Category Archives: Travel

Bury St Edmunds

At the time of writing this post (not sure when it will actually get published yet) it is a year since we went to the UK for a couple of weeks. There are still quite a few topics from that trip that I have not got around to posting about. One of those was our visit to Bury St Edmunds. It was a pretty hot day when we were there as the second week of our trip turned in to quite a scorcher. I had been to Bury St Edmunds before but not for about 30 years.

As town names go, this one isn’t very imaginative. It is the town in which St Edmund is buried. I wonder how long they thought about that one. We didn’t have time to check out the whole town but just got to explore in the area around the cathedral of which more will come another time. There are ruins in the park area around the cathedral and more churches in close proximity. If you want to get your worship in, this is the place for you.

There are more modern buildings in the area too but more modern is a relative term. Still pretty old by the standards of our current home! The square looked like it was ready for a market to be held but clearly not the day we were there.

Vintage Japanese Rolling Stock

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Here are some old Japanese rail vehicles. These are part of the SCMaglev museum in Nagoya that I visited when I was in Japan last summer. The museum has a great selection of Shinkansen equipment across the generations but it also has a lot of other rail vehicles from long ago. The vehicles clearly look old from the outside but the interiors are really an interesting comparison with what you see these days. The amount of wood in the paneling and the materials of the seating are definitely of their time. I was quite amused by the fans mounted on the ceiling. Obviously pre-air conditioning days with these cars and so a bit of air circulation was all you could hope for. Knowing how incredibly hot it gets in Japan during the summer, they would not have done much for the riders I would have thought. I wonder whether it was as crowded in those days as it is now. If it was even close, that would have been brutal.

Flatford Mill

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Flatford Mill is a very well known tourist attraction. I last visited it about 30 years ago when a friend of mine was living there for her job. The mill is in an area known colloquially as Constable Country. The artist lived in the area and many of his paintings are of the local landscape. The mill itself is possibly best known for being the subject of the painting The Haywain. Originally we had intended to walk along the paths that line the river near the mill. However, even though we were there quite early in the day, it was already stupidly hot and the idea of walking far was not appealing. Instead we wandered around the mill, had an ice cream and some lunch and took a look at the buildings that Constable had painted – all while trying to visualize where the settings were and how much they had changed.

An Update to the Japanese Rail Photos

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I have put some previous posts together of Japanese trains from my travels. This is an update to that (although a very late update given that these were taken nearly a year ago!). I got to see some different trains while I was in Nagoya for the day and then there is the variety of trains that you get around the Tokyo area. There was also a small line that ran through the Kamakura area which we crossed paths with as we were walking to the beach from the giant Buddha statue that I wrote about in this post. A few more photos to amuse those of you that like different trains.

RIAT 2010 Arrivals

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I put together a selection of shots from the RIAT show of 2006 in this post. It was another four years before I was back for my next visit. This time I made a visit to the Park and View East rather than the west. This was the end at which everything was landing, and it also provided a good view of some of the arrivals as they taxied to the ramp.

The weather started out okay, but it got steadily worse resulting ion a torrential downpour. Some movements were in such low light that it was almost like shooting at night. The stormy weather passed and then the flying could resume. Given the variety of things that were showing up, I will focus this post on the arrival traffic, and we can add some of the displays in a different post.

Plenty of helicopters as well as the fast jets. I had not shot at this location before and I was not prepared for how crowded it could be and the way you needed to be at the front. That limited some of my shots unfortunately. Also, there was a lot of heat haze in the air so some of the nicer angles on the approach produced shots that are not sharp enough. Still, a fun day out. Drying out took a while that night though!

Hawaii Helos

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Anyone that has vacationed in the Hawaiian Islands knows that there are loads of helicopters around. The sightseeing flight operations are extensive and there are a variety of types that are used. The Astar was a big feature of these flights but the EC130 was developed to provide something best suited to these flights and it is now very widespread. There are other types in use too. I used a Robinson R44 for one of my flights for example.

There are the occasional MD500s around too which is what you expect to see if you ever watched the original Magnum PI TV series. The helicopter area at Lihue was a busy place to be with a steady stream of operators moving from the different pads. I wasn’t on vacation to spend time watching helicopters but of course I managed to slip a little time in with them!

Ice Crystals on the Armrest

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One morning during our visit to Tofino, when I headed outside, there was a heavy frost on the seats around the fire pit. The armrest of the seat had some beautiful ice crystals formed upon its surface. They looked so intricate and crisp. When looking through the viewfinder, you could find yourself unaware of what you were looking at. I liked both the wide “carpet” of crystals as well as looking close in at the details.

Whitby

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In the early 2000s, Nancy and I took a trip up to Yorkshire for a long weekend in February. We were staying in Pickering and we got there just before a decent snow storm arrived. By the time the snow started, we were comfortably tucked up in the hotel bar but the following day, any chance of going somewhere was out of the question as the town had temporarily been cut off by the snow. The day after, the roads had been cleared and we took a drive north.

We ended up spending some time in Whitby. A historic port town, Captain James Cook first went to see from there. It has the ruins of an Abbey on the hill overlooking the harbor and the town rises from the water in a style you would expect of such an old English town to do. We went to a really nice pub for lunch as a recall where we had excellent fish and chips – formulaic I know but still bloody good! I scanned these images when making a surge through my old film shots so I thought I would go back about 20 years to something from the old country.

Bryce Canyon

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More photos from old vacations. This time we have moved from Arizona to Utah and to Bryce Canyon. This was a place I was absolutely blown away by. Photos of the canyon and the hoodoos within had got me interested in the place but seeing it was quite stunning. We were staying on the rim so hiking down in to the canyon or taking the trail around the rim was really easy for us. It might be true that I spent so much time trying to take some photos on the way around the rim trail that we got to the lot farther around too late for the shuttle and had to walk back again. I think that proved to be good fortune as the views get better as the sun gets lower.

When you are within the canyon, the hoodoos rise up around you and you get a sense of the scale which you don’t from outside. The peace and calm when you are down in there is very special. I may not be a spiritual person but I certainly felt really at ease as we walked through the trails. Here are a few of the shots I took during that trip. There are other parts of Utah that we haven’t explored yet and I hope any trip back includes the opportunity to visit Bryce again.

Lockheed Martin Test Assets

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An early ISAP symposium included a visit to Lockheed Martin’s facility at Fort Worth. We were there to see the first F-35 test aircraft, AA-1. In addition, they had arranged to bring Glacier Girl, a P-38 Lightning, to be there too to provide two Lockheed Lightnings. However, while I was up the scissor lift that was provided for us to get an elevated view, I looked the opposite direction. There were two interesting looking airframes parked up. One was an old F-16 that had probably been used for test duties. The other was not a flyable plane but it was some sort of test rig for the STOVL configuration of the F-35 – what would become the F-35B. A couple of cool looking items that you wouldn’t normally get to see.