St Leotards

Welcome to the North Shore.

This suburb is called St Leonards. Spellcheck suggested it was called St Leotards, which I find humorous. As a result, this is a suburb called

St Leotards

St Leotards is a North Shore suburb which sits immediately west of its trendier neighbour Crows Nest. It's got its own train station but, for my route today, it made more sense to take the bus up the Pacific Highway. This takes around 30 minutes from close to Central Station.

Just across the road from my bus stop, and accessible from a side street, is the Gore Hill Memorial Cemetery. 

I don't normally cover graveyards because, frankly, nobody wants to find grandma in my blog, but this cemetery is actually super interesting. 

Being a heritage site, it's full of gravestones from the late 19th to early 20th century,

including a fair few impressive stones honouring people who clearly were quite well during their time on Earth.

As I continued through the cemetery, the plots became more modest, more modern (mid 20th century) and, sadly, more overgrown.

Google Maps suggested that there was a path leaving the graveyard, where this fence turned out to be.

Not one to let steel get in my way, I managed to squeeze through the narrow gap, ending up in a car park belonging to the Royal North Shore Hospital. There's an obvious joke to be made about a hospital that borders a cemetery.

The RNSH has a number of modern and shiny buildings,

but I did also spot this much more vintage one.

Exiting the hospital grounds, I found myself back on the busy (and today, wet) Pacific Highway.

I was ready for lunch so I thought I'd check out the local shops.

This shopping strip is pretty modest when it comes to dining options, a kebab shop, a Dominos, a Subway, a bakery, but nothing too exciting,

that is, until the menu outside the local Japanese/sushi place (named Sushi and Bowl) caught my eye.

Sushi Burrito?! I can't not try that. 

After ordering, I helped myself to the complimentary miso soup which I very much enjoyed in today's crappy weather.

So this is the sushi burrito (I ordered the fresh tuna option). It turns out that it's more or less just a giant sushi roll. Unfortunately, sushi burrito is better in theory than in practice due to the difficulty in eating the thing without it collapsing on itself. 

These shops sit across the road from St Leotards "CBD", which basically consist of the train station and a few office blocks.

There is a plaza in the station building so I continued on to have a look. 

This is definitely more of a "business day" place and it was quite quiet on this rainy Saturday noon - even the station was closed for trackwork.

Sadly, that's kind of the overarching theme of St Leotards. It feels like it's more for Dolly Parton's 9-5 than anything else.

Cold, wet and a little dejected, I caught the bus back out.

St Leotards: All work and no play makes Lenny a dull saint.