Local knowledge……

It certainly took a bit of local knowledge to get me to a Probus event yesterday morning.  A small snippet about a motor accident heard on the radio at 6.30am had me trying to visualise which route to take because the traffic management place only gave the names of two streets but no details about how far down those roads the road block had been put in place.

‘Should I go the back way and hope I can get across the main road and then take a shortcut through a side street half way up the hill because the main road will be blocked at the roundabout’ or ‘Should I go straight down the other main road and hope I can get round the roundabout’ or ‘Should I go straight ahead at the traffic lights then weave my way through local streets and then cut back to arrive at where I want to be?’ Decisions Decisions.  All the time thinking of those involved in what by 7.30am was actually being called ‘a serious collision’

Good job I went directly to the roundabout because The Golfer went the back way and discovered the traffic was being diverted further down the hill than I anticipated and would have had to have done a Uturn to find another way LOL

Waiting in line for a cuppa at the morning tea break when someone asked me if I had daughters who played netball when they were much younger.  Oh my, it’s got to have been 25 years at least since I’d seen this lady (she along with her husband used to run the local newsagency) and yes, one of my girls played sport with one of hers.  With there being more than 70 members I don’t always notice faces and I certainly hadn’t seen hers before so it was a lovely surprise when she recognised me (but then she could have just seen my name badge lol)

Now each month I usually sit with a person who has only been living in the area for a short time so she was full of questions about what changes had taken place over the years, we talked and reminisced for a while and you should have seen my companions face when we got to the time of the protest meeting.  After a noisy protest meeting the council turned up at 6am the next day to cut down a beautiful Moreton Bay Fig – well before anyone realised what was going on – which they had said was in the line of a road widening scheme and down it must come.  Residents protested but down it came 😦

I smiled when my friend said ‘how lovely it was to hear all this from locals, they have so much knowledge tucked away’ I smiled because even tho’ I’ve lived here for over 40 years it was the first time anyone had referred to me as ‘a local’ 🙂