When I'm 63...

It is my birthday today. I'm going to retire this year, at the age of 63. November 21 I will clean my desk and walk out of the office.

Here I am making a Key Lime Pie for my birthday. I nicked the photo from Ingela's Instagram page here:
http://statigr.am/p/307900087261264610_180875317

By the way, "Key Lime Pie" was also the name of a Camper Van Beethoven album from 1989:

I have not planned much for my future, I will for sure pick up some of my hobbies like HAM-radio and amplifier building with ancient thermionic tube technology, I will be around assisting Ingela, houscleaning and repairing stuff and then we will do a lot more traveling.

We went here in the end of August to celebrate Ingela's 50th birthday and we will for sure go again:

Who knows, maybe we will go elsewhere in Europe, too. You never know... ;)

And this very interesting book arrived some days in advance:



Five days in London, day 2

Hi there, It's been a while since I installed some stuff from our trip to London in April here, I have been occupied with a lot of other stuff and things to do in the meantime.

Most of the photos are shot with a tiny little Olympus FE-240, 7 MPix camera at "Everything Automatic."
Some of the pics I took with this camera are relly good after some tweaking in Photoscape

Anyway, day two started with a trip to St John's Wood where we walked down to Abbey Road to do the walk of the Beatles on their Abbey Road cover.
We were not alone there doing the same thing...

When we where finnished walking across Abbey Roead we took off to Buckingham Palace:

Exhausted by the Pomps And Circumstances we decided to take off to Notting Hill:

We rounded off the day by meeting Ingelas sister Anne and her husband Matt at Piccadilly Cicus and then going for a little scenic tour by bus.

To be continued...

Five Days in London, day one

Our trip to London became somewhat drowned in the volcanic ash from Eyafjellajökul but before the trouble started we managed to have a lot of fun in london. The first day we went to see the RAF museum at Hendon

Spitfire at the entrance

B17G

Me Bf109G

Nose art o a Handley Page Victor, please observe the text "Axe stored here". That is not really what you expect to see on a jet bomber used to carry nuclear bombs :)

We had a lunch break and a bottle of Spitfire ale. "The bottle of Britain" :)

Lancaster

The infamous quote of Herman Göring slightly modified and translated to English and painted on the Lancaster above.

The original quote goes like this: "Ich will nicht Hermann Göring, sondern Hermann Meyer heißen, wenn jemals ein feindliches Flugzeug die deutschen Reichsgrenzen überfliegen würde."

Typhoon

The very complicated powersource of the abovementioned Typhoon, the Napier Sabre 24 cyl. H-configuration

Sunderland, oh my, this was BIG!

German V2 rocket

These are only a few of my photos from the RAF museum in Hendon. We spent the whole day from 11 am to 5 pm  and we did not go and look at every subject there. 

http://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/london/

Of course I had to buy a souvernir and what could be better than some good old wartime Big-Band music:

What's so special about the Squadronaires? :)

OH6MY´s European tour...

...is finnished!
It went like this:

-Day 1:
London UK
Newhaven UK
Dieppe France
Serqueux France
Lille France

-Day 2:
Lille France
Tournai Belgium
Bruxelles Belgium
Liege Belgium
Cologne Germany
Hamburg Germany
Rostock Germany

-Day 3:
Trelleborg Sweden
Malmoe Sweden
Stockholm Sweden

Day 4:
Turku Finland
Tampere Finland
Pirkkala Finland
Korsholm Finland

We have used the following means of transport:
-Taxi
-Bus
-Train
-Ferry

And we may have been running and walking from terminals to train stations and car rentals about 100 km.
We arrived home at about 15:00 local time today

5:15...

...to Brighton, not really but tomorrow 5:15 AM out of London in a van to Newhaven in an attempt to reach the continental Europe by ferry to Dieppe. The ultimate Dieppe raid.
Then we will try to get a train to Paris and then to Stockholm. Ferry to Turku (Åbo) in Finland, train to Tampere, taxi to Tampere international airport and car back home.
Phew.
This will last some few days or more. We will blame Iceland.

Anyway, we had to spend an extra day in London, most of it spent in trying to get us out of here without any significant success. In the afternoon we took off to Richmond to see if we could spot some famous people there :)

Tax return time... blaaaah...

My favourite pastime, not! But it has to be done every spring and of course I'm procrastinating until the very last day. But not this year, Ingela has kicked my butt several weekends now so I finally caved in...

Anyway the result was pleasing, we are going to receive some refunds later this year! Will be very much needed because we are going on a trip to London, doing a total makeover of our kitchen and a total makeover of the ceilings in our hall, living room and kitchen. I started the ceiling project yesterday.

Signs of spring to be seen here lately, we had a thaw for two days in a row and the blanket of snow shrunk some 10 cm. Now it is chilly during the nights but nice sunshine in the daytime rising the temperature close to 0 C.

What are these brand new suitcases doing...

...in our living room?
Well, we are going to London, UK, later this spring. We had some vague plans to go around my birthday in October last year but London late in October is not such great fun.
Any ideas of places to go and stuff to see? Maybe drop by at Rachels and Petes place...? :)
One thing is sure though, RAF Museum, Hendon, here I come!