Mary Poppins village

National Park Village, my current home, is a very strange place. It's small, structured on a grid of 4 main streets by 4. It includes a mixture of holiday homes, hostels and timeshare apartments, family homes and barren pieces of land sandwiched between the railway and SH47, the petrol station at one end and the school at the other. 4 year-round bar/cafe/restaurants. 1 shop (in the petrol station). The village was originally built around the sawmill (that recently closed - the latest local victim of the recession). Many of the original houses, including ours, were only meant to be temporary wooden shacks. Instead, most of them became permanent, extended wooden shacks. Dotted between them, flash holiday homes have cropped up. The resulting mix is really rather odd. And there are so many surprising little back streets I keep discovering that don't seem like they should be able to fit in such a little settlement. It certainly feels incredible that I should be able to continue to make new discoveries here on an almost daily basis!