A had to go to Tokyo for work recently and, for the first time on my transpacific trips, I got a window seat. The low winter sun angle made the clouds look great out of the window as we crossed the ocean heading to Japan. I don’t know what was below us. It might have been the Aleutians or it might have been nothing. I just thought it looked pretty.
Haneda is a busy hub for Japan Air Lines (JAL). While you visit, there will be a steady stream of JAL 737s coming and going so, another one arriving is no cause for interest. However, I realized that this particular jet did not actually say Japan Air Lines on the fuselage. Instead, it was marked Japan Transoceanic Air. I had never heard of this airline before. A little research shows that it is part owned by JAL – hence the use of the common livery – but there are other shareholders. Occasionally they will lend aircraft to JAL but they do operate to Haneda so I don’t know whether this was a JAL flight or one of their own. A new airline for me, though.
On a previous visit to Haneda I ended up getting a photo of a Japanese Coast Guard Gulfstream. This time, the weather was not great so I ended up staying on the side which should be backlit but wasn’t since there wasn’t much light! A turboprop showed up on approach which I hadn’t noticed online and initially wasn’t bothered about. However, I shot it and it turned out to be a Japanese Coast Guard Dash 8. I was pretty pleased!
Drive south from Tofino and you come to the wonderfully named town of Ucluelet. There are some great trails near the town that take you around the coastline and one of them goes past a lighthouse. The Amphitrite Lighthouse is a great looking lighthouse. In the days of modern navigation techniques, the concept of lighthouses seems a little out of date but they still serve a purpose and they do provide a nice focal point to a view of a rocky coastline. The lighthouse was one of the first things to see on the trail we took and I should probably post some of the other views in another post at some point. In the meantime, here is the light to keep you going.
I shot this Singapore A350 landing at Haneda in January of 2020. When I was reviewing the shots, I saw something odd on the roof. At first I thought it was markings for rescue areas but it really didn’t look that good. I am wondering whether the original paint job was pretty shoddy and the paint is peeling off. It doesn’t look good to me.
The cable cars are a staple of the San Francisco tourist scene. I still grab the occasional shot of them, even having seen them more times than I can recall. As we were walking back one evening after a fun night out with friends, we crossed the street at Union Square as one was heading up Powell. I figured an evening shot was worth the effort.
If you want to get from street level to the Salesforce Park, there is a more unusual method. A gondola runs from the ground up to the park level. We first came across it as we walked through the park and passed the top station. For some reason they only want you to use it in one direction so we watched the car come up and then moved on.
After we had come back downstairs, we checked out the base station. It was not a busy day so there wasn’t any form of line but there were customers taking the ride to the top. It was a simple device and slightly odd. The car was a box with no effort made to style it in an interesting way. However, it did provide a point of interest.
This 767 was parked right beneath me at the terminal in Haneda. The crew seemed busy at work fixing something on the wipers on the first officer’s windshield side. I watched them at work for a while before they seemed happy to have the jet fixed and ready to go on its next service.
The sunsets at Tofino were beautiful and I included some shots of those in this post. Sunrise was also pretty impressive. Winter means the sun is pretty far south so the position it comes up is not so far off that in which it sets. It does provide a very different light to things with some of the headlands that we could see from the hotel now having nice light on them. When you wake up to a view like this out of your hotel window, you know you are a lucky guy and are likely to have a good day!
Quite a while back I posted some shots from the Fort Worth Stockyards. In that post, I mentioned that there was a gathering of cowboys taking place but I have been a bit lax in following up with a post about that. Many of the cowboys were dressed pretty much as you might imagine a cowboy would be. A couple looked a little more unusual. One guy was wandering around in a very large and heavy looking fur coat. I don’t know what type of fur it was and I didn’t get a good shot of him because I didn’t want to look too obvious.
I may have lived in the US a long time but there are still plenty of things that catch me off guard. Dressing as cowboys is one of them. It is something that I don’t often think of as being a current thing. It feels like people dressing up rather than dressing as they always do for their lifestyle. It is no different to any other form of dress but it still catches me out. I was once in Las Vegas for some meetings and the hotel I was staying in had a lot of people there for a large rodeo competition. I was amazed by how similarly everyone was dressed. That is what happens with many styles of clothing but it did seem strange to me at the time. Anyway, here are some of the cowboys at their gathering.
