This week of spring break we've been sticking close to home. Maddy's studying hard for exams and preparing college applications and Sam and I have been doing projects here, too. Still, we wanted to do a few things that felt extraordinary so we invented a new mini tradition on the spot: spring break lunch club. For each of these last three days of break, we've decided to find new lunch places in interesting/spectacular settings before hunkering back down in the afternoon to be (various degrees of) productive.

Today we picked the cafe at the National Arboretum. A few years ago there was a huge bushfire that swept through this part of Canberra, stripping it of its trees. While the Arboretum is absolutely beautiful now it's also all about cultivating patience and awaiting its potential to sprout and grow. The views of Canberra from there are spectacular.

We love the huge script sculpture up on the windswept hill: wide brown land after the lines in the poem My Country by Dorothy Mackellar:

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown land for me!

p.s. Did you know that this week Canberra was named by the OECD again as the best place in the world to live? We think she's pretty terrific, too--she might not be quite as exciting to visit compared to her glitzier sisters Sydney and Melbourne but we have found Canberra to be a really great place to live.