A sunny almost fall day

Today, for the first time, I looked at the tide table and decided to go for a walk on the beach at low tide. I can't believe we've been here nine months, we live 15-20 minutes from the ocean, and I've never gone for a walk on the beach in Dunedin. I've been wanting to post some pictures of my ride to the university, so I'll start with those, because the road to the beach goes right by the university. We live in a narrow valley that goes northeast from the northern part of town. So to get just about anywhere, we go about a quarter mile south on the main street that runs along the bottom of the valley. After about a quarter mile is a shopping area, with a supermarket, bank, pharmacy, used bookstore, and some resturants and other shops. Just past all the shops is the Botanic Gardens on the left. The first photo shows the bike lane (between the parked cars and the moving cars) that goes beside the Botanic Garden, where I ride to the university.

Just past the Botanic Garden the road going into town merges with highway 1, the main north-south highway that goes the length of the South Island. It is pretty funny to ride my bike on the main highway just to get to the university. Highway 1, as far as I can tell, has only a few miles of freeway on the whole South Island. It goes right through the middle of all the towns and cities. In Dunedin, highway 1 splits into two one-way streets, one going north and one south, both with bike lanes, so we end up riding on it a lot. Sometimes really big trucks whiz by us. The next photo shows the scenic view about halfway between the Botanic Gardens and the University, which is up ahead on the left in about five blocks.

Just past the university is one of my favorite sights on the one-way street: the Castle Street Panel Beaters. That's the New Zealand name for a body shop, and for some reason I find that name ceaselessly entertaining.

At the south end of downtown, I left highway 1 and drove through a bunch of smaller streets to get to the neighborhood called St. Clair, which is right along the beach. The beach in Dunedin runs almost exactly east-west, with St. Clair on the western end, a big headland. To the east is another big headland, which you can see in the photo below. The yellow truck says "Learn to Surf" and there were a group of surfers in the water today.

One noteworthy aspect of the next photo is the rock in the background. It's a little island called White Island, and it's the triangular island we could see from our rental house. It's in lot of the pictures of the views from that house that I took in the second half of 2007.

The next photo shows the view looking east again.

And the next one shows the view looking west to the part of Dunedin called St. Clair. The houses on the hill are the most expensive houses in town.

The next one is a closeup of the expensive real estate, plus a woman and a dog.

And here are yet more of the expensive houses, with a coffee shop in the foreground, the yellow building. This coffee shop is noteworthy because our son, Mike, wrote a lot of his masters thesis in that coffee shop when he was here over Christmas. Almost every day he would ride Dave's bike from our rental house, high above the town, to the beach and write in the coffee shop.

I walked on the beach with a windbreaker on, and then later with the windbreaker off and just a short-sleeved teeshirt. It's the equivalent of mid October, but the trees are just barely turning gold, and the days are still in the 60s. We turn on our heat in the morning for an hour or two, but most days warms up quickly. It definitely seems warmer than Seattle in October.