Today we went to the zoo. After spending a couple of hours staring at animals and wondering if the feeding times advertised on the flyer involved feeding the shrill, annoying children to the lions, we decided it was time to go home. Unfortunately we’d missed our bus and the next wasn’t for an hour. "Let’s follow the path back to the city. It goes around the lake, should be nice."

Yeah right.

For the first half hour (probably more really) we caught glimpses of the lake. For some reason that was completely inexplicable the bike/walking path doesn’t follow the lake all the time. Instead it meanders (my hated word for the day) casually over towards Black Mountain and has strange curves and loops in it that make no sense. There’s no tree, giant rock, sleeping politician to avoid and yet every so often it has a completely pointless U-shaped bend in it. For ages we saw more bikes whizzing past than water views. Eventually the path made it to the lake, but it turns out the lake was also designed with strange little bends in it. I think the man-made lake suffers from river envy or something.

We eventually made it to the city after many more meandering paths and pointless turns. You know the path was put in first and the trees that it appears to wind around put in later and when your legs are already threatening to fall off it doesn’t seem all pretty and countryish, it instead makes you want to find who designed it and strangle them with the last of your energy.

So yes, it took roughly 3 hours and many a rant from me before we dragged ourselves down to the food court in the Canberra Centre and tried to undo all that exercise with some Hungry Jacks while we waited for our bus which we had, inevitably, just missed. I crashed into bed as soon as we got home and slept until dinner. Luckily Ben likes cooking and wasn’t as tired since he usually walks around the city in his lunch breaks at speeds you usually only see when watching those funny, walking races you see in the Olympics.

I’m back in bed again and will probably only drag my carcass out of bed long enough to take off my makeup. On the plus side I do appear to be getting overall fitter in that I wasn’t out of breath for any of the walk. It seems to be just that the muscles in my legs weren’t used to quite that much exercise so that’s where all the tiredness/soreness seems to be. As I said, they’re definitely going on strike.

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