Corin Forest

Lilly has been intermittently watching the tobogganing luge from the winter Olympics, with across-the-lounge room commentary I can do that! And so, in a coincidence reminiscent of a Muppet movie, Saturday saw us ballet dance classing, and then off to Corin Forest.

It was a nice day trip (about 45 minutes from Belconnen). The GPS said the coordinates are E149 4' 39.362" and S35 27' 11.922" (since the map location didn't show up in the search list.) Google maps has a great satellite view

The web site shows water-slide (it was closed) Flying Fox (it had shut down) and Cafe (a drinks fridge) and "the largest toboggan ride in the southern hemisphere" which was open, and which all four of us had great fun zooming down it.

First, I took Lilly up and we tested out whether she'd cope with the run down (check). We can do it again! Yes, we could. And we did. It turns out tobogganing alpine sliding in an over-sized metal rain gutter is amazingly fun. And not too difficult -- pull-back on the handle thingy to break, pray and lean forward to go -- I'd say we're pretty much ready for the next Winter Olympics.

So next Flavia took Lilly for a turn, with the express mission of scoping it out for the smaller toboggan luge-inator dude. We agreed that there was only a 30% chance we'd kill our second born in some ill-considered metal tobogganing alpine slide incident and so, with Flavia in the front (holding Lilly We can go fast Mum!) and me behind (Mascot for Olympic Winter Team Squirmo) we ascended.

I suppose I should point out that nobody died. Given that there was a sign on the start which basically said if you didn't do everything on a list of fifty must-know rules, and follow every sign on the course you will die, and a sixteen year old staffer yeah, but ignore the second sign, we did pretty well.

Gabriel's first act in the ascent was to grab the hand brake, and pull it back as hard as he could. Thereby stalling the pulley, and not-quite-derailing us. So far so good.... The remainder of the ascent was spent with Lilly calling out, and Gabriel evaluating escape options, and the run down, with Lilly shouting whoooo and Gabriel very happily waving at the car in front. We got to the bottom and Lilly decided she was ready for solo flight I can go by myself. (Rule #37 Minimum age 8 years). There was also a line drawn at 1.5m near the ticket office, clearly to prevent 9 year old midgets being let loose on the slide. So we convinced Miss three that co-pilot was a good position for now.

Not content with merely cheating death on largest luge outside Vancouver, we went to see Gibralta Falls. The Falls themselves are quite small, which was good, as Gabriel was asleep -- so no real desire to hike for miles to see a waterfall.  The recent rain meant that at least there was some water falling -- it would have been touch-and-go a month ago.

And on the trip home, a random input from the GPS gave us the chance to see Tidbinbilla (space observatory).The space centre has a Cafe (open, serves milkshakes and icecream and probably other things too....) and a museum. The photo in front of the dish is about as close as you can get (which is the deck of the Cafe). 

The museum is quite interesting, with a fair bit of detail of all the aspects of the NASA-CSIRO interaction and tracking of hte manned space flights. I get the impression there was a little bit of touchiness on the "it's all a hoax" material - as that was the first poster at the very entrance to the museum.

Editor's note: Flavia has informed me that the Winter Olympics event in which people lay down on a plastic sheet and hurtle to the bottom is called the Luge, and is not Tobogganing. Toboganning, it seems, is what small children on un-funded snow hills do, whilst Luge is what beefy 20-somethings in skin tight lycra do for gold medals.