Windsor

I'm not sure if I have mentioned this before, but I like walks, particularly those that involve walking through places with more greenery, and less of the tell-tale signs of urbanisation. One of the many reasons why I delight in travelling to the US back in the day was to go on such walks with my friends who have similar inclinations as well, and man, those places in the US for such walks really puts most of what Singapore has to offer to shame.

Notice that I call them ``walks'' instead of ``hikes''. Mostly because I'm not hard-core enough---I've been resigned to the fact that I'm just a city-dwelling hermit who escapes into a curated ``natural'' place for a short amount of low-ish intensity exercise in the form of a walk, unlike say Brian who is hard-core enough to do things like multi-day treks while camping out in those US National Parks that are larger than my friggin' neighbourhood.

Anyway, today's walk was to Windsor Nature Park, canonically located at 30 Venus Drive, Singapore 573858, with YT who is, as always, a great walking companion. Getting there from home via the Android Google Maps app revealed a new bug---if all notifications were disabled, the map application would automatically self-terminate the current ``journey'' when it loses focus either through locking the screen via the single tap of the power button, or switching context to another app.

The original behaviour was such that whatever ``journey'' that one was on, the routing information and tracking would continue despite whichever of the two actions were taken. So having such a major anti-pattern appearing was frustration inducing, to say the least. The notifications were turned off by me in the first place because there prior to the latest update that introduced this new behaviour, there was no fine-grained control over what kind of nonsense they would show in the notification bar. So things like advertisements of various places along the way would show up, as is location-based ``recommendations''.

It's slightly better now in that there are such fine-grained control available, and the notification information displayed now is also useful for public transport taking---it does buzz when one's bus is near the stop that one needs to get off. That is a welcome feature that I had been thinking of before, but am pleasantly surprised to see it implemented decently.

While the bus was going along Ang Mo Kio Ave 1, I realised that the block of flats for low-income households along that road have been deconstructed into empty fields with ``residential developments'' planned. Whether those are to replace the ones that were deconstructed for the lower income households, or to create newer high-end housing solutions will require a bit more study of their billboard, which I didn't seeing that I was on the bus.

Digression aside, Windsor Nature Park features shorter and easier trails compared to the more ``traditional'' central catchment area type trails. A large part of the trails were boardwalk-styled, and were actually pretty boring to walk on. But to be fair, I can see why they chose to set up those boardwalks---the boardwalks themselves were an enhancement to the paths that, for some reason, sit between two water stream flows. Without the boardwalk, it was likely to be a muddy mess no thanks to general water loggedness from the always evolving streams of water.

There were other trails that were more traditional but still man-made---there was an aspalt one, and later on as we got to the peripheries, the gravel ones. Those were definitely fun.

We headed down to Thomson Plaza at 301 Upper Thomson Rd, Singapore 574408 to just enjoy the air-conditioning and scout for lunch. The weather today was simultaneously great for walking (no rain) and terrible for walking (high temperatures of 34 °C), so a respite in an air-conditioned place is always amazing. We found this meme-tastic set of banners that I will just put a picture of and not say more about, other than click on it to see it larger to read the funny text:

Meme-tastic banners aside, lunch was at Omoté, located on #03-24A in Thomson Plaza itself. Despite the weird acute accent, Omoté is actually a Japanese-styled restaurant. The food is undeniably good and has a price level close to a middle-high tier restaurant. Getting seats there is not hard, but it does involve a [short-ish] queue, at least at the time that we had gone there for lunch. I might go back again some time in the future, if only to try some of the other fancier fare that I wasn't ready to stomach today.

After that, we headed to Udders Ice Cream at 246D Upper Thomson Rd, Singapore 574370. It's good.

Sorry man, I'm not writing a food review blog here. 😅

Upper Thomson Road itself has changed quite drastically from just two years ago, when I was still plying parts of it on bicycle to access Lornie Road towards my old work place while avoiding the scary 70 km/h road that is Marymount Rd.

That's mostly because the crazy construction for Stage 2 of the Thomson East-Coast Line (TEL) has completed. I think I might want to dedicate some time to explore it more thoroughly than I had done today.

I mentioned about avoiding the scary 70 km/h road while being on a bicycle. This is something that I had learnt while I was hitting the roads hard in the US on my bicycle there---many roads had a speed limit of around 25--30 mph (about 40--48 km/h) due to being within the city bounds and/or residential bounds. Those were quite comfortable to cycle on. But when I was in the peripheries near the transition point between urban and sub-urban/rural, the speed limits rose to about 30--45 mph (about 48--72 km/h). I only managed to cycle about a quarter of a mile on that higher speed limit road before the sheer fear of the air-wake of the passing vehicles forced me to stop and rethink my route. This was by no means the freeway or anything---it was a legitimate road that a bicycle can go on---there was a bicycle lane in it which I was using. It's terrifying. So when I read about cyclists who are on some not-quite-highway roads that have the speed limit of 70 km/h, I break out into cold sweat.

I mean, even using the Tour de France average speed as reported by this page (just the first one I grabbed---there is no other reason), it is ``only'' 25 mph (or 40 km/h). This means that the sustain speed of a fast-ish cyclist is still slower than a puny goods vehicle that is rated at 60 km/h.

In short, cycling on those types of roads are just asking for trouble, especially since the driving culture in Singapore is less than gracious to begin with..

Anyway, that's all I have for today. Till the next update.