Rainy day .... no trip to Mungo today June 27th

We were planning to go to Mungo National Park today, but it rained in the night and we are aware that the track might be a bit less driveable there today, so we left that on the "to do" list and had a lazy morning (finally almost finishing putting together a photo book of our China trip in March) . We only ventured out in time to have lunch at Andy's Kitchen (very nice asian food and very friendly) before we decided we must have some exercise and agreed to go and walk those wetlands that we saw yesterday.

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These wetlands drain a good portion of Mildura's stormwater and filter the water, but the walk was a bit underwhelming.  There were not many birds around (maybe the cat we saw had been busy??) and it was hard to get scenic views of the wetlands themselves.

Even the bird hide didn't help us much.
They have experimental floating islands which we think we spotted, but were also not very impressive. (although the pigeons seem to like them)

The walk was good for the sake of a walk, but we decided we needed a little more, so we drove over the big bridge once more and headed to the Inland Botanic Gardens. By the time we arrived we had about 45 minutes until closing time so we made the most of it.
Here we visited some roses. These are my favourites today...

Jubilee 150

Corso

Iceberg

Helmut Schmidt

We then had a bit of a rapid walk to see the "WOW Tree" which is a 2500 year old Mallee

before heading onward to admire the "Aussie Summerhouse" which boasts an amazing ceiling of seed pods.

Such variety of seed pod, and someone took a very long time putting this creative work together!!!

We took the self drive tour of the garden and stopped to admire the Sturt Desert Peas before making an exit before they locked us in.

There is a lot more to see in this botanic garden and it deserved at least a few hours of time to really see it properly, but it will have to wait for another visit from us.