Faraway Friday with Raffle on the Side

Fiona Uncategorized

A couple of weeks ago Ducky suggested a “slides evening” where we can share our favourite travel slides. Well, this is your chance, Pubsters.

The way I suggest we do it is for you to send me your jpgs. I will put the jpgs into the library asap, and will send you the html for each one. You can then put up a comment with one or more of the pics, plus some information about your visit.

There may be a delay from time to time, as unfortunately Maestro CK Watt’s laptop has gone on sulk, possibly permanently. So I will look after the raffle too.

Very few of my travel slides have been digitised, so I have hunted on the web for images of some of my favourite foreign places looking as near as possible as they did when I first saw them. However, the travel theme is NOT restricted to non-Australian places!

From the Grand Tour of November 1978 – April 1979, then, I give you a street in St Paul de Vence, not all that far from one of CTar’s preferred places:

(Image Credit: Matyas Dubal)

The Coliseum in Rome (my first glimpse of it was from this angle, but further away, and it was one of those jolt to the solar plexus moments of recognition.

My first glimpse of the Alps was – once again – more distant than this. For a moment I couldn’t work out why the clouds on the horizon had such peaked tops . . .

Heather Whelan)

We had two goes at visiting Greece. The first time – during our month in Italy – the Brindisi ferry sailors were on strike. The second time – nearly at the end of our three months in continental Europe – we did a mad sprint by various trains from Paris to Brindisi. This time the ferry did sail, and we had four days in Greece, including one at Delphi. Another of those moments of recognition.

(Image Credit: University of Texas)

The Grand Tour started and ended in England (well, it was winter when we arrived, and a very cold and late spring for the final month of our time). We spent the first month staying at a B&B in Bloomsbury, spending most of the time exploring London (almost entirely by foot) during the day, and exploring the theatres and concert halls by night. (We also managed day trips to Brighton and Oxford). For our final month we hired a car – a Mini (all we could afford) – into and out of which 6’4″ OH had to shoehorn himself. Unlike the Minis in Australia, the driver’s seat did not go back very far, and he was most uncomfortable. So he was generally reluctant to stop and look at things, because of the agony of getting out and then back in. I did persuade him to stop at Stonehenge, however. It was late in March, blowing a gale; we were the only humans there, and this was way before the days of the fence, the Visitors’ Centre, and all the other paraphernalia now there. It was a truly haunting experience.

(Image Credit: Stonehenge News and Information)

Later this evening I will put up some more images of my travels before and after the Grand Tour (if I have time).

280 thoughts on “Faraway Friday with Raffle on the Side”

  1. Welcome all, to this evening’s entertainment, including special viewings of distant places with the assistance of the latest wonder of modern science, the Magic Lantern!

  3. Fiona
    I will look after the raffle as you will be busy.

    Raffle tonight only for those patrons that request numbers.

    gotta be init to winit

  4. Joe6pack,

    Many thanks.

    I’m going over to me mum’s for a nice glass of chateau cardboard. Backson to do the pics.

  15. Happy Friday all! I’d love to be in the raffle please, any numbers are fine.

    Hope the Watt laptop is up and running again soon, it’s no fun when technology misbehaves (was offline for a few days this week myself).

  20. A place I’ve always aspired to go to is this amazing and rather alien sandy place where people live in dugouts: Coober Pedy:

  21. Any three for me please 🙂 Where is the first picture taken – Rome? Venice? ?

  23. fj- 100,80,65
    l2 19,7,77
    puffy (Happy Birthday) and clan 81,76.13/ 15,92,2

    congite 1,20,25

    Ctar1( name the HMS Ship from the numbers ) 57,85,26

  29. Back from me mum’s, first lot of html done and emailed to the lucky Ducky.

    Any three numbers please, Boss.

  30. Anyone who wants to put their own pics up but doesn’t have my email address, just ask for it here and I will be in touch.

  34. They say Brazil has the falls but Argentina has the views.

    Mmm …

    The first one was taken from Argentina. This one from a vantage point in Brazil

  35. TLBD

    This description of the RBBT from the Hitchhiker wiki suggests some similarity.
    .
    “The Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal is a wild animal from the planet of Traal, known for its never-ending hunger and its mind-boggling stupidity. “

  39. Tony Burke on this week in The LNP’s Parliament:

    I can’t remember a week when a single appearance on a TV show completely derailed a government. Joe Hockey’s appearance on QandA saw the Government spend the rest of the week arguing with itself. On Thursday everything took a sharp turn as Mark Dreyfus launched into some of the most forensic questioning the Parliament has seen for a long time.

    BEST:

    1. Bill kicked off the Parliamentary week asking Tony Abbott about Labor’s plan, announced in Bill’s Budget Reply Speech to have computer coding taught in Primary Schools. The PM rejected the idea for two reasons: he said it was stupid and implied children would go to work aged 11, and then he claimed the Government was already doing it. Yep the PM’s view was it was a dumb idea and therefore the Government was already doing it. While on many issues that approach would be disturbingly accurate on this one it isn’t happening but needs to. You can watch Bill’s question and the PM’s ridiculous response here.

    2. Question time is meant to be about direct questions and direct answers. We’re halfway there. On Thursday midway through question time Mark Dreyfus repeatedly questioned Julie Bishop about what protocols were changed in Ministerial Offices including the Attorney-General’s office after we went to our highest level of terror alert in our history in September last year. These questions also raised that a month later the Attorney-General received a letter from Man Monis seeking advice about making contact with the head of Daesh (ISIS). After Julie Bishop refused to answer any of the questions Mark Dreyfus asked the one that really matters for the future. Would the government now handle information of this nature any differently? Christopher Pyne intervened and Bronwyn Bishop ruled the question out of order. A few minutes later the PM shutdown Question Time. You can watch it play out here.

    3. We may be getting closer to a lot of the politics being removed from the debate over marriage equality. In the wake of the Irish Referendum, Bill and Tanya put a Private Member’s Bill on the Notice Paper where debate will commence next Monday. It can’t be brought on for a vote without the Government granting a conscience vote to members of the Liberal and National Parties. In answer to a question from Bill, the PM gave the strongest indication yet that a conscience vote will be granted and a debate and vote will occur this year.

    4. The absurd anomaly where the GST is applied to tampons and sanitary pads but excluded from other essential items may finally be resolved. Joe Hockey stumbled into the issue on QandA and under pressure said it should be fixed. Tony Abbott then rejected Hockey’s claims and it looked like the issue might be lost. The problem for years has been how to get the states to agree to a cut in revenue. Labor used Question Time to make clear there was a one off opportunity at the moment when the Government is offering the states extra GST revenue through the Netflix Downloads Tax to say if the states want that revenue they need to agree to take the GST of women’s sanitary products. Terri Butler has launched a petition to make sure we don’t miss this opportunity.

    5. This isn’t really the best. It isn’t really the worst. I don’t know what it is. But it’s sort of mesmerising. I don’t know why Tony Abbott started dancing in Parliament, but for some reason I just keep watching it.

    WORST:

    1. The NATSEM modelling was released on Monday on the impact of the budget on families. Jenny Macklin has been relentless in exposing that this budget is as bad for families as the last one. A typical family loses $6000 a year. 9 out of 10 of the wealthiest families are better off and 9 out of 10 of the poorest families are worse off.

    2. Tony Abbott thought he was onto something really clever when he told the Parliament the problem with the NATSEM modelling is that it doesn’t take into account second round effects. Chris Bowen didn’t miss a beat and asked whether there was a single measure in the Budget where the modelling included second round effects. Joe Hockey had to admit there wasn’t. It was yet another contradiction between the two this week. You can watch more of them here.

    3. The Capital Expenditure figures were released on Thursday. They are the worst since the Global Financial Crisis. While the issue didn’t get much media coverage on the day this is a serious downturn in investment.

    4. Remember at school when you knew you were meant to get into trouble and didn’t feel quite right that the teacher didn’t know it was you who was talking all the time in class? That’s exactly how Ed Husic must have felt about not being thrown out under standing order 94A for a while when he tweeted this:

    5. This hasn’t had as much publicity as it should but there was an unbelievable cut in the Budget where George Brandis raided the Australia Council funding and established his own vault to pick and choose which Australian stories would be funded and told. I warned before the election that he’d do something like this and he responded saying it was a “spectacularly brazened lie”. You can reach the campaign to let Australian stories be told without political interference here.

    Oh and in case you missed it, in a mark of true independence the Speaker ejected a member of the Liberal Party from the Parliament on Thursday. This evens up the score to Liberal 7 Labor 365.

  44. BTW.
    Those two high rise buildings you can see in the background are a testament to the corruption of Joh and Russ Hinze.

  45. Thank you everyone…I am all misty eyed. I was such a young dragon once. I even remember changing channels with the knob on the tv set.

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