My father asked me to put some pictures and maps on the web, so as to show the lay of the land better. Well, stitching together panoramas by hand^Wgimp sucks so I didn't find the time to do it - until today.

(Well, I know of some gimp tools that can make this easier - however I haven't played with them yet, and my gimp capabilities are between modest and lousy. Also my machine doesn't really suffer gimp with 15+ 2048x1536 jpgs very well; selection moves are multi-second operations...)

These maps are from Whereis. The crosshair icon shows the street address, but the complex covers a fair bit of space. The red dot on the smaller map shows my house, the dark green blob is the hill/wilderness area. You can see that it's about 1500m to the beach. On the large-scale map just to the N there's a golf course and a sport area with the primary school Conny went to last year (the green area). West, across Bermuda Street and the water you see Bond Uni (the area within the circular road). It's obvious that walking to work is a pretty good idea over driving the big detour (the roads west of my place do not connect to Bermuda St).

When you drive through the complex, you see the hill and my garage (the right-most one), with the foot path leading to my house. The second pic obviously shows how things look from the slope of the hill down. It's actually a lot more beautiful, but the trees, palms and other assorted shrubs kept me from photographing the hills on the horizon better.

Just outside of the complex to the SW (where the Grebe Place road has the bend) there's a nice open park (and some new developments along Bermuda St... grrrrr). I cross this every time I walk to work, and today I took some photos. The first is the view towards the east. My house is where the hill begins, behind the corner where the fences meet (left third of the photo). The blocky thing on the horizon above the gap in the fences is a 10-storey building on the beach.

What follows next took me about forever to produce - and these are pretty big files, too (700k to 1.4meg). Why should only I suffer...

The first panorama was obviously taken in the park and spans the whole 360°. The hill is E, the one bigger house S, the crane about W. The blue thing is the ugly new shopping centre development at Bermuda Street, and the high buildings right of the crane are where work is. The hills in the background belong to the Gold Coast hinterland. We fly on the ridges W of the visible one (because it's in restricted airspace due to Coolangatta airport).

The second panorama shows the back side of the house and the hill. It also spans 360°.

The last panorama spans 180° from S to N, in front of the house. To the right there's neighbours, the footpath in the middle leads to the garage (and W), and behind me there's the hill.

I think, dear father, that this should do for an area description. Agreed?