The Kookaburra Queen is a Mississippi-style riverboat that seems to spend all its time moored at Eagle Street Pier on the Brisbane river: this is its paddlewheel. I assume it does see active service but whenever I go past, it’s there, a feature of my daily walk to work at QUT. I don’t have many of those left however – one week to go in Brisbane (and I’m spending half of that away, with three days coming up in North Queensland after tomorrow).
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.
So, finally, I make it into the fjords. This is a narrow passage between the little islands of Paddøy and Hokøyna, north of Bergen on the route up to Mofjorden. I don’t really feel I did the Norwegian landscape justice with any single photo taken today, partly because of a simple lack of good light, and also because for most of the journey we were either on a boat which was moving very quickly (some 30-35 knots), and thus being out on deck was a bracing experience to put it mildly – and focusing was difficult as a result. Or, we were behind glass on the bus home. And how can one choose just one shot to encapsulate this amazing natural architecture. I know, then, that here I do resort to cliché. But what the hell.
Being 42 