We spent the day in and around Canberra seeing some of the local sites. The first stop was the Royal Mint, where Australia produces all its currency plus the currency of a number of other, smaller, countries. We asked where the samples were distributed and got the sad news that sample day was yesterday, not today.
The facility was interesting and had examples of various coinages going back to the early 19th century. I had never heard this, but during WWII, Australia was so short of currency that the US Mints in Denver and San Francisco produced coins for Australia.
As you can see, the mint is very modern, with the current building having been built in 2005:
Inside the mint were examples of vintage coins, old machinery, and an observation area where you could see the coinage being produced.
Unfortunately, while we were there, the workers seemed to be on a permanent break.
After leaving the Mint, we went southwest of Canberra about 40 miles to the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex. This was interesting. During the 1960's, NASA had tracking stations all around the world that were used to track and communicate with satellites and with the astronauts in space, including the Apollo program. The facility near Canberra is out in the wilds on top of a hill and consists of half a dozen satellite dishes of various sizes, up to 220 feet in diameter. They look a like like the radio telescopes in Green Bank, WV and the complex is still in operation. You can see two of the smaller satellite dishes in the picture below:
Inside the complex, they had on display a number of examples of the types of equipment used back in the 60's to track and communicate with the satellites, a piece of moon rock, an Apollo space suit, and they were playing some vintage (1960's) films produced by NASA to explain the space program to the public. I thought those were particularly interesting.
When we left the complex and returned to Canberra, we almost wrecked the car a couple of times. First...here is a group of kangaroos along the road in a nature preserve:
A little further down the road, we came upon these in a cow pasture:
There were actually three ostriches in the field, but a couple of them were a little shy. BTW...these are BIG birds!
We went on into Canberra to Weston Park, on the shores of the local lake. We found this buy grazing about 10 feet off the road:
Interesting day, and Canberra is a very pretty city.
Tomorrow, we're headed back to Sydney to catch a plane on Friday morning to Ayers Rock.
More to follow!
