I had an awesome weekend with Andrew. He planned the most amazing date I've probably ever been on in my life. It might even be better than our first date, where we had dinner and then he brought me camping at Jarrahdale under the stars.

It all started with an email on Friday...

Can you guess what it is? The first clue is pretty clever. And he knows I am a huge Tintin fanatic so the last clue was really a giveaway. We had been planning to visit the WA museum to see the pompeii exhibition, ancient relics, body casts, 3D movies... I was so excited! And I was so pleased that I had solved the riddle that I didn't think anymore about it. I didn't even realise that the answer to his riddle was in actual fact a clue for my prize.

So the next day we started driving up North towards the city and then he quite purposefully missed the exit that was heading towards the museum. Then... he asked me to look in the glove box for a street map (even though we both probably knew how to get there without a map anyway). I found a google map printout in the glove box which I brushed aside, intent on finding a street directory, which was not there :( And I was holding the printout in my hand and Andrew said "how do you know that isn't the map?" and I looked down at it and realised he was bringing me to the Gingin gravity discovery centre and observatory! He was kidnapping me! So brilliantly done :)

The gravity centre was a wonderful place to visit with lots to do. Bushwalks, a scale model of our solar sytem, lots of fascinating, fun and well thought out experiments that demonstrated difficult concepts simply, a leaning tower of Gingin where we dropped balloons from, a huge buckyball structure that served as a gallery, with beautiful penrose tiling inside, plus we had an excellent guide (Grant, the astronomer) who immediately picked up that Andrew and I are both science nerds and he made it very informative and relevant for us. The centre is researching gravitational waves first postulated by Einstein on the basis of his theory of relativity. He thought that every object that has mass creates a fluctuation in space-time, distorting gravity and causing a gravitational wave. So these are supposed to exist but they have never been directly detected! It's so trippy! There have been gravity wave detectors made, but none of them have been sensitive enough. Right now, WA scientists are building the world's stillest environment in Gingin to try and detect these gravitational waves, and many UWA physicists are basing their PhDs on this stuff. I'm glad they are doing it, because all of this is way beyond me!

After the gravity centre closed its doors, we waited for the sun to set and we went right next door to the observatory. We were fortunate because the sky was so beautifully clear, not a cloud in the sky! We learned how to identify Scorpio, Libra, Virgo, Leo and the Southern Cross in the night sky. We watched the international space station fly over us at precisely 7.23p.m.. Then we took to our telescopes to see Saturn and it's rings (so beautiful I actually cried!), beautiful binary stars, the jewel box in the Southern Cross, the craters on the moon and heaps more. It's amazing what's out there and how very very large a scale it is. The light entering our telescopes was sometimes 1000s of years old and the stars that emitted the light might not even exist anymore. So fascinating. And while we were out there we saw at least 4 shooting stars (the answer to the riddle!), too many wishes for me to make, I am already so happy just as things are. And once we all got too cold to stand out on the viewing deck we were all ushered inside for hot coffees and teas and some really funny and interesting presentations. At the end of the night we all got a little "piece of the galaxy"... a milky way chocolate bar! How appropriate and very sweet :)

What a wonderful day of science and astronomy. If any of you have a free day to spare... make your way up to Gingin! Great fun for the whole family!