Time travelling by train

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At Bristol Temple Meads I did wonder if I had travelled back in time to 1976, as there was a British Rail blue and yellow engine on the platform. My train yesterday morning included a very different engine, this was a GWR High Speed Train painted in the original colours when the train entered service forty years ago in 2016.

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This was painted up specially for an event in May to celebrate forty years of the HST. I thought it was nice that only was it painted up in the original colours, but is currently being used to pull trains. It’s a pity that they couldn’t paint a whole train in the original colours.

Stuff: Top Ten Blog Posts 2015

As with my other blogs I am looking at the ten most read postings over 2015.

The tenth most read post on this blog was posted in the last two weeks of 2015, and was about WHSmith. At WHSmith you can afford to give them anything but the ordinary this Christmas contained an old advert from the high street store.

I visited Legoland in 2013 and felt that it was A bit tired and this was the ninth post in this top ten. Certainly when we went this year in 2015 there were some new models in Mainland.

Legoland

You have entered the Quiet Zone! was eighth most read post and I asked what’s the point of the Quiet Zone Carriage?

Back to Legoland for number seven, Legoland Miniland.

The sixth most read post was on Ten Incredible Sand Sculptures that have been on the beach at Weston-super-Mare over the last ten years.

Ten Incredible Sand Sculptures

The post at number 5 was from the Cinematic Advent Calendar which I posted back before Christmas in 2012. The post in question was #24 – Back to the Future and as 2015 was the year in which Marty McFly went to in the film series, it’s quite apt that it in this year’s top ten.

Back to the Future DeLorean

More Lego at number 4 with The Bat Cave in Lego.

The third most popular post was “the cafe on tv at weston super mare is it real” and the answer is, it isn’t!

Over 2015 there were seventy Shaun the Sheep sculptures places all across Bristol and the top two posts on the blog were about these Sheep. At number two was Ten out of Seventy and the most read post was about all seventy sheep, Shaun in the City.

42. Sgt. Shepherd - Shaun the Sheep

Happy New Year for 2016.


Buongiorno Italia

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Back in the mid to late 1990s I visited Italy quite a bit, usually going twice a year, once for the carnival and once in the summer. I initially would take my 35mm SLR film camera, but in later years replaced this with the first HP PhotoSmart Camera. These images are from my 35mm camera, which were developed and then scanned into the computer.

On many of those visits I went to Venice, but I have very few photographs of that place from my 35mm collection, though I have some digital ones from the PhotoSmart camera. I really liked Venice and though it was full of tourists, one of the advantages of having a friend who was  a local, was finding those really nice places for coffee, cake and pasta, that were frequented by locals. So yes you could spend €4 for a coffee in St Marks Square, the places we went to, you paid €1 for an espresso.  This photograph is one of the Grand Canal.

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The local restaurant in Venice we went to, was more of a cafe then a restaurant, but served some delicious food, the seafood pasta I had was great with clams, prawns, squid and lobster.

Another place in the area I visited was Verona.

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This is Piazza Bra in the heart of Verona.

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This is the Arena di Verona, which is a Roman amphitheatre in Piazza Bra in Verona. Back in Roman times, nearly 30,000 people could sit inside, despite its age, today 15,000 people can sit inside.

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The one place where I spent most of my time when visiting Italy was Padua.

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An early morning walk with the mist slow rising before the hot summer day.

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Interestingly from a technical perspective, the prints from those trips are still with me (in a box) however the original digital images seemed to have gone missing, they were probably backed up to a series of floppy disks that I discarded many years ago when moving house (this was in the days before cloud storage became ubiquitous and a quick and easy way to backup and store digital photographs). What I do remember from those images was how awful the quality was, 0.3MP or similar if I recall correctly.

Out and about in the Lake District in 1998

Following on from my last blog post, here are the final pictures from that Lake District trip. It was rather cold up there and every so often you would see something that reminded you of this, this frozen waterfall is a good example.

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I loved how this bridge was more than just stones as the local fauna dover the sides, making it look like a living bridge.

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This is one of those images that has uses for presentations that talk about barriers. It was used to keep the sheep in the field…

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One thing you find a lot of in the Lake District are sheep!

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Some more holiday pics from Normandy.

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I’ve already published some blog posts about a trip I took to Normandy in the 1990s. In the first I talked about Honfleur and the second was on Caen. Here are the remaining pictures. Back then of course I was using film in my 35mm SLR, which I was quite conservative about the number of photographs I would take and in some cases there would also be prints with the little stickers that the developers would place on those underexposed, blurred images that I would occasionally take.

There was something quite special (as well as quite annoying) in taking photographs with film and then once you had handed it into Boots (or similar place) and then a few days later, collected your prints in the wallet, leafing through them as you walked through the town to see how they turned out. We seemed to have less coffee shops back then too, otherwise I am sure I would have sat down in one of those, ordered a coffee and looked over the photographs. These images, looking at the “box” they came in, were sent off for developing and the postman would have delivered them to the house. In today’s digital world, I now take substantially more images (as I did on a recent visit to London) and there is more instant gratification, as you see them on the small screen on the back of the camera (or phone); or as you load them onto the computer or laptop.

The first stop of the trip was arriving into Ouistreham, it serves as the port of the city of Caen. We had undertaken an overnight trip to France and this was the early morning arival at the port.

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As well as serving large ferries, many sailboats also are moored in Ouistreham, used for cruising up and down the Normandy coast.

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Of course with no GPS, I have no idea where the following images were taken. I remember stopping at a cafe for coffee and a croissant for breakfast. Knowing the journey we took from Ouistreham to Honfleur, before driving back to Caen, I would guess this was Cabourg, but could be Houlgate, or somewhere different. I did take a quick look at Google Maps and Streetview, but to be honest there was so much to look through I didn’t think it was worth the effort.

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I do think that this final shot is Honfleur, but I could be wrong…

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Looking back over these old photographs, makes me realise how much I enjoyed visiting Normandy back then, so I think I might start planning a return visit soon.

Ludlow Castle

Ludlow Castle

I have taken quite a few photographs of Ludlow Castle, but I have never actually visited the castle itself.

Ludlow Castle

These were taken back in 2000 (or possibly earlier).

Ludlow Castle

Click the images for larger versions.

Caen in Normandy

In the late 1990s I made a weekend trip to Normandy, and we stayed in Caen having first visited Honfleur. On this trip I had taken my relatively new at the time, 35mm SLR and took some photographs.

All down the Normandy coast are marinas full of boats, this appears to be very much part of the culture of the place, but also they welcome hordes of visiting sailing boats from the south of England, as well as Spanish, Belgian and Dutch seafarers.

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One of my overwhelming memories of that trip was a visit to the local market in Cane and the smell of tomatoes. You could smell them from some distance away from the stall.

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Even today I have never found an English market come close to those that I found in Normandy on that trip. Certaiinly the Italian markets I visited at the same kind of time were similar, full of fresh produce.

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There were things there that you would never find in the British markets (or supermarkets) at the time, but things have changed.

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I wonder if these markets still exist?

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I remember at the time noticing this jeep like car, only later did I know it was a Citroën Méhari.

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The Citroën Méhari is a light utility car and off-roader produced by the French automaker Citroën, a variant of the Citroën 2CV. nearly 150,000 Méharis were built between the car’s French launch in May 1968 and 1988 when production stopped. This means that this car was at least ten years old, but may have been even older. In case you didn’t know a méhari is a type of fast-running dromedary camel, which can be used for racing or transport.

Mountains and hills in the Lake District

Back in 1998 I made one of my last visits to the Lake District, after quite a few years of visiting the place on a regular basis. These photographs are from that final trip, where in the Lake District, to be honest I have no real idea, but I think some of these are around Buttermere.

Click the images to see larger versions.

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This was down by one of the lakes, no idea which one, but I think it’s Buttermere.

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Even then I wasn’t sure where we were, just went with the flow with the group I was with at the time. This may have been after leaving Buttermere on the way to Wasdale Head.

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This is from a walk around Buttermere.

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Honfleur in Normandy

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Back in the 1970s and 1980s we would go on family holidays to Normandy and Honfleur was one of those places that stuck in my young memory. It was so very different to the English towns I had experienced, with it’s tall buildings, narrow streets and strange shops. Back then I didn’t have a camera at first and when I eventually did get one it was a 110 film instamatic style camera. This was a terrible camera (from Boots I think it was) and the quality of the prints were awful, covered in all those stickers and usually blurred. Well you could blame the photographer.

In the late 1990s I made a weekend trip to Normandy, and I did want to visit Honfleur again. This time I took my 35mm SLR and took some photographs.

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It was very much as I remembered from my childhood visits, not much had changed.

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The harbour was still the centrepiece of the town and had a range of boats moored within it.

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The streets were still narrow and crowded with cars, trucks and people.

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Off to the sides were narrow streets and alleys.

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This building sticks in my memory, it always looked as though it was thrown together over time.

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Would I like to go again, yes I would. One day…

Pembrokeshire coast

The coastal pathways in Pembrokeshire are stunning, as these photographs of mine from 1998 show.

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Pembrokeshire coast

Beautiful cliff paths, that as you walk along, you can see the waves crash against the rocks below.

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Pembrokeshire coast