P365 – Day 363 – fun afternoon (and year in review 10/12)

For today’s ‘let’s get out of the house’ trip, we ventured a little further afield and went to Alpenrail in Claremont. 

It’s a model Swiss Railway, which has been operating since 1985, and apparently is one of the biggest in the world.

Juniordwarf had already been there with his Grandmother and was very keen for a return visit, but neither Slabs nor I had been.

It’s rather cool to watch the show and see the trains running around the track, and the amount of work that has obviously gone into the model is phenomenal. It took seven years to build, plus ongoing work sine then.

There are also some smaller models that visitors can operate themselves, as well as the most beautiful faery garden, which I would have loved to have taken the time to explore, but which Juniordwarf rushed through at his standard pace.

After that we went to the Montrose Foreshore Community Park, where there is a huge climbing rope structure in a great kids playground. Every time we drive past the park, Juniordwarf tells us how he climbed to the top of the climbing frame the day he went there with his class.

When we got there I appreciated exactly how tall it was, and thought that Juniordwarf meant he’d climbed to the top platform.

But no, he meant to the actual top – as high as you can go.

I was terrified watching him. Even though his climbing skills have improved dramatically in recent months, I thought that this was a bit much of a challenge for him.

As I watched him go higher and higher, past the platform, I was preparing myself to have to get in there as quickly as I could in case he fell off. I was fully expecting him to.

Oh mother of little faith.

He had no fear, was completely sensible about the whole thing, navigated the route that suited him best, made it to the top and then all the way down without a hitch.

It was all I could do to stop myself saying, ‘be careful’, but I bit my tongue. He knew what he was doing, he’d done it before and I had to let him know I believed in him.

Once he’d made it safely back to earth, we tried out the exercise equipment, and then set off on the recently opened Boardwalk, which is part of the Glenorchy Arts and Sculpture Park (GASP). 

I have a photo of the boardwalk in development from back in April.

As the boardwalk was being build, Juniordwarf had been fascinated by it as we drove past each morning. He’d say, ‘I like all the blue-y bits. I like all the orange-y bits.’ And so on until the end.

This was my second (and Juniordwar’fs third) walk along it. I think it looks a lot better when you’re actually on it than it does from a distance. The different colours are fascinating and I love how the main colours blend from one to the next.

I wonder what the walk is like from Juniorwarf’s perspective, as he’s not quite tall enough to see over the top. I get the impression he’d get the feeling that he was basically walking through a giant liquorice allsort.

It was a fun afternoon.

October: Yeah! Cookies!

I loved so many of my October posts. It was impossible to pick a favourite, so I settled on this one, because who doesn’t like choc-chip cookies?