Stockholm continued

Back on dry land and one of the first things that greets us is an equine statue of King Carlos II (or was it III?). One of the Swedish Kings. His imposing statue looks down on the main quay area as if he is saying to all the visitors who alight here "This is my country".
We wandered back through the old town along different streets. The warm colours of the buildings really impressed me. They were all different but all blended so well. Apparently the planing regulations are extremely strict here and everything the is done to any of these buildings has to be approved and only traditional materials can be used. It sounds a bit like the grade 1 listed building status in the UK but here it applies to the whole town.

The lion is used as an heraldic symbol of Sweden just as it is for England. But in Sweden it is mainly the head of the lion that is used as in this beautiful knocker. I saw many of these as I wandered around. Not just door knockers either. There were lion head mooring rings and similar for tethering your horse. This symbol also appeared on flags.





The main church towers over the old town in Stockholm allowing tantalising glimpses of it's bell tower between the narrow streets. Despite it's size it is not a cathedral. It is located next to the Royal palace and has been the site of many royal weddings.

Chramed by Stockholm

Stockholm old town was totally charming. OK so it was busy with tourists but apart from them I doubt it had changed much for a couple centuries. The main street was narrow by modern standards but the side street were pencil thin. These were havens of quiet as no one seemed to notice them yet alone wander in their cool shadows. All the houses were painted in these warm earthy tones which just glowed when the sun hit them. Even in the shade, the colours just gave the place a cosy feel.

That first afternoon we were just following our nose and before long we had walked through the old town and were now standing at the quay. Well, one of many quays actually as Stockholm is built on several islands in an archipelago so it is surrounded by water everywhere. We were not done with the old town by far and I'll be taking you back there but for now, with tired legs, we thought we would get on a water taxi and take a trip around the archipelago.
This ship had millions spent on its restoration and is now a floating youth hostel. This has got to be the most interesting youth hostel I've ever seen.
One of the islands had a pleasure park on it that opened in the afternoons and through the night. Apparently this is a popular place with the locals in the evenings but didn't get the opportunity to visit it this time, there were simply too many other things to see in the short time of our stay.

Onwards to Stockholm

The next day we prepare to leave for Stockholm, but before I tell you about that I must just mention Malms airport. This was the original airport for Helsinki and doesn't appear to have changed much since it was built. It is a perfect Art Deco building. The departure lounge is circular and all the original Art Deco fittings are still there. Not quite as beautiful as Shoreham airport on the UK's south coast but a good contender non the less.
The weather for our flight to Stockholm was perfect (CAVOK) so I flew that leg. When we landed we needed fuel and as the fuel pump was being temperamental we soon ended up in yet another queue. I don't think the refuelling went smoothly at any airport we landed at during the trip.
That afternoon, after we had settled into out hotel, we walked into the town to explore. As we walked down the main shopping street in Stockholm towards the old town the first thing that hit me was how busy it was. There were so many people it was like walking down Oxford Street in London. Then we reached the start of the old town which is situated on it's own island. The impression I got then was that Stockholm was grand. As you walk over the bridge to the island you are confronted by the parliament building and chancery which are joined by a triumphant arch. You know that you are in for something special as you approach. To be continued...

Helsinki

I have to say that I didn't find Helsinki overly inspiring. That's not the say it was dull, far from it but the beauty had to be hunted for. It had a lot of Art Deco architecture but the detail was quite minimalist so could be easily missed. The main religion is Lutheran so even the churches are simple in design. This is the main Lutheran church. A large white Romanesque building not too dissimilar to the White House in Washington. It's lines are clean and very geometric. The interior very Spartan. Nothing to clutter the mind or distract from worship. It has a simple beauty.
I wandered around the harbour and I stumbled across a small pier with just old sailing ships moored. I'm not sure I was supposed to wandering around there but as the signs were in Finnish and I only understand English I used that as an excuse to take a closer look. Most of the ships were being worked on. I think in hind sight they might have been being made ready for the tall ships race that was due to start in a few weeks from the UK. I took quite a few photos but eventually I seemed to be attracting too much interest so thought I would leave before I was removed. I'll upload a few more later.

Day 5 - Helsinki or bust!

It's the morning of day 5 of our trip and we are heading off into the blue again. This time we are leaving Norway for Helsinki, Finland. We were also leaving behind this wonderful blue sky because before long we were dodging thunderstorms.
When I originally saw dozens of lightning strikes on our storm scope all perfectly aligned on our route I started to believe it was a computer error until I saw this beasty. It was emitting constant bolts of lightning every few seconds from the same place on its far right edge. We got permission to divert to the west by air traffic control. It was a long way around but flying through active thunderstorms is something even the big boys avoid.
Our diversion took us down the west coast of Finland. Well, in truth I guess they only have one coast. Despite this being a sea coast it looked more like the coast of a large lake. There was no evidence of any sandy beaches just hundreds of tiny islands.
The detour added an extra 40 minutes to our flight but it kept us reasonable safe so well worth it. Eventually we arrived at Malms airport, Helsinky and had a chance to swap tales with the rest of the group. No one, it seemed, had had a boring flight :-)

Work in progress

As there was only this one road linking the villages along the coast it had to be kept open even during major road widening work. I felt like I was driving through a building site, which I guess I was. These machines look very big when you are squeezing between them. :-)The coast on the other side of the fiord was totally different. Here the breeze was roughing up the water and the light was in the wrong direction to provide the superb reflections seen on the other side. Despite this it had its own beauty.
That evening we went on foot in search of catching a view of the midnight sun. We had had to return the hired car so were restricted to finding a view on foot. That limited us as Alta was on the wrong side of some high ground but we had to try. another down side was that it was cloudy. This ended up being as near as we could get to capturing the moment. This photo actually looks like it was quite dark but that is just my little point and shoot, that I was carrying at the time, trying to cope with the brightness of the sky.
By the time we got back to our hotel and turned in for the 'night' it was 1am. It was still quite warm and as our airconditioning didn't work we had our windows open. There was a kid in the car park below on a skateboard. I can't begin to explain how strange that felt trying to sleep in virtually full daylight with the sounds of children playing outside.

An Interesting Encounter

While taking photos of the fishing boats I noticed some oystercatchers on the shore and thought it would be good to get a photo of them. As I approached they flew off, naturally, making quite a fuss but never went far.
The fuss the birds were kicking up and the way they were acting could only mean one thing. They were nesting. Not that they build a nest. They lay straight onto the shingle. I had no idea if I would be looking for eggs or chicks but what I did know was that they are extremely well camouflaged either way. I studied the ground carefully before every step.
As I slowly made my way across the shingle,carefully checking every step incase I trod on the very thing I was looking for, my progress was being further hampered by a common gull who had apparently decided to join forces with the oyster-catchers and was dive bombing me.
Eventually I found what I had been looking for. One of the rocks looked odd and I soon realised I was looking at a chick. It sat there totally motionless. Not only could I not discern any breathing but it didn’t even move its eyes to look at me as I carefully edged around it to get a photo. I knew there wouldn’t be just one so I searched further and sure enough there was a second, hiding with its head stuffed in some drying kelp only a couple of feet away. The temptation to pick them up was immense but that would have been wrong so having taken a few shots I carefully moved away to leave them and their parents in peace. I felt totally elated as I had never come across them before. this was turning out to be a very good day.

Catch of the day

Dried cod is one of the main sources of income for the people of Finnmark. We passed loads of fishing huts with racks of fish drying in the air like this. It's hardly any wonder that cod stocks are so depleted in the North Sea. Who knows how the local economy will fair when the cod stocks are exhausted.
Below is a photo of some cod fishing boats, you can see more racks of fish drying behind them.

Day 4 - A trip around the coast.

The next day we hired a car so we could drive around the coast of the fiord. We had a 200km limit on our car hire for the day so we drove 50km along the coast to the west of Alta first and then planned to go 50km to the NE of Alta in the afternoon. There were no other roads so a round trip was out of the question. 50km west took us to a little peninsula with a few houses called Isnestoften. It was, like all the settlements along the coast, a fishing community. We stopped and sat by the water for a while. This was the most peaceful place I have ever been. the only sounds were natural and mainly just wading birds and gentle lapping of the water. Very gentle lapping actually as there was barely a ripple to be seen. We could have been the only humans on the planet.
On the way here we were surprised by a handful of reindeer who had decided the grass was greener on the other side of the road and just ran out in front of us. I just had to stop and get a photo although I half expected them to disappear into the vegetation at the sight of me getting out of the car. I noticed that down a bank on the other side of the road there was a heard of 20 or so but they were too difficult to get to. This guy was clearly not impressed by me as I was blocking his route that would allow him to rejoin the rest of the herd. He showed his displeasure by stamping his feet. I was amazed at just how close I could get to them. In the UK you only ever get this close to deer if they are tame as in the wild they are extremely shy creatures.
This one was the biggest of the group. I'm sure once those antlers finish growing he will be a very impressive animal.

Alta

When we arrived at Alta it was a big anti climax. The town was totally lacking in character or anything of interest. It location on the wrong side of a small hill meant you couldn't even get to see the midnight sun properly, as we were later to discover, without a long walk. Luckily we didn't have to travel far to find something that more than made up for this. A short taxi ride out of town took us to the Alta Open Air Museum. It was late in the day but with 24 hours of sunlight most businesses try and make the most of the summer with long opening hours. It also meant that all the coach parties that would normally be filling the place during the day had left and the place was almost empty. The museum was set up around an extremely extensive series of prehistoric rock carvings that had been dated as being created between 4,500BC and 500BC. These rock carvings had been chipped out of the flat stones that littered the place after the ice retreated during the end of the last ice age. They show every day life, herding reindeer and elk, fishing and hunting bears.
The location of the museum itself was also as interesting as the artefacts. It was at the edge of the fiord and had spectacular views in all directions. As we walked around we are serenaded by the sounds of wading birds calling and everywhere we looked there were beautiful wild flowers of a sort I had never seen before. The place was totally idyllic.

Glaciers

The flight from Trondheim to Alta took about 4 hours. there was little to see for the first 1 1/2 hours as we were in cloud but when we broke free the views were spectacular. We flew over glaciers and snowfields, mountains and lakes, for mile after mile. Having never seen a glacier in real life before I was thrilled to get this view (above). The fissures in the ice showed up turquoise and the whole thing looked like a pale blue tongue. The image below is the same view but zoomed out a bit.

Below are some more shots I took on the flight.

Day 2 - Trondheim to Alta

The flight from Trondheim to Alta was spectacular. The first part was in cloud but after flying for about an hour we broke free of it and the scenery had totally changed from lush green to white. We are flying at 10,000'and some of the peaks on route were about 8,500'.

Day 1 - Bergen

As mentioned, we spent the first night in Bergen, SW Norway. This was a charming town with a harbour. These houses were opposite the quay and were probably fishermen's buildings of some sort. Wood was and still is the main building material throughout Norway except in towns were concrete has taken over.

Just Back from Scandinavia

We have just got back from a 10 day flying tour of Scandinavia. I took over 800 photos in all which will take me ages to sort out. Loads of deleting to be done I'm sure :-)
There were 12 people on the trip in 6 aircraft. This photo is our arrival at Bergen, Norway where we all met up and spent the first night. Didn't see much on the flight as we were in cloud for most of it but once we broke out of the clouds the scenery was wonderful. From Bergen we went up to Trondheim and then up into the Arctic circle at a place called Alta right at the top of Norway and land of the midnight sun (home of the insomniacs). After that we flew down to Helsinki in Finland where we returned to having a couple of hours of darkness each night...bliss. Our last planned stop was Stockholm but as the weather turned bad on us we had to break our return flight at Gronegen in the Netherlands for an extra night.
Apart from some nasty flying weather on some of the legs the trip was excellent. I'll tell you more about it over the next few days.

Brac's big moment...but don't blink!

This is a frame from the Morrison's ad that Brac is in. You will have to be quick to notice him when it's on as he's only visible for about a second and hidden behind the other collie. Sorry about the quality of this image but it is a photograph of my TV screen.

Taking to the Air

Now we have the aircraft back Paul is desperate to get up-to-speed again with flying it before we go on holiday in it at the end of the month. For this reason we spent the weekend going places in it. On Saturday we flew to Shoreham airport which is near to Brighton on the south coast. This is a charming airfield as the terminal building was an original 1920 Art Deco building with all it's original features. The airfield is also located so close to the town you can walk there and get straight down onto the beach.
Yesterday we flew to Old Sarum airfield which is next to Salisbury in wiltshire. We me his parents, sister, and niece Bethany there for lunch. Paul gave Bethany and his dad a joy flight while we were there. There is a large Iron Age hill fort next to the airfield that you fly right over on the approach. This was later turned into a Norman bailey and mote castle and when that fell into disuse the stone was taken to build a cathedral. You can see the ruins of both in this image. Apparently when this cathedral was built it was so exposed and cold that no one wanted to worship there. A decision was made to relocate the cathedral and so history books record that an archer fired an arrow from the mound and where it fell was where they erected the current cathedral. However, it seems extremely unlikely that any arrow could have ever made it that far. You can just about make out the spire of the current Salisbury cathedral in this photo and it's a very long way.

Major Headache

Now here is an even bigger reason for my tardyness in blogging. My PC is getting old and arthritic. OK so it's only 4 years old but in technology terms that's ancient especially when I need to run hungry software like Photoshop. Paul tried increasing the ram for me but it's already on maximum at 1GB. One thing that did seem to be slowing everything down is spurious software that seemed to be running for no reason. Then Abode bridge, a pert of Photoshop that manages files, failed. On contacting the support desk I was told it was basically my operating system that was in error and not their software. They provided me a fix that sure enough fixed Adobe bridge but messed up the rest of my operating system! Thanks guys. I finally came to the conclusion that the only way to go was to start from scratch. I didn't want to replace my PC just yet as after the aeroplane refit we are a little tight on available funds and when I do replace this PC I want to make sure it has enough spec to last me a little longer than 4 years. The only other solution was to reformat the hard drive or simple replace it with a new one as they are pretty cheap these days. That was done last Saturday and I am still trying to re-install all my software and configure my system. It took me 24 hours to get all the windows updates installed! I'm nearly finished now and hope to have it all done by tonight but I'm sure there will be things I go to use in a few weeks time that I've forgotten to re-install. One thing I have noticed though, far less space is being used up by all my system and program files than was before. Lets just hope it runs more efficiently now. :-)

Long weekend in Berlin

The weekend before last we had a trip to Berlin. It was a flying trip organised by a group called the Socata TB Users Group which is an internet based support group for owners of Socata TB aircraft. It had been planned a long time and we were all paid up for it but for one problem. Our aircraft had been booked in over the winter for a respray and refit and the work was taking longer than expected to get done. We should have had it back at least a month before this trip but as it ended up we didn't get it back until about 30 minutes before we were due to take-off as there were still last minute problems that needed fixing. It does, however, look beautiful and the flight to Berlin went like a dream. See below



There were 31 other aircraft on the trip and we all flew into Templehof airport which is right on the edge of the city and the location for the Berlin Airlift just after the war.
Berlin is a real phoenix of a place. Flattened mainly by the Brits during the war there are few original buildings standing but what they have they have restored beautifully along side the ultra modern buildings of the Chancellery and the Paul-Löbe-Haus.
We arrived on Saturday afternoon and left after lunch on Monday. We had a city tour on foot and another by boat. A group meal was arranged for us at the top of the Reichstag on the Sunday evening and walked back through the Brandenburg Gate to our hotel. Although we saw quite a bit there is plenty we didn't get to see and I would thoroughly recommend it for a city break.

Brac moves into video

One thing I forgot to tell you guys that I know you'll be interested in, Brac did another ad last Saturday. This time for Morrisons supermarket. It's a TV advert rather than a still one and if used will be shown on ITV in the next few weeks. I took this on my mobile as they were setting up. Brac's not in this shot as he is with me. The advert had a housewife pushing a shopping trolley through a farmers gate on her way to get some spring lamb. The farmer is leaning on the gate and Brac is sitting next to him pretending to be a sheep dog. For some of the shooting he has a girlfriend, a beautiful tri-colour border collie bitch but she got worried by the shooting and after a few takes wouldn't settle any more so they continued without her. If she is in the final ad will depend on which take they use. You can just see her in the centre of this image being held my Brac's agent Viv. If you look closely you can also see the guy playing the farmer holding the gate open for a woman pushing a shopping trolley. They wanted to see if the set worked before bringing the dogs in. I think you can see the image larger if you click on it.

Bloggers Catch 22

The big trouble with blogging is that when ever I have time to blog I never have anything much of interest to say. When ever I have plenty to tell you, I don't have the time to blog! It's the Bloggers catch 22. I've not been blogging lately because I've been so busy but now it's all old news. I'll tell you some snippets but I'll break them up into separate blogs because long blogs can be a strain to read. :-)I'll also space them out a bit so they won't appear all at once.