After my 5k run and a shower this morning, I suggested to my wife that we could go out for a bit of a drive. She suggested exploring another inner west suburb, and decided on St Peters.
As I drove out of our driveway, I was inching carefully forwards, preparing to turn left into our street (remember that we drive on the left here in Australia, so I wasn’t crossing any traffic). Our street is fairly quiet, but the approach from the right hand side of our driveway comes around a blind corner, so we have to be careful and come out slowly, in cases someone is coming around the corner from the right. So naturally I had my eyes glued to the right as I pulled out…
And another car came racing down our street from the left. You might think this is not a problem, since it would naturally be on the other side of the street, nowhere near me. But not so. It had swerved onto the wrong side of the street at high speed to avoid a speed bump, and so was coming at me from the left. Where (in Australia) you would NEVER expect an oncoming car to be coming from. See the diagram below:
I’m the blue car, edging out of my driveway, peering right in case a car comes around that blind corner on the left side of the map. And the red car came hurtling down the street, swerving onto the wrong side to avoid the speed bump, around the wrong side of the pedestrian safety island, and came within centimetres of hitting me. Fortunately it missed. But sheesh.
Anyway, following this we drove over to St Peters and explored the area. We stopped to get my wife a coffee at a cafe named Copper, which she’d looked up before and was keen to try. Just as we arrived a horde of about 20 seven-year-old-ish boys arrived, with mothers trying to herd them in to the only table inside. This caused chaos in the cafe for about 10 minutes and was incredibly loud, as you might imagine. Eventually we managed to order a coffee and she had it on an outside table, while the kids inside sang “Happy Birthday” and a guy ran out with plates of cake for all the mothers standing outside (since there was no room inside the tiny cafe).
Then we went next door to Fuel Bakery, where I had a sausage roll and a lamb pie, which were both excellent. Then we walked around and explored the neighbourhood.
We found a crafts workshop, which did lessons for people. the woman inside was very friendly and chatted with us for several minutes. The place was in an old factory that used to press vinyl records! My wife took a business card and is planning to go back for a resin jewellery workshop one day.
Further on was a community garden, full of fruit and vegetable plots.
And back near where we had parked the car, there are these old brick kilns.
We also stopped at Miss Lilly’s cake shop in Newtown, just across the suburb boundary of St Peters, where I had a very excellent orange almond cake slice. Like really good – I’ve had a lot of orange almond cake and this may well have been the very best I’ve ever had.
Back at home, this afternoon I wrote what might be the last Irregular Webcomic! strips. I finished off the Stranger Things theme story, which is the last one to be completed. I took the photos, and will start assembling them tomorrow.
Enchiladas for dinner, three ethics classes, and relaxing for the evening…. a busy day!
New content today:
