John Nicholas and Mark Hodgkin over England

A Sunday Jaunt

Mark Hodgkin emailed John Nicholas with a Blast from the Past. We hadn't seen each other for 38 years yet live about 15 minutes apart by Tube. Friendship is weird how you can step back into it over distance and time.

John joined Mark for a couple of pints at his local, then went back to his place for steak and wine. And quite a bit of talk. John remembers stuff Mark doesn't and Mark remembers stuff John doesn't. Somewhere in between we remembered some stuff simultaneously.

Then Mark suggested we go on a jaunt with his old friend Paul, who is a very nice bloke (and also has an original Triumph Bonneville). This photo is Paul with plane.


He is standing at the wrong end of his Beechcraft D17S Staggerwing , the first true business aircraft designed in the U.S. in 1932. Pauls' beautifully maintained specimen was built in 1938. The interior looks like a Pontiac of that era.The windows wind down, and there are 1930s automotive door handles. You can put four men in it plus full fuel and some luggage, and its 450 horse power 9 cylinder Pratt and Whitney radial engine makes it fly. It was a dream of John's to fly in one, and then . . .

Paul and John ran the office:


While Mark managed the main cabin and the photography:


You can tell the cabin is spacious, because Mark isn't very short.

We flew south from Paul's home aerodrome Popham, over Portsmouth on the south coast to the Isle of Wight, then past Osborne House and Cowes and back over the Solent and the yachts to the mainland.Then up the Beaulieu River over Buckler's Hard, where several of the ships in Nelson's fleet were built, including Euralus, Swiftsure and Agamemnon, and into the New Forest towards lunch at Old Sarum, at which low cloud sent us retracing our steps. So we went instead to the famous wartime airfield of White Waltham, west of Maidenhead, for lunch.

After lunch we posed (note the difference in height and stature):


Then headed off westwards at about 2000 feet above sea level over Berkshire (past Andrew Lloyd Webber's house, Highclere Castle etc) and into Wiltshire. We passed the ancient stone circle village of Avebury:


And nearby and even more ancientSilbury Hill, a mound built 4750 years ago and topped off by the Romans:


And then flew past the house of John's Ancient Aunt, whose origin is lost in the mists of time:


Then home to Popham:



It's amazing how much of southern England you can cover in a couple of hours at 140 knots.


John Nicholas is the Founder/President of NovaPangaea Technologies which is active in producing technologies to overcome Peak Oil. More information can be found at their web page at http://novapangaea.com/

Robert Fisher e-mails in

Hello guys,

If we are to start expounding on all of our travels and exploits, I must advise everyone of our recent trip to Iceland; not sure if any of you have been there before, but what a brilliant place (especially for a geologist like myself); I will attempt to upload, as time permits, a series of photos of this adventure; 2 weeks there was not enough, but we did charter a plane on our first day and fly the entire SW quadrant where much of the action occurs in line with the mid-ocean ridge spreading centre which cuts through that part of the Island. We drove the ring road around the Island, but we were spared the action of any volcanic activity during this trip, but plenty of seismic activity. I will say though the women are gorgeous and always interested in new blood on the island; they are known to be quite aggressive; We followed this up with a week in London where I had managed to acquire centre court seats at Wimbledon for the men’s quarters and semi’s; something else to cross off the bucket list; they did not offer me a wildcard to the men’s senior event unfortunately!!!!!! Then off to Europe where we did a river cruise from Amsterdam to Vienna and back home through Switzerland and Northern Italy; 6 weeks of great travelling.

Strongly recommend Iceland as a destination; not sure I would like to spend winter there however.

That is all for now; I will be in Merimbula at Xmas followed by a few days in Mollymook, so would not mind catching up to those in the area if possible.

Take care

Rob Fisher

Peter Forsythe's Cape to Cairo trip

Peter's blog with lots of photographs and interests is to be found here.

Rick Frith and David Edmunds Flying photos

Abeam Spring Creek Gulf of Carpentaria


Dave and Rick flew their light aircraft to the Gulf and back.
Rick also adds some photographs from an earlier trip he did to the Kimberleys


Vapour trails with shadows 6500 feet above Nyngan

Undara Lava tubes


Flying Doctor base Georgetown

The boys land at Longreach

Leichhardt River Gulf of Carpentaria

Landing At Ayres Rock Kimberley trip




Landing at Cape Leveque Kimberly trip

Kimberley trip...Horizontal waterfall

John Hampshire

John Hampshire....reports in

Well, I think it's time for a bit of an update as I actually have some reasonably interesting stuff to report ...
Just had a great three days off work, leading into a weekend (first break in two years aside from week between Christmas-New Year), so a good time to relax. I used it to help transfer Ted Howes' 1968 Fender Rhodes electric piano -- as used by all the stars of the time -- down to Pete Reid's place in Pambula, on the far south coast of NSW.
Ted left it with me when he cleared out his storage unit a while ago, following his move to live in Bangkok, but Laura [for CGS mob -- my 14yo daughter] didn't want to pick up on the keyboards again so it wasn't being used.
Pete has a great group of mates who play music together, record and do gigs now and then, called the Pambula Beach Garage Band (http://thepbgbblog.blogspot.com/

) -- they have a lot of fun (still got somethin' to say, even when they're old and grey:) and were eager to adopt such an iconic instrument. Peter came up in his Ford Falcon ute (of similar vintage to the Rhodes, appropriately), stayed overnight, then we cruised on down to Pambula via the freeway routes through Canberra and Cooma, crossing the Great Divide via Brown Mountain (great corned beef and leek pie by the open fire in Cooma!).
The Rhodes was unloaded into The Shed, the venue for PBGB practice sessions, Pete got busy with a rag and a can of black spray paint and within a very short time the Rhodes was looking very smick and had been renamed Frhodo.
I stayed three nights, went to a Don Burrows gig on Thursday night (Don is a legend jazz man who plays flute, sax and clarinet at 83 as if he were 30 years younger).
Flew back from Merimbula on Saturday morning, enjoyed the rest of the weekend with Sheila and Laura, then back to work.
On Tuesday I found out that as a result of the illness of a colleague, I was expected to attend the keynote function for CPA Australia -- the accountancy professional body for which we produce our magazine, INTHEBLACK -- marking this year's annual congress. Special guest: Neil Armstrong.
Yep, my new best mate is the first man on the moon -- and, as with Mr Burrows, is a stunning advertisement for the "life begins at 80" brigade. As part of the team that produces the mag for CPA Australia's 134,000 members around the world, I was invited up to the VIP room where we lucky few of the 800 guests got to shake Neil's hand and have a chat. He and I spoke briefly about whether there would ever be human boots on the ground of any other moon or planet in the solar system, or whether all future exploration would be by automated probes: Neil was adamant that it would happen.
Later he entranced the crowd with an outstanding discourse that was erudite, cogent and humble. We were then treated to a stunning exclusive: high-res footage from the modern Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that was matched to the grainy footage of Apollo 11's original descent, shown in split screen with the LRO vision overlaid with shading to match the view through the tiny Apollo 11 porthole -- brilliant stuff! It closed with a view of the original lunar lander module resting on the moon's surface.
Being the gentleman he is, Neil was copious in his thanks for the Australians who had helped with the mission, specifically those who manned the various radio telescopes that helped in the mission, and specifically the Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek stations that transmitted those first TV images from the moon to the US and around the world.
Interesting side note: in 1967, as I was working odd jobs to save for going overseas the following year, [note for CGS mob: this was after McKeon invited me to leave CGS at the end of first term, for not wearing school uniform to a weekend sports day, and I was working while attending night school to complete the HSC] I worked with a cleaning team that was taken to Honeysuckle Creek in the evenings. No projects were under way, but I was fascinated by the control room with its flickering computer number counters and the systems involved in aiming the vast (to me, anyway!) dish clearly visible through the glass that covered one wall. Recessed to half its depth in the benchtop was a heavy plastic sphere, somewhat larger than a tennis ball, that to me was clearly the device for moving the dish around ... and so it proved when I gave the sphere a couple of quick spins! So, perhaps mindlessly disrupting that night's tracking pattern, I played with a couple of hundred tonnes of radio telescope dish that would later be crucial to the vision received from Apollo 11.
(BTW, watched some Jeff Beck (live at Ronnie Scott's) on DVD at Pete's place and came across the extraordinary Sydney bassist Tal Wilkenfeld, who's about 24 now but looks about 16 in this vid -- and is just sensational on the bass. What a pair!)
Best to all,
J.
-----------------------