Jamaica to USA

Jamaica and USA, 22 September 2016

This is from a flight from Montego Bay, Jamaica to Charleston, South Carolina. A later flight to Los Angeles was at night and I didn’t take any photographs on that one.

Houses at the water’s edge near the airport in Montego Bay.

A couple of hours above the Florida coast. West Palm Beach maybe.

All the cloud shots are not far apart.

Approaching Charleston.

America – the land of individuality?

Charleston in the distance.

When we got to Charleston, we had to wait for maybe hours in a long security queue while the time to catch the next flight faded away. A German couple near us tried to jump the queue to where some friends of theirs were, but they were seen by officials and sent to the very last place in the line.

When I got to LA and picked up a rental car near the airport, I had to return to get the rental company to show me how to get the drivers seat back up. I had found a control to recline it but had gone too far and that control didn’t put it back up(!). There was a different control in a different location for that.

Then when I got onto the crowded freeway (at night) I found that the side mirrors were electronic and I couldn’t tell how far away other cars were. That made changing lanes quite freaky. Still, we got where we needed to go without incident.

I also spent a fair amount of time this week dealing with corrupted images and backups. When I came to start considering my California images for processing, I found I had 300 corrupted and unusable images. My backup to the Cloud is supposed to go back to 2017 when I started Cloud backup but the relevant backup only went back to May which must be when I had a motherboard change. My local backup to a Drobo was no good because only have enough space to retain recent backups. But I do have an old backup to disk from 2017. At first that seemed inaccessible but I eventually retrieved the files I needed from it. This just goes to show the value of the old adage that you should always have three separate backups.

Head in the Clouds (Lahad Datu to KK)

Aug18

14 May 2019, Lahad Datu, Sabah, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

These are images from two flights, from Ladah Datu to Kota Kinabalu in Sabah and from Kota Kinabalu to Kuala Lumpur. They are all monochrome conversions of infrared images.

When leaving on the plane from Lahad Datu I was instructed by a stewardess that I was not allowed to take photographs out the window during takeoff because the camera is an electronic device. That has never happened to me previously and astonished me as the camera is hardly going to be sending out wifi signals. Consequently, most of these images are of clouds.

Not long before, we took off from Lahad Datu in Eastern Sabah.

We are flying over Sabah.

Rivers and mainly cleared land below here.

The clouds could be quite majestic though.

This is near Kota Kinabalu. We have landed and taken off again.

I was able to photograph clouds over the South China Sea for a while until the visibility closed right in.

Now we are over mainland Malaysia.

A small sea-front village.

Workers’ cottages, probably, beside the ubiquitous palm oil plantations.

Palm Oil plantations.

This was the last post of our trip to Sabah. You can see links to all the other posts in the Sabah Itinerary post.

Next, a return to the last few days in Havana in the Caribbean trip.

Queen Mary

Sep1

New Orleans, USA, 2nd to 3rd November 2014.

Our time in New Orleans has passed and we are now heading back to Australia by plane. The above and following images are somewhere over the skies of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona or California.

Floating above the sea of clouds….

A mysterious desert landscape that includes a solar power grid.

Another mysterious desert landscape with no solar power grid but the edge of a town or city.

That must be the top of a mountain just poking up above the cloud.

Los Angeles. Cars, freeways and suburbia.

We had six hours between flights in LA and LA airport is not the most congenial place to hang around. We had in mind to go to the La Brea Tarpits but it was too close to closing time, so we jumped into a taxi and asked him to take us somewhere. He took us to the Queen Mary, retired and converted to a hotel fixed to the coastline at Long Beach. This is inside a cafe looking out.

One of the mighty funnels.

The Captain’s cabin.

Panelled in maple and mahogoney and off-limits to everyone except the Captain’s Steward who kept it ship-shape, this area served as the Captain’s retreat from the demands of running a vast luxury liner. Even here, the Captain was on call at all times in case of an emergency.

The Captain’s Dayroom

Twice a day, barring heavy weather, the Captain entertained the elite of world travellers. Throughout the ship’s disinguished reign, cocktail parties in this room were attended by nobility, statesmen, financiers and stars of stage and cinema.

The wheel house.

Looking forward as the ship prepares to gather steam and lurch off into the city.

Radio operator’s room.

This is the switchboard of the Queen Mary’s mobile phone system.

In other words, when the ship was mobile, there would still be a phone system. This wouldn’t include the ability to call the shore (other than ringing the telegraph operator) unless the ship was trailing a very long cable.

Even if you click on the image for a larger version you won’t be able to read the labels on the board because that requires the full-sized file. The plug holes on the wooden board on the far left are for various stewards or are blank. The rows of hole on the wooden board at the left of the main console are for shore exchange or coin box (whatever that is). Then at the very top of the console there are plug holes variously marked shore lines, radio services, radio order wires, service, transfer and staff. The rest are all ordered by deck for individual cabins. Presumably only the more expensive cabins had phones. The operator had just stepped out some decades earlier and therefore was unable to provide further information.

For those unfamiliar with this system, you would call the operator who would plug your line into a specific hole according to your request. These days, this service is provided by very small people hidden inside mobile phones. They are not unionised and have very poor conditions of employment, especially at the time of termination of services.

Looking towards the bow from the “gangplank”.

Many hours later, we have landed in Sydney, taken off again and are heading for Canberra. This is still in Sydney, somewhere around Botany Bay.

Botany Bay.

Countryside not far from Canberra.

This has been the last post for South-West Canyonlands and New Orleans. There have been 35 posts with 590 images and 6,500 words for South West Canyonlands, and 34 posts with 640 images and 8,500 words for New Orleans. It has been ten months since my first post for South-West Canyonlands but I have been to and posted on Hawaii and Boolcoomatta in the meanwhile.

Next I go back to my North Atlantic trip in 2013. It’s been eleven months since I finished posting on Scotland prior to my trip to South West Canyonlands. I will pick up again with the Lofoten Islands in northern Norway and then move on to Spitsbergen, Greenland and Iceland. We will see how far I get on that before the end of September. I’ll definitely complete Lofoten and Spitsbergen. Maybe I’ll finish Greenland and not start on Iceland.

Murray Foote

Tag Archives: Clouds

Jamaica to USA

Head in the Clouds (Lahad Datu to KK)

Queen Mary