Happy Birthday to the Queen!

Monday was a public holiday here: it was the Queen's birthday celebration. Not that I'm complaining, but it's a very mysterious holiday:

• Britain doesn't actually celebrate the Queen's birthday; just British commonwealths do, it seems
• All of the states in Australia celebrate her birthday on the same day in June, except for Western Australia, which celebrates it in a different month. New Zealand celebrates on an entirely different day.
• None of these celebration days are on the actual Queen's birthday; my guess is that each place just picks a month when it seemed like there neededto be a reason to party and made that the celebration day.

Anyway, I'm a fan of the holiday since it meant a nice three-day weekend. One of the British expats I work with seemed especially excited about actually having a holiday celebrating the monarch's birthday, as he'd never had one before moving here. He brought in a whole display and British treats to work on Friday to kick off the celebrations!

Toby and I celebrated the day by taking a little roadtrip south of the city to the Southern Highlands.

The Southen Highlands is full of tiny towns and villages, that just like the towns in the Blue Mountains, look like they haven't changed in decades. It's also in a wine region so there are lots of picturesque wineries around, as well as livestock farms.

We took Bill the Yaris out for the day, and he was a champ! I did end up taking a few wrong exits getting out of the city - so much so that we ended up in the airport parking garage - but after that detour, we were off!

It felt really weird to see the speedometer at 110; it kind of freaked me out, even though that was the speed limit on the highway.

Don't worry, Toby took this picture!

Another thing that was weird was that there were practicality no billboards on the side of the highway. Occasionally, we'd see an ad attached to an overpass, but along the roads, there was nothing marring the view of the countryside. It was lovely.

We didn't have a particular destination in mind, so we stopped when something caught our eye. One of those was a lookout point where we could see a whole valley.

We next stopped in a small town called Moss Vale for some coffee and walking around. It was a cute little town, and probably looked exactly the same as it did 50 years ago.

We walked around for a while, and then we decided to make our way home on some back roads by farms and vineyards.

When we got back to the city, we decided to do the most Australian thing we could think of: we went to a pub and watched rugby. Or rather, Toby watched it and I wrote a blog post!

It was by far the best Queen's birthday I've ever celebrated!

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