The apartment and views therefrom

 This will be an on-going post to hold general burble about the apartment and what we see from it!  Lets begin with the logo of the building:

Here is a street level view of St Kilda Rd outside the building, looking towards the CBD.
This is a view from the Winter Garden looking down on the traffic layout.  There are at least 6 'lanes' on each side of the road.  1 Pedestrian lane (could be counted as two lanes as goes both ways); 2 Bike lane; 3 Slip lane i (also car parks in places); 4 slip lane ii (no parking); 5 Through lane for vehicles; 6 Tram tracks.  It is repeated in the opposite direction on the other side of the road.
Here is a view of the building from a side street on the Albert Park side of the road.  I think the arrow points at our apartment.
The entrance to the car park.  It is important to get this right as if you miss it (from the slip lane) you have to go on to Commercial Rd; do a u-turn; back to St Kilda Rd; 400m North to Leopold St; another u-turn (which takes time to give way to the trams) and 300m back to try again.

Once in the airlock of security doors here is the lobby.

Looking from the concierge desk towards the Fawkner Tower lifts.  (There is a second/ lower tower towards St Kilda Rd.)  The hall looks good for reps training with a nice slope, but so far the only exercise I have seen going on here is some Chinese sword-fighting!
A view from the Winter Garden towards Port Melbourne.
War of the Worlds anyone?
Port Melbourne cranes by night.  I need to work out how to take a time exposure so as to get details of the lights on the cranes.  
On the evening of the 14th there was a backdrop of dark clouds which showed the lit-up cranes rather well.  I tried to zoom in on them without opening the louvres but that didn't work too well: I shall experiment next time there is a good backdrop.
The cranes, and which lights are lit continually change.  This is another version from early in the evening.  I don't know what the blue needle-object is attached to!
Looking a bit further round towards the South I realised we could just see the You-Yang range in the background.  Google Earth tells me they are ~50 km away to the WSW.  (We can also see as far as Sorrento to the South: that is 57km, so need binoculars at least to see any detail.)
Looking to the North we have views of the CBD skyline.  We were surprised to find that the spike towards the RHS of the image was the spire of the Arts Centre, rather than, as expected a radio antenna on a high-rise.
A different bit of the City.
Looking out to sea, with the setting sun reflected in the higher building.
In the Fawkner Park post I show a helicopter parked in the Alfred Hospital heliport (which straddles Commercial Rd).  Here is a set of images from the Winter Garden of an incoming helicopter.




I have a Marine traffic app on my phone, which is quite useful at Mallacoota as ships come round the corner.  It is very useful here as the vessels come in to the port.  This is the wide view.
A close ship.
Here is the entry on the app for AAL.
Another view of a ship.
It could become rather addictive (perhaps trainspotting is the metaphor) photographing and identifying the ships as they come into the port.  This is a vehicle carrier "Morning Cherry" which arrived from Freemantle and sails under a Panamanian flag.  EUKOR is the owner, with details in this: not surprisingly (from KOR) Hyundai and Kia feature in the ownership.
On the weekend there were many yachts out and about.

They all disappeared as the morning developed, but in the afternoon reappeared much further South.  I wonder if they had raced to Sorrento and back?

The clouds were impressive in the afternoon.



Back to index.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I rec...
Read more

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are ...
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the bird...
Read more