ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE ...

 ... Wellington without your eyes tearing up.

It's a great day and I've been out and about enjoying the sunshine with no chill factor winds.

After a walk about town I took a bus ride on a route I've never been on before - Number 24 Miramar Heights.

I wanted to view suburbs and properties on the way. From the railway station this route went through the inner city to Courtenay Place and then followed the road around Oriental Bay to Evans Bay. From there it went past the airport to Miramar but turned left after the Miramar cutting and went up to Mount Crawford. In all my years living in Wellington I've never taken this road, either literally or figuratively as it leads to Mount Crawford prison. The views across Wellington harbour to the city and across the harbour entrance to Eastbourne and Cape Palliser are stunning. Here would be a great place to build or buy a house.

The bus route meandered around extremely narrow and windy roads necessitating other vehicles to reverse or drive up onto the footpath at times and encircled the flat area of Miramar. At one point it went past Totara Road in the hills where I had a girlfriend named Helen in the 7th form at school. See: SOX

I stopped off at the Miramar shops where WETA and Peter Jackson's cinema are. There are lots of cafes and bakeries (soon to do a starve with the huge layoff of staff at WETA Studios) and I had lunch there.

I spied a lot of desirable apartments along Oriental Parade but it may be that we won't be in the market for an apartment. Recent research I've done suggests that purchasing an apartment in Wellington is not financially viable due to low capital growth, the length of time it takes to on-sell and the excessively high body corporate fees, on top of rates, due to high earthquake insurance. All this on top of the physical risks in an earthquake. Purchasing a townhouse would be a better option. 

Fortunately The Old Girl is coming to this conclusion as well and, living in an inner city apartment for the next few months will likely strengthen that view. Apartment living can be noisy, too hot or too cold, prone to evacuation with fire drills and false alarms, logistically difficult to bring things in and take things out like furniture, shopping and rubbish etc. You can see by this that I'm in favour of buying a townhouse. The problem is though that there are more apartments than townhouses in the inner city/waterfront area where we want to live. We will just have to wait until an opportunity arises so may well keep renting for a while next year.

If, in time a suitable townhouse isn't available, we may opt to rent an apartment in the longterm rather than buy one. We can leave the house sale money in the bank to earn interest (assuming that we ever sell the house), rent a better apartment than we could probably buy, not have to pay body corporate fees and leave the worry about lift repair, structural issues, earthquake rating issues and other council imposed restrictions to the landlord.