As expected, the early morning (number 640) Metro bus arrived from Hobart at my eastern shore bus stop, and once on board I settled down ready for the new experience of Stage 2 of my walk along the Derwent River. After charging along Cambridge Road, the bus turned left at Bellerive village and commenced the long haul along Clarence St.  It occurred to me that the houses along both sides of the road represented many vintages of free-standing suburban house architecture for this part of Hobart. I was surprised to see Wunderlich panels of decorative pressed metal in the frontispieces of some houses in the gable beneath dual pitched roofs, indicating an architectural age of early in the last century. There were the flat roofs of houses that had more in common with Tasmanian shacks of the 1950s, the three fronted brick veneers, the fashionably rendered homes in tones of dark beige with their black roofs, the remnants of rural cottages from a time before the city sprawl had moved to fill the land on the eastern shore of Hobart, substantial pretty weatherboard family homes, and much much more. If your experience is of the repetitive rows in London streets, the towering repetitive apartment blocks of Moscow, or the repetitive white family group block houses of Athens, then the sight of the houses along Clarence St will be a revelation. Somewhat puzzling but fascinating nevertheless. You will not be familiar with the diversity of free standing houses with their own front and back gardens that so many Australians take for granted, and accept as their right. One family to a large block of land is a situation more prevalent and typical in Hobart perhaps than in other Australian capital cities and it is one of the features that attracts me to this beautiful and interesting city.