Pedestrian Access

I’m sure many of you are familiar with the phrase pedestrian access. In Wellington however I’ve learned to look at the Pedestrian Access sign, sigh and go through a complicated stretching/warm up exercise.

Wellington is built in a nice sheltered bay, its not that big and in order to take advantage of the area there are a lot of terraces and places built on hills. Remind me to tell you about rental property known as “you got to be ****ing me”. So in downtown Wellington you cannot necessarily get to a place by car fast even though its only two blocks over, you have to take a long curving path to get up to the right level. The city planners though knew that people on foot could just walk over to where they needed to be so they built Pedestrian Access points to help out those environmentally friendly people who want to walk.

Did I mention the height difference? Blaise and I needed to catch a bus which stopped on The Terrace; we were down on Willis and saw a sign that said “pedestrian access to The Terrace”. We knew after our first day to expect a few stairs turns out we just got lucky in our first day; today would be a whole other story. As we stood at the bottom of the walkway and looked up we suddenly realized that we were no longer in Canada. The stairs rose into the face of the cliff, they zig-zagged back and forth; to get to the top of this thoughtful pedestrian access we were looking at 10+ storeys of stairs. We were breathing hard that first day and joking about how we better get in shape fast, now I’m convinced that by the end of our first week we will be in shape due to necessity rather than any conscious effort on our part.

We made it by the way, only problem was that the bus we wanted to catch didn’t run on weekends…at least going down was way easier.