Wednesday Walk in Rockland

For my #WednesdayWalk I set out to find and photograph the place where my free TV signal comes from. It would prove to be an uphill walk.

Wednesday Walk is the creation of @tattoodjay. Check out his post here.

There's a tall building less than a mile from my house that has a bunch of radio masts and communications gear on the roof, and it broadcasts four TV channels in digital HD. Remember broadcast TV? As in no cable, you just have an antenna? That how I get my TV. Those four channels plus internet so I can have Netflix and Prime Video and whatever. That's all I have for TV and it seems plenty to me!

The building is on top of a hill and you can see it from all over town, but it's rather odd because it isn't on a main road. In fact, I didn't actually know what street it's on or how to get there. All I knew was it was uphill so I started walking in the general direction.

I'm heading up a steep road with cool old houses. I get the impression that a lot of these houses are single family dwellings - not split up into multiple suites as is fairly common in Victoria. Any house this size in Fernwood would have six or eight apartments. This isn't Fernwood, it's Rockland. A lot more money in Rockland...

Up we go, this hill seems to go on forever. Or maybe I'm just getting old! Gasp!

I get my first look at the mystery tower. It's roughly a fifteen story building which is tall for this neighbourhood. You can see the TV broadcast tower on top.

I keep climbing and I can see it's closer, but it still isn't obvious how to get there.

At the top of the hill I get my first clear view, but there is no entrance here.

And now I'm past it, and there is always a fence or a home or something in the way. I have to circle around to find the entrance. Check out that guys house... in Victoria, that's a gazillion dollars. Real Estate prices here are insane.

I had my Olympus EM-5 Mk ii set up in HDR mode as an experiment. It fires off four shots and combines them into a single image. I didn't like the look, and I've tried to process the HDRishness out of the final photos with some success, but they still look a little weird to me.

Finally after a long walk I'm all the way around on the other side and I can see the tower, behind some shorter building. Now I'm sure there is a way in...

I get over to the main entrance and I see a sign: The Rockland. And it's still uphill and I have to go past that first building. I decide to bail out, my feet are killing me! I now have a long walk downhill to get back to Fernwood. I'll spare you the next 20 photos. :-)

Fifteen minutes later I'm almost back down to my area. I stopped in this park to check out the baby Giant Sequoia tree (left side) That's probably less than a hundred years old, and they can live to be 2,000. Just a baby, and it can grow a lot bigger than this, like at least double the height.

That's more than enough photos for anyone I'm sure, so I'll stop here and go put some ice on my knees. Hope you're having a wonderful week. Thanks for coming along!