Virtual Rambling (Our World) Where You Live

Hi all Many of you live many thousands of miles from Coventry, in environments that so many of us back here in Coventry can only imagine what it is like. The technology of Google Maps, is mind blowing almost, where within the confines of our PC screens, we can drop onto anywhere on our globe. During the last hour or so, I have had a peep in onto streets in Australia, then moved on to India & South Africa, before heading back home using my mouse. If you have a favourite location, maybe near to where you live, work, or where you go shopping or whatever, please tell us about it. Please give us a few clues as to where it is, so that we can then do a virtual ramble, when we are off the forum, courtesy of Google maps. I would love to think that I was standing next to Dreamtime looking at what she is referring to, or Primrose across the big pond. Please don't give away or compromise your security in this. Please feel free to share in the same way, if you are living in Scotland, Wales or any part of the UK. We have this none Coventry section to our forum so we might as well use it, especially if it brings us a bit closer in our friendship with one another. Let's see how it goes. ***************************************************************** Remember, please do not compromise your security with what you post. I enjoy your company far too much to risk that becoming an issue.

Hi Philip, What a lovely idea. I will certainly do my best for you. Here's a start for you. I live in Kalamunda, a quiet, old and very 'Federation' type of town, as it is hardly a city, in the foothills and not spoilt by high rises and still maintains its historic interests and buildings. As I live in a new villa (you would call it a bungalow) it is not on the google maps yet but shows the old garden nursery site that was once there. You know how old the google maps are. We do have our larger shopping centres, if you care to look for Midland, that is our local haunt (even shoe shops!!!). Guildford is a really old but small Australian townsite and is where my daughter and I like to browse and chat to anyone sitting at the next table, so laid back atmosphere here. It has a history of the early settlers and plenty of wineries to choose from, the Sandleford being one where they hold the open air celebrity concerts - excellent on a balmy summer night with your favourite bottle of plonk. You could zoom in on to the West Coast Highway and follow the coastal road up the west coast or even have a gander round the Perth foreshore which will be undergoing great changes very soon, for the tourists' benefit I might add. You might even see the Bell Tower also on the foreshore. If you have the time pop down to Fremantle and visit the old Roundhouse where they used to hold the prisoners off the first convict ships. I could go on but I will leave that to find out for yourself. Have a good day. Edited by member, 16th Mar 2014 3:47 am

Hi Dreamtime Pam & I have just visited McDonald's next to Beds Plus. I will see what we can do for a forum breakfast meet there, hey! Please make a note of the address, Rob!

Hi Philip, Beds Plus, Captain Snooze, Beds R Us, we have them all here Philip and a McDonalds every way you turn. Hope you enjoyed your little excursion. Do come again

Hi everyone Karan and I bought a bush block in Queanbeyan in 1985, with a lovely view across to Parliament House in Canberra. but - for me at least - the main attraction was the 40kms - in any direction except west - of beautiful runnable bushland that I can go jogging in every morning. In the satellite photo here you can see the 15km main loop to the south and back up again, but there are dozens of tiny tracklets cris-crossing the whole area. Roughly in the centre of the photo, there is a small area of deep creeks (usually dry except when we have lots of rain) and steep gullies, where I've seen lyrebirds occasionally. Whenever I go for a run, I inevitably see dozens of roos - there is one with an inverted white chevron - exactly like a Citroen logo - on his nose. We are old mates now, because I'm also a Citroen devotee. Occasionally, I also see black wallabies - usually only one at a time, but I have watched a couple of them boxing furiously! Echidnas and wombats are rarer, but still out there in decent numbers. I was once privileged to (almost!) attend the birth of a baby wombat - I heard the grunts as I was jogging along a track, and disturbed the poor little fellow and his mother seconds after the event! Oh, and I almost forgot the platypuses (platypi?) that swim around in the Queanbeyan Rive at the bottom left of the photo. Top centre of the picture is a creek, by the side of which lives a family of foxes. If I'm lucky with the wind direction, so they don't know I'm there, I've been able to watch the cubs come out and explore and play. Imported pests they might be, but oh they are cute! The bird life is also fantastic - several different species of rosella (parrot), plus all the different cockatoos - the sulphur crested, that you see as pets, but also the red-tailed black cockies - gi-normous birds with a call like a squeaky barn door. Wedgetailed eagles come down the mountains in winter, and beautiful rainbow birds come down from the north in summer. You can probably tell that I enjoy my bush runs! If any of you manage to get over here, bring your running shoes (aka "droobing boots", if you're an old KVIII type)!

Thanks for the tour JW. Nice to see how the other half live.

Hi JW. It's Derek, we met at the forum breakfast when you were last here. That is one hell of a running track you've got!

Hi all I am really enjoying this. I hope that our friends from the USA & Canada will join in. I suppose that "a lyrebird in the hand is worth two in the bush". Don't worry, I am taking the pills.

Hi Derek Yes - one lap is always enough! It's even quite an effort to get to the first turn, and after that there is a series of steep switchback hills and gullies that turns your legs to jelly!

Hi Dreamtime For a few years I used to have the occasional company of a female runner and her dog (and occasionally her very fit marathon-runner sister), and we used to solve all the world's problems as we ran. But sadly, she moved back to England three(?) years ago, so I hardly ever see anyone now. There are a few dog-walkers that I meet sometimes, but they generally stick to the bigger tracks in the more open country. It's good to have an excuse to stop and chat! Most days I do either an 10km loop along the river and back up through the bush or one of a variety of 6-8 loops climbing up the escarpment, along a bit and back down. I'm not quite the gazelle I used to be, so the more ambitious runs, including the big one, tend to be once or twice a year specials! I haven't got into the habit of taking a phone with me, because you can bet that the day I do I will drop the damned thing - but I sometimes think I ought to! Here's a true story - perhaps it should go into the "Members Poems" thread - The Scents of the Bush I went for a run, just a few days ago, as I do every day around seven. I find that the sights and the sounds of the bush are a fair proximation to heaven. I’ve been running for fitness a few Ks a day, ever since just a kid at school, And I run for an hour or so round the bush, about 8 to 10 K as a rule. Being Sunday, there wasn’t a need to be rushed, so I thought I could run a long way, And I set off determined to finish a loop of a hilly but nice fourteen K. The roos and the parrots accompanied me, and the sky was agreeably blue, Though, because of the temperature being quite low, my hands were a similar hue. I’d run about six K, and finding it tough, but was stopped by a very strange smell. It was quite unmistakeably cooking baked beans – an aroma I know very well. I’m two kilometres or more from a house, and expected to see campfire smoke. But no matter in every direction I looked - no campfire, no tent and no bloke. I tried to imagine some other way that baked bean smells could waft through the trees. I know all the gumtree aromas quite well, and it wasn’t remotely like these. Could it be the result of a clumsy attempt to genetically modify beans? An Acacia Bakedbeaniana, perhaps, - a tree that is quite rarely seen? What else could it be but a bushman’s cuisine, with no doubt a billy of tea. At that point in my run, a small share of these treats was a real attraction to me! But as far as I know, roos and wombats don’t cook – I could rule them right out as the cause. Yet the smell of baked beans was out there in the bush, and I never discovered the source/sauce.

Well done JW, I think we have another Banjo Pattison in our midst. You have a lot to draw your inspiration from. (I still think you should carry a mobile though)

Don't try this at home. This is the Oka Ice Bridge, around 50km into Quebec from the Ontario border and only opens if the ice is at least 12" thick. It is a 2km drive across what is essentially the Ottawa River and saves a huge amount of time for the locals who have to travel to Montreal's West Isle. Trees mark the route and when the trees disappear, you don't drive across (although I did a see a mad woman and her three small children in a small car negotiate the route a couple of days after the official closure). It is a 'must do' for any tourist travelling in this part of the world, quite exciting, and you can stop and chat with the ice fishermen. The nice ones will share a beer with you after having defrosted it in a generator powered microwave. When the Ice bridge closes, a ferry takes over but not immediately. There is a period of time when fast moving logs would sink a ferry like it had been hit by a torpedo. :-)

That looks like a beautiful winter's day, Mike H, and a unique piece of highway engineering! I've seen people walking their dogs and even playing ice hockey on the Danube in Vienna, but nothing quite like that. Good possibilities for ice-speedway?

Skidoos use the river for fun but nothing like ice speedway. Half way across, there is a stop sign where skidoos running up and down have to give way to traffic crossing side to side. You can't see any in the shot but there are a lot of ice fishing huts dotted over the ice a little upstream, and I doubt that ice speedway would make them very happy.