hills and hills and hills

One of the nice things about the place we're renting is that it's fairly centrally located within Auckland.  This means we can walk to most places we need to go.  From our home it's only about a 12 minute walk to my office, a 15 minute walk to the Skytower, and anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes to pretty much any other place we might need to go in the city.  This is something we're really excited about as it will help us to save money on petrol and get to know our city better, to understand it's places and contours in an up close, personal manner.  

Speaking of contours though, a downside of our current location is that we're literally on the downside of everything.  Almost every single place we might need or want to walk is uphill from our house.  Even getting to the few places that are downhill from us usually requires going uphill first.  This is one of the results of Auckland's quite turbulent geothermal and tectonic history.  Some of the hills around us have slight, gradual inclines and others are definitely less gradual, either way though it's all uphill for us.  

Practically for me this means I'll be walking at least 12 minutes uphill and 12 minutes downhill almost every day.  Right now that's a rather tiring endeavor since I've gotten pretty out of shape since Sophia was born.  Hopefully though  it means in a year I'll be in much better shape from my daily commute alone.  With this in mind, and out of curiosity, I'm posting pictures that Brooke took of my calves today.  A year from now I'll post some "compare and contrast" photos to see if this daily hill trek does me any visible good.