Finding Numbers

Finding interesting street numbers in my neighborhood is easy. Finding a specific number is NOT.

In normal American cities I'm used to blocks, where the numbers start a fresh 100 on each block. Armed with that info it's easy to go out anywhere, find the side of the street with even number, find the 200 block, and every street on the same latitude as that block will have the same numbers. It makes finding unfamiliar addresses easy and predictable. I think it's an intelligent system.

Here is Auckland, there is hardly such thing as a block, and the numbers don't like to follow any system that I can comprehend. Numbers usually start at one, at the beginning of a street. This makes sense, of course. Most of the time the even numbers are on one side and odd on the other, but not always. Most of the time the numbers increase sequentially by one, but not always. Sometimes numbers are skipped. Sometimes the right and left halves of the street don't appear to have any coordination at all (e.g. 102, 104, 106 on one side while right across from that is 157, 159, etc. Where did the numbers in between go?). Sometimes the numbers restart in the middle of a long street, seemingly at random, but they don't always restart at one. Sometimes they increase going a certain direction but on a parallel street they increase going the other way. Another obstacle in finding larger numbers is that many streets are short, curvy little buggers that start and stop all the time never gaining the momentum for their numbers to climb up very high.

So it's not easy finding a 200. For the past week or two when I run I've been scouting locations of 200s and this is the only usable one I could find.

I'm celebrating blip-day 200 today but it's a bittersweet feeling because today is also the departing day of our beloved Treegonk after a monumental 400 blips. Farewell Mr. Gonk.