Floriade - Tick Tock, Tick Tock... Bloom!

Many of the pieces here at A Grey Area are designed to help you avoid modern pitfalls. You are welcome to learn from my mistakes. I am out there, losing my mops, swamping my ute with wet mattresses, taking my own temperature with meat thermometers and many other hazardous activities, all in the name of investigative blogging so that you don’t have to.

Today I have two handy tourist tips for when you visit Canberra to see the Floriade exhibition.

Number one. Don’t instantly assume that everywhere charges for parking quite the way Sydney charges for parking. I pulled into a car park exactly outside where we wanted to go, walked over to the Pay-and-Display ticket machine, dropped my money in and got a ticket out that said it was good till 9.30, Monday morning. Seeing as it was Saturday afternoon, I thought that was pretty good value. I thought I was paying for an hour and here I was getting closer to 40 hours for a paltry dollar fifty.

Emergency Contact said, “I don’t think you need to pay on the weekend.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

She said, “See, I think you paid for an hour like you thought you needed to, but that hour doesn’t start till 8.30 on Monday morning.”

I said, “Are you saying that this parking, here, in the middle of the so-called CBD, right where we need to go, is free?”

“Yes,” she said, laughing a little.

“I simply don’t understand.” I said, flustered. I realised that some locals were looking at me with a look that said, “Oh, bless. Look at that poor out-of-towner thinking he had to put his money in the machines on a weekend.”

What we had parked outside of, was Floriade, which leads me to tip number two.

If you want to see it next year, get there at the start. It is a spring celebration that goes for a month and largely consists of flowers. We arrived on the second-last day. The second last day of an exhibition that goes for a month and is made of flowers. See where I’m going with this?

I’m sure that in week one, maybe even week two of an exhibition of glorious, exotic, delicate flowers planted out in the Australian climate, it looked fabulous. End of week four? Not so much.

So, a little underwhelmed, we went back to our Formula 1 hotel. Now, I’m not even going to go into this experience as a tourist tip. You know everything you need to know about Formula 1 hotels already. The pixilated light board on the outside of the hotel that advertises the double-digit price per room is all the indication you need. We just didn’t have any choice. Buggered if I know why, but Canberra was full.