In the Flesh

Our new house in Kingston is almost finished, but – because of pandemic restrictions to cross-border travel – we had still seen neither the house nor the land that it sits on. The whole project had thus far been conducted entirely over the internet.

The border between ACT and TAS opened in mid-November, and Link Airways laid on an unusual direct service from Canberra to Hobart, so we took the opportunity to fly down and – for the first time – see our project in the flesh.

There was a short delay at Canberra Airport when the ground crew realised that the HF aerial had snapped from the top of the fuselage and was wrapped around the tail fin (you can just about see it at the top of the photo below), but in the end we boarded anyway. I chatted briefly to the captain on the way up the stairs, and he quipped “We don’t use HF anyway”.

Although the builders had been good at posting progress photos on the internet, we’d never seen any of it for real, so it was with some trepidation that we approached the building site for the first time.

We were relieved to find that it all looked exactly as we expected.

This visit also gave us a welcome opportunity to look at the surrounding area. The last time we’d seen pictures of the plot was from our bush-fire assessment, when there was nothing there but empty grass. Today, what a different picture!

The fledgling streets are crammed with tradesmen’s vehicles, skips, back-hoes, pile of earth, stacks of temporary fencing. The houses are springing up like mushrooms along the edge of the creek, which has been planted with native shrubs in plastic tubes.

The neighbouring buildings are quite close, so we are glad that we are in a quiet cul-de-sac to the front, with creek and shrubbery to the rear. It will be interesting to meet our new neighbours; from the state of their buildings, it looks like we’ll all be taking up residence together, early in the New Year.

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