Floriade - the spring flower festival. Couldn't believe the traffic. For the past three days we've been marvelling at how little traffic there is in Canberra and how few people we'd seen walking about. Now here they were - the ENTIRE population of Canberra it seemed on our road.
As we'd originally thought we'd ride round the lake, we thought we could drive round instead so abandoned the Floriade idea for the time being and took off left past the British High Commission and the Chinese Embassy.

We drove ourselves down a dead end where we could see hundreds of white posts in the park. We discovered it was a memorial to the hundreds of men, women and children who died when the Siev X, a refugee boat, sank (http://www.sievxmemorial.com/sievxmemor

ial.com/). Very sad, very shameful and I had to leave; the poles covered such a large area and each one had the name, age and gender of a person on it.