Jean, through her Social Bridge blog, has inspired this posting by asking to see a version of down town. It’s hard to get me out of the bat cave as I don’t often venture into town if I can avoid it, but when I do it’s usually for a meeting at the cultural centre, so straight to that carpark and up the lift to the meeting rooms. I don’t dilly dally. Not good with large crowds.
The Bat Cave.
My down town couldn’t be more different to Jean’s, so to give you some idea; I live in the (near) northern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia, 29.5km from the city which takes 26 minutes by very fast train. (When I choose to drive often the train overtakes me while I do the speed limit of 100k – the train, it seems, has no such limit.)
When I was studying for my degree between 1998 and 2001, I frequently used the train to go from home to Mt Lawley and WAAPA or ECU Campus. I kept a notebook of poems and prose, ‘Rail Tales’ was re-printed in 2012
“Rail Tales” re-published chapbook, 2012
I did do a ‘Coming home, 2003’ blog entry with lots of photos of the car trip, taken when we returned from Ireland.
Ocean Reef Road leading to the sea, 5 min from where I live.
I recently Re-Blogged a post about our city which has amazing photos of the buildings; “Perth, is that you?”
From the blog entry “Perth, is that you?’
Everyone drives a car here, it’s necessary because there are distances involved in going anywhere.
“Two Rocks is an outer suburb at the northern edge of Perth, the state capital of Western Australia, Australia, located 61 kilometres north of the city’s central business district.”
My hubby does most of the shopping because we run a small food production business (registered) from home and I hate shopping. If I go when I’m hungry, I buy all the worst goodies; so best I don’t go and I hate shopping for clothes. I’m a maker, so my favourite shops are also within 5min (Spotlight) and 9min (Office Works) respectively.
Coat made for a recent wedding.
As I mentioned, I very seldom go down town. We have wonderful shopping centres near us ranging from HUGE (Whitfords City, Lakeside, Joondalup just one train stop away North or South, or 5 -10 mins by car) to smaller local shops with a large supermarket plus more than 20 retail outlets including hairdressers, chemist and post office plus the obligatory fast food outlets, within walking distance of home.
However, I do often drive down south (skirting the city) to visit my children and grandchildren; a trip of 50.2km there and another 50.2km home again. The city boundaries extend about the same distance down south. This map shows the Transperth Zones where my children live in Zone 3 to give you an idea of the distances.
Depending on the time of day the trip can take anything from 42min to more than 60 min each way on our freeway, so I usually leave at home 10am and get back before 3.30pm.
Always worth doing; my grandies are (naturally) adorable and because it’s cold and wintery at the moment, I’m busy making beanies for them in various colours. Of course, that means lots of trips to Spotlight for more wool and perhaps some more material for dresses, dollies etc…
What are you focussed on – right now?
@FrancesMForde #FrancesMacForde #BOOK:RailTales #DownTown #PerthCity #TwoRocks #NorthernSuburbs
Perth Words... exploring possibilities. 