Could have offered up photos taken from the plane, but there will, I’m sure, be plenty of New Zealand landscapes coming up over the next few days, and I also got a good shot of Auckland but that’s also a theme used a few days ago. So here’s a photo taken of the plane. Here is everyone plugged into their little worlds as we fly over the Tasman Sea.
Things you don’t necessarily want to hear from the pilot as you’re coming into land: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re turning the seatbelt sign on, there seems to be some thunderstorm activity around the airport”. Cue one of the bumpier landings I’ve ever experienced. But we made it.
The east exit. It does get busier than this during the week. Taken as I returned from the airport having transited (on a very bumpy flight) back from Adelaide. The lonely ‘wet floor’ marker – placed there for no reason I could discern – gives it a sense of pathos I think…
I seem at the moment to be spending most of my life on the move. Just as well that I don’t mind taking photos of railway stations, then, even if it does sometimes make me look like a trainspotter. I got quite a few photos today that were nearly very good, and even though there’s nothing spectacular about this one, I quite like it; this gentleman just looks very chilled out. All in all it does encapsulate what was another very beautiful day with great light, one on which it was far more pleasant to be hanging around outside than one has a right to expect in mid-December.
I haven’t always spent this much time travelling, you know. It really started to take off (ha ha) around the middle of 2010, the first time I came to Bergen (and Scandinavia) in fact; since then I have averaged a trip a month, and in 2012 more than that. That’s just the way my job works now, I have little commutes (to Manchester) and big commutes (usually to Bergen or Moscow) and beyond the time they take they all feel rather much the same now. It ain’t glamorous. It’s just work.
Lovely morning today, which at least means the three-day storm has passed over without flooding us again (though towns to the east were definitely not so lucky). Beautiful light at the station as I waited for the 0856 train in. And here it is, right on time.
Tomorrow is day 400 of this blog, so as I do with these milestones, I have updated the ‘best of the rest’ page with some more recent pictures that didn’t quite make the one-a-day cut.
A mundane subject to mark the end of the first year of this blog, perhaps: but it’s all been an attempt to just capture a life, and here I am in Leeds tonight, celebrating my birthday tomorrow with a night out. These gates just grabbed my attention as we came in this afternoon on the train.
I’ve posted what I think are the top 10 pictures from the first year; also some statistics, feel free to browse and comment. But I’ll be back tomorrow…
This is one of my town’s more pleasurable regular events and was thankfully blessed by good weather. I no longer have an interest in cars as a means of propulsion but any one built before about 1965 just has such a damn fine look to it. And when they come out to events like this they’re all looking their best, polished and chrome and curvy and well, dammit (Janet), rather sexy. But I only look. I don’t want a relationship with one of these things again. Too complicated.
(PS technically this is a self-portrait: look carefully.)
I never sleep on planes. The flight passed relatively quickly (a decent movie helped – Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, better than I thought it would be), and there’s the odd feeling of seeing the night flit by in half the time it would normally take, but otherwise there’s no appeal to this mode of travel. Electronic devices are a big help these days, of course. I like this shot because of the light, particularly the rim-light around the head of the guy on the left.
This is a bit out-of-focus, but it was taken from a moving train. Specifically, a train that was crossing what Wikipedia, at least, defines as the longest railroad bridge in the USA and, at 9.3km, ‘likely to be’ the world’s longest rail bridge over water. It crosses the south-eastern end of Lake Pontchartrain and took me and a couple of hundred other passengers out of New Orleans this Sunday morning.
I got off after a six-hour journey at Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where I am staying for the next five nights: some others were going as far as New Jersey and weren’t going to arrive until tomorrow lunchtime. And the train guards work all but 4 hours of the full 32-hour journey! Now there’s a group in need of a better union. Remember also that the UK government look to the US for best practice in its labour laws.
Being 42 