The Big City

To Wollongong, NSW, Australia

After having had a few enjoyable, but cloudy days at Jervis Bay, we were ready for some time in the "big" city, which in this case was Wollengong, just a little ways up the coast. The prospect of modern city life was very alluring and, in particular, the small science museum and planetarium that we read about in the Lonely Planet. The museum was a great diversion with dozens of exhibits to keep us entertained. Many were similar to the San Francisco Exploratorium, just on a much smaller scale: interactive displays on air flow, mass and momentum, simple mechanisms, electricity, optics, etc.

Breakfast at Jervis Bay

Mining truck tire at the science museum

Inside the museum was a small planetarium, which was showing a movie about the history of space travel. It was particularly instructive for the kids as it described all the incremental learning needed to send a man to the moon: development of sufficiently powerful rockets, putting the first satellite into orbit, sending successively more complex life forms into space -- fruit flies, a dog, a monkey, and then humans -- designing space suits, landing craft and a re entry module.  It is still amazing to realize how much had to be overcome to reach this goal.

Afterwards, we found a tasty Vietnamese restaurant for lunch and then a campground not far away and just a short walk from another fantastic beach. There are so many beautiful beaches, that they seem to be totally taken for granted. To take advantage of being back in an urban environment, Meg and I picked out an evening movie. The family friendly option was Lion, a serious film about a boy from India who gets separated from his family and ends up lost, a thousand miles away from home in Calcutta. It was really neat to see the scenes of Indian life and especially the trains, which brought back memories from our time there just a few months ago. Spoiler alert, after being adopted by an Australian family, he eventually tracks down his mother for an emotional finale. Meg is a softy, so, of course, had tears in her eyes. I on the other hand....