A Walk in Amaroo

For our walk today, I decided it was time for a change of scenery. So instead of walking around the neighborhood, we went and walked around a different neighborhood in a nearby suburb, Amaroo. I've been thinking for a while that I might walk around in different suburbs, check things out, and take some pictures. Eventually, I'd like to do one in every suburb in Canberra, but with over 100 suburbs (and several more being built right now), that might be a bit ambitious.



This is a house we pass when we walk around the Yerrabi Pond. Usually I only see the side and the back, so it was nice to walk in front of it today. I've never seen what it looks like inside, but I really like the look of it from the outside.



This one, on the other hand, I don't like. And it's HUGE. Google says it's 80 ft wide by around 40 ft deep, so with 2 stories, that comes in at around 6400 square feet. That's nearly 3 times the national average for new homes, which are generally huge compared to older homes (in the 60s, the average house size was around 1300 square feet, growing to around 1700 square feet by the early 80s). Which just goes to show that some people have a lot more money (Google tells me that it sold for $940k 5 years ago) than brains. Or taste. Although to be fair, this is far from the ugliest, obviously expensive house in the area. It's just one I happened to be walking by today.



When we got to the top of this hill, we found a playground, and Tom thought it might be a good idea if I sat down and had a little rest, while he got out of his stroller and run around and play for a while. I didn't argue. This pic is looking back down the hill in the direction we came from.




Same thing, only using the zoom. If you click on it and look at the original, you can see the light green roof of the house in the first pic, a half mile away and 100 feet below us.



Tom had another play at the first playground we'd passed near the start of our walk. I'd told him that if he was good, we'd stop on the way back. I thought that he might forget about it since he got to play at the other playground. He didn't.



While he was going up the ladder, through the tube, and down the slide 688 times, I wandered around a little. I don't know what kind of flowers these are, but I saw them in 6 or 7 different colors today.



The Broken Windows Theory in action. Apparently, there are quite a few houses that were built (or partially built) and abandoned. Some of them have been sitting empty for years (this one was built nearly 10 years ago), and a lot of them get vandalized.



As we were heading back across the footbridge over the pond, a water hen came to see if we had any food. When it saw that we didn't, it took off through the grass heading back to the water.

That's ten walking days in a row. And the fourth day in a row with more than one walk.

Oh, and if I haven't mentioned it before, I'm freaking LOVING Google Earth for planning my walks. Using the Ruler tool, I can mark and measure out the distance of each walk, and I can save them so that I can use them again later. And I just discovered today that I can then view a Elevation Profile of the path I'm walking, so that I can where the hills are. That came in very handy today, because even though I've driven around in Amaroo enough to know that hill was there, for some reason I thought it was steeper than it was. It's hard to tell when you're driving a car, but checking it out in Google Earth can help a lot.