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...

Nikonists (or maybe Nikonians...?) ahoy!

I bumped into a cheap Nikon lens, the now discontinued 28-80 mm AF 3.3 - 5.6 G, on the eBay the other day and as I'm in need of a simple allround zoom for my D70 I threw in a bid.

I became the owner of the lens above for EUR 41,50 and when it arrived it was unused in the original box!

I mounted it on my D70 yesterday evening and though it was a little rainy I went out in the backyard and fired some shots:

The pictures are shot in mediocre light late in the evening at ISO 640, White Balance at auto, aperture preference, aperture set at  f6.3, tweaked only in camera, using my preferred settings regarding sharpness, color and contrast, no noise reduction applied.
The colors I got with this combination of lens and camera are as close to what i got 30 years ago shooting Fujichrome 100 slide film with my Nikkormat Ft2 and Nikkor 50mm 2.0

I must say I'm a little amazed what a second hand 6 Mpix D70 combined with a EUR 41,5 (USD 50 ) lens can do. Sorry D40, D60 and D3000 users, this lens does not work in AF mode, only manual focus on those cameras, but everybody else, go and get it if you find one!

Well it is as plastic as plastic can be and weighs nothing but it is sharp, good colors and fast AF.
I call it a bargain, the best I ever had... :)

Hans

The High School Graduate

Our son, Lukas, graduated from High School last Saturday. Congratulations Luke and may the force be with you!
Photo shot by Ingela.

...and it went as suddenly as it arrived!

The temperature at the Vaasa Airport at 12:15 today: 7 C! =:0

Well... I've seen worse, we had sleet and snow in the beginning of June in 1974 and the rest of that summer was cold and rainy here. I hope it won't follow that progress this summer because May 1974 was mostly very warm.

Anyway, yesterday I nailed the last piece of moulding in place in our renovated kitchen and moved out all tools and hardware back into the garage again. You who haven't been following the resurrection of our kitchen at Ingelas' blog may take a look below.

The summer arrived suddenly

Above is a screenshot from the Finnish weather service today at 12:40 showing the temperature curve for the last 24 hours at the airport nearby.
+25.1 C or 77.2 F !
We even had a thunderstorm this morning which is very unusual in May.
The bad news is that this pre-summer will last only for a week. Then we are back to the normal crappy 12 - 15 C again.

In the meantime in Korsholm-Mustasaari...

It is getting hectic here and I feel a little stressed now, a lot of work and our new kitchen will arrive this weekend so the old furniture has to be completely dismounted and moved out of the way before Sunday! Phew...!

Our dear old blogger friend Val at http://vereeniging.blogspot.com/ came to visit Finland last weekend and we enjoyed a couple of days in her company and that was an excellent break in our self occupied and stressed out life this very moment.

The spring is arriving very slowly, it is bitter cold at nights but we get a lot of sunshine in between and some early flowers are popping up.

In the meantime I'll will try to follow the instructions printed on that bottle above, I think it would work even better if I filled it up with brandy or something...

Though we had some trouble getting out of London when we went there, we have made up our mind to go back and cross the street above (among other tings to do) as soon as possible! In between we will perhaps go to see some barges in Rotterdam... ;)

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? :)

The long and winding road...

...back home from London:

We could of course have gone straight from W to Y but we had to go via X because our cars were parked there at the Tampere International airport.

We travelled 3000 km (1873 miles)back home in 82 hours.

The vehicles used were, starting in London: taxi, ferry, bus, train, taxi, train, ferry, bus, ferry, train, taxi, own car. One night spent in a hotel in Lille, about 7 hrs. Effective travel speed including waiting for trains etc was then 40 km/h or 25 mph. :)

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 :)

"Mind The Gap!"...

...is sounding in my ears ever so often this week so where am I ?

Spring has sprung...

...or not.

Ingela picked some branches of a cherry tree in our backyard some weeks ago and brought them inside.

Now the buds have bursted into flowers.

The snow in our backyard is still at least 1/2 m.deep though so it is still very wintery. 

It is raining today for the first time this spring so there is still hope... :)

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.

Winter update

Hello everybody from this frozen over hell called Finland. Blogger Val asked me regarding my last put if it has got any better now, the answer is no.

Its is worse...

Since Sunday we have got som 10 inches of snow combined with a hard northern wind yesterday and today that made the snow pile up, up to my eyebrows in places as you can see from the picture of our backyard this evening:

My car trailer parked alongside our woodshed is somewere inside the pile of snow below:

The temperature today is only a moderate -6 C but tomorrow it will drop down to -15 C again.
Aaargghhh!

Still hibernating...

Nothing much else to do. The temperature plunges down below -20 C every night and hardly rises above -12 C in the middle of the day. I generally like a good old winter but this is too extreme even for my taste. The snow is soon waist deep.
To comfort myself in the meantime I upgraded from D70 to a second hand D300.
Took some test pictures from the front- and back porch last Sunday (cold) morning. You really don't want to walk around with the camera in this weather. Your fingers will be frozen stiff, the lense will stick and the battery will die in some few minutes... :(