Suburb #1 Hawker - the reboot edition

When I visited Hawker on my first round of suburban adventures, I had only been there to look at a flat and to go to Rocksalt for lunch. Since then I have spent a lot more time in the area, with one of my favourite people now a local and lots of pandemic walks around the local area, so I was excited to start my suburb journey reboot here on a perfect Canberra autumn day...

Hawker, in North Canberra, established in 1972, now has a population of more than 3,000. 

I started my adventures at the local shops. It was sad to see the second hand bookshop has gone, but otherwise very little seems to have changed since my last visit....

Other than the fabulous new intersection... ha ha - sorry infrastructure memories...

Leaving the local shops, Hawker was showing off its Autumn glory...

And then it was off to the fabulous Pinnacle nature reserve - which I missed the first time around...

 But even back in the suburban streets....fabulous nature was everywhere :) 

And I was also able to spot the things I always keep an eye out on my suburb journeys...a street library, something creepy, something cute, a weird mailbox, a fun playground (with slide!!!!) and a sign of decay/times past (poor tennis court..).

Thank you Hawker for a lovely afternoon and a great start to my new adventures :) 

 

Blog reboot time!

So 10 years ago I created this blog...and it took on a life of its own in 2014, when I had the crazy idea to visit every suburb in Canberra at least once.  It took me 5 years, but I did it. It made me fall in love with my adopted home of Canberra, and taught me a lot about myself and my wonderful city. 

A decade later Canberra is a very different place. Afterall, more than 50,000 extra people now live here and it is potentially not the sleepy "waste of a good sheep paddock" that it used to be😜

Canberra's new tourism slogan 'there's more than they're telling us' kind of makes me giggle, but its pretty apt really. You just have to know where to look :) I really need one of these mugs by the way...

But I digress....so anyway, I have decided to reboot my blog and do it all again! Visiting each suburb again in the same order I did last time (plus any new ones!) and discovering, what has changed, what has stayed the same and what I missed the first time around!  

It is time to fall back in love with my home city (after cheating on it with Merimbula for 12 months...oops). Canberra has changed, but so have I - a Belco local, very very single, possibly improved by therapy (jury is still out perhaps ha ha), changed by covid and several changes in job, with a new love of the outdoors and art - so I will be interested to see if my suburban adventures also look different with this new perspective.

This time I also intend to undertake my adventures mostly on foot (rather than by car) - using the fabulous Walk Canberra website for inspiration (which didn't exist last time around). 

So anyway, time to start where it all began in the Hawker....