Under our noses

The school holidays are just ending. Tomorrow number one son goes back to school. So we finished up with doing something that I've been meaning to do since my own childhood: we went to the old WWII fortress that is excavated into the hill overlooking the harbor. There are so many things like this, that I've known about for years and never done. And having kids is the best excuse in the world to actually go and do them.

This set of holidays has been filled with things like this. Not only things I've been meaning to do, but discovering new things about a city I've lived in, off and on, most of my life. We discovered a clock that chimes on the hour and opens up to give a brief history of the city in a series of mobile dioramas. It's in a shopping arcade inside an old bank building, and I've walked through there a million times and never noticed the clock or heard it chime. Must never have been there on an hour...

The bunkers were impressive too. Miles and miles of tunnels through the hill and the most massive gun emplacements. My kids got a good laugh out of me being too scared to climb back down the ladder to the place the guns were mounted. So, I'm a little more scared of heights than I thought. I've always known about the fortress. As a kid I walked all over the hill they're dug into and every now and then I'd come across a concrete slab, a locked door cut into it. It never occurred to me that they were anything other than old storage sheds or something. The vast network of tunnels linking all these places surprised me.

What wonders have you discovered under your own nose?