Majestic Vulcan

While attending the 40th Wedding Celebrations of Mrs Fleet’s Uncle and Aunt today we were treated to the magnificent sight of Vulcan XH558 on its way back to Brize after displaying and flying past at various locations in the South of England.

The last time I was conscious of seeing one of these stunning delta-winged nuclear bombers airborne would have been at Abingdon Airshow as a small boy – probably thirty years ago now. It was wonderful to see the last flying Vulcan in action again.

Sadly I didn’t have my telephoto lens on the camera so the image is very poor, but what a glorious sight nonetheless.

Women and childred first! It’s Gordon!

Martin Day, whose enthusiasm for the noble art of photoshop knows no bounds and who usually deploys his art in the cause of making Gordon Brown look stupid, has excelled himself with this latest offering, on display in its original setting here.

Walk on the wild side…

These trailers for the BBC series Walk on the Wild Side are hilarious… I’m very sad that I missed it when the program was shown earlier in the year!

The Rock

While in San Francisco I took the opportunity to visit Alcatraz – something I haven’t done before. The Alcatraz Night Tour was highly recommended to me, as it is longer and more detailed than the tours that are run during the day (and also suited my schedule as I was in SF for work and consequently not free during the day). Suffice to say I’d highly recommend it as well. It was bitterly cold (as San Francisco can be during the summer) and the Bay microclimate and it’s trademark fog were much in evidence, but the boat trip out was great fun and the tour both informative and highly entertaining.

Fog City lives up to it’s name

The Island of Pelicans

The Lighthouse and the remains of the Warden’s house

Water Tower

Alcatraz Island looking towards the Bay Bridge

The Rock

Alcatraz Cell

The entrance to the Administration Building

Lighthouse, with the cellblock behind

Watchtower at Dusk

Leaving the Island

The photography isn’t up to my usual standard as I used my little Ricoh compact rather than the Olympus DSLR, but the chilly greyness and forbidding aspect of the island comes across quite effectively I think. I hadn’t been aware that many of the staff of the Federal Prison lived on the island. It must have felt very isolated as the last boat of the day pulled away each night, although by many accounts the guards had happy family lives while some of the most infamous prisoners in US history lurked but a few metres away.

I’d highly recommend anyone visiting San Francisco taking the night tour of Alcatraz… a very informative and enjoyable 3 hours.

A Long Wait

Apologies for the long break in blogging – after my very enjoyable trip to my favourite city San Francisco the Fleet family spent a lovely week in Dorset, of which more detail later.

While in SF i had occasion to need to synchronise the inbox of my work laptop via the rather flaky WiFi connection – whereupon I was faced with a rather alarming ‘time to go’ message by Outlook, which I snapped with the iPhone.

Fortunately my elderly Dell soon regained its sanity!