travelling allrite

It sometimes seems a bit incongruous to have visited museums in distant countries while neglecting their local counterparts. We've taken Alex to science centres in places as distant as Paris and Tokyo, but never looked around the ANSTO Discovery Centre fifteen minutes down the road. To be fair he's done vacation activities there before and B and I went on a tour of the old nuclear reactor before he was born. But this was the first time that Alex's activities were actually held in the Discovery Centre, allowing us to have a look around. It's pretty small and there isn't that much to see without going on a tour of the facilities. However, I was captivated by my all time favourite science demonstration, a cloud chamber showing the trails of particles as they pass through a liquid. Meanwhile, Alex built Lego WeDo robots. You can't get much more local than your own suburb. Last term Alex studied some of the local history of Illawong, a suburb that...

It's been a long day and our short trip up to Central Queensland is now over. Though I did not feel the same dread as on the flight up, I still awoke to a sense of anxiety about our upcoming flights. At the same time the weather forecast sounded much nicer. Surely it was to be a very pleasant flight back... If only I could have caught a train then I would have been so much more relaxed. Sadly, there was no train to catch. Not from Yeppoon. As I mentioned before, once there were trains to Rockhampton, from where you can still catch trains north, south and west. Those days have gone, along with the railway tracks that connected Yeppoon and Rocky. I went for an early morning walk with my camera to inspect the remains of the railway station and yard. Not a single track remained. The wooden station was in a decrepit state, fenced off, though I hear that it is to be moved and preserved. Shrubs grew wild alongside the platform. Despite this, I could very well imagine catching a pas...