#cbr22

On my last night in Canberra, I took a bike for a ride around the eastern portion of the lake. This turned out to be a bit of a highlight due to the variety of views and how quickly I got away from the city itself.

The National Carillon sits on a little island in the lake, recently renamed in memory of the Queen. It contains 57 bells and chimes every 15 mins.

It was impressive that for essentially the whole route there was a proper cycle track.

I went through Kingston, a modern 'canals' style development full of upmarket apartments and restaurants, before following the busier lakeshore paths back.

Each spring, Canberra puts on Floriade - a huge & artistic display of flowers. I was in Canberra for the tail end of it, and it was still very impressive!

One icon of Canberra is its cute circular bus shelters. A lot of them aren't in great condition today - which is a shame - but they remain a key part of the Canberra streetscape.

Following Floriade, we took the bus out to IKEA for lunch (we don't have IKEA in New Zealand and I really wanted to try the vegan meatballs), before backtracking to the National War Memorial.

This already massive building is currently undergoing expansion to become even larger. Unfortunately they operate on a timed-ticket system which only gives you a maximum of 2 hours inside, which is definitely not enough time to see every exhibit, even today. We ended up only exploring one hall fully before realising the time and speed running the rest to get outside to the memorial walls before closing time.

High on my to-do list for this trip was to visit the National Arboretum. Up on some lightly sculpted hillsides to the west of the city, this young botanic garden is (unfortunately) designed to be explored by car - so that is exactly what we did.

While a lot of the trees are very small, there are a couple of patches with older/larger trees - and there are actually walking trails too.

I quite liked that they worked sculptures into the gardens - it suited the well-designed & organised vibe of the gardens.

Following the Arboretum, continuing to take advantage of having a car, we headed up to Mount Ainslie for Canberra's most iconic views.