It is certainly one of the most well preserved medieval castles in England, and I was interested to notice two separate themes in its displays. The parapet walk and the basement follow the middle-ages theme and have a number of displays centred around “The Kingmaker” Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick during the Wars of the Roses. The other theme, somewhat more recent in chronology, is that of a royal weekend party hosted by the Countess of Warwick in 1898. The private appartments (library, sitting rooms, bed rooms, et c) are set up as exhibits within this context.

I managed to thoroughly enjoy myself despite the somewhat “touristy” environment (and a number of noisy school groups). It was fantastic to walk along the parapets and climb a the tallest tower, and I quite enjoyed a falconry display. They had a working trebuchet, set up pointing away from the castle, with which they threw a 30 kg stone wrapped in burning cloth.

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I took the coach from Canberra to Charles Kingsford Smith airport in Sydney (the fare of merely $15 was quite pleasant in its own right), and arrived with plenty of time to spare. I went up to the “Viewing Deck” and was excited to see a Qantas Airbus A380 for my first time. An hour or so later, as I was walking down the terminal to find my gate, I saw a Singapore Airlines A380 taxi in to the terminal. I was disappointed to have missed its landing (unless it had simply been parked somewhere), but these giant planes are still new enough for a sighting to be interesting.

My flight to Hong Kong was smooth and uneventful except for the bad local weather that delayed our landing by 20 minutes. I was on an Airbus A330, and thoughts of the recent Air France tragedy made me somewhat somber as we flew a holding pattern through the clouds. I was glad for the unremarkableness of our flight.

Most of my (shortened) transit time in Hong Kong was taken up with walking the length of the terminal back to gate 2. This might perhaps be an exaggeration, but it certainly is an enormous terminal building! My flight to London Heathrow was aboard a Boeing 747, and I was lucky enough to be sitting in the first row behind a bulkhead. The extra leg room was very pleasant indeed.

I switched on my mobile phone after landing, and was delighted to get a call from Clansi within minutes of stepping off the plane. It’s my first use of international roaming, and having it work so well is very convenient.

After meeting my supervisor (who was on a different flight that came in to a different terminal at Heathrow), I was very surprised to bump in to a friend from Sydney. Grenville Kent was just as startled to see me, and we had a brief chat about the (separate) conferences that we are here for. This chance encounter was so amazingly unlikely that it gave me quite a buzz.

But the greatest serendipity happened at lunch today. On the way from Heathrow to Warwick we stopped in at Oxford to visit some colleagues and have a look in their laboratory. Having had very early breakfasts on our planes, we decided to find some lunch. A number of restaurants and cafes failed to capture our attention, and so we headed back towards the “Lamb and Flag” (which we had passed earlier in our wanderings) for a pub lunch. On the way, however, we saw the “Eagle and Child” and were enticed by their fish-and-chips deal.

This turned out to be the very same Eagle and Child that C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien enjoyed often with “The Inklings”! I was so glad that we stumbled upon it. Retrospectively, there are probably few things in Oxford that I would have been more interested in seeing.

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[flickrset id="72157620429425635" thumbnail="square" overlay="true" size="medium"]

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After leaving Canberra in the late afternoon, we arrived at Registration after dark on Friday night. We quickly donned our packs, received our instructions and started hiking in to 4 Mile Hut. Being dark meant that we missed out on the views, but it did help avoid sunburn. After a few hours hiking we found the campsite and went straight to bed.

Saturday morning was crisp and clear, and we had a fairly relaxed start. After eating exotic breakfasts and packing up our gear, we walked down to a small waterfall north of the hut. Our primary destination for the day was Tabletop Mountain, which we summitted mid-afternoon. After enjoying the views, we continued on to set up camp near Broken Dam Hut. Finding water was a bit of a challenge, but after a short walk we got to a nice little waterfall.

On Sunday we set off on a cross-country short-cut back to the track. The girls navigated very well, and we found the track easily. After retracing our path to Mount Selwyn skifields, we took a slightly different route back to registration. It was not a particularly strenuous weekend, but it was heaps of fun.

If you have a small display, it may be convenient to view the map in full-screen mode. This is probably toggled by pressing F11.

The menu on the right (showing interesting waypoints and geotagged photos) is also interactive. You can click the little triangles to collapse or expand a section, and you can toggle the visibility of that section using the checkbox. Clicking on an item in this list will show you the photo (or more detail) on the map.

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We headed down to the Rond Terraces (the grass at the bottom of Anzac Parade) with heaps of friends, and enjoyed a picnic while some Navy guys showed off in a helicopter. Just like while waiting for the Australia Day fireworks, the Army’s Red Berret precision skydivers did a jump. Instead of landing in the lake, this time they touched down right on the shore in front of the crowd.

The fireworks were more of an artistic display than I have seen before. They had carefully synchronised high ones and low ones to create patterns in the sky. I thought it was a bit analogous to Floriade, where pictures are created with flowers.

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We rode down to the “Rond Terraces” on the north shore of Lake Burley Griffin, where the ride started. It headed north up through the central eastern suburbs of Canberra, and turned around at Dickson. We made good speed down Northbourne avenue and over to the south side of the Lake. After circling around and climbing part way up Red Hill behind Parliament House, we crossed back over the lake on Kings Bridge and finished at the start point. By the time Clansi and I had ridden home, we had done just a bit more than 30 km.

It was a fun event, and a bit of good exercise. Additionally, it was a fantastic occasion for me to try out my new geotagging tricks.

I tied my gps receiver to the handlebars of my bike, and took a few photos with our little compact camera. Here are the photos on a map showing our route (click the little icons).

View Larger Map

This is nice in that I can embed it here and show the gps tracklog as well as the images, but I think there are better tools for geo-browsing the photos. You can browse them on the Flickr map, or explore the same images on loc.alize.us. I’m interested in knowing which of these options you prefer.

Also, if you know of an even better way to share and explore geotagged images then let me know.

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For a bit of fun, I took my GPS receiver with me tucked into the elastic band of my goggles (I have found that the device sometimes struggles to get good signals when it is in a pocket). I wasn’t afraid of getting lost, but the experimental scientist part of me tends to get excited about the datalogging capabilities of my GPS receiver. I was actually quite surprised at some of the information it recorded; for instance, I was a little unnerved to find that I had been travelling at up to nearly 50 km/h on the snow!

The best bit about GPS is of course being able to see a map of the day’s adventures. Here is an interactive zoomable map showing our entire day’s path colour coded by speed. It is superimposed on the Google aerial imagery, which must have been photographed during the summer.

One interesting thing that you will notice if you look carefully (and have some knowledge of the Perisher Blue ski resort) is that t-bars actually travel faster than chairlifts, except for the “express” chairs. Another very interesting set of recorded data was the elevation above sea level. I’ve included two separate altitude profiles, one as a function of time and the other as a function of distance travelled.

The profile against time seems to be in GMT, but shows the break in the middle where we stopped at Blue Cow Terminal for lunch. The other nifty part of this graph is that it shows the waiting time in queues for lifts. The profile against distance gives a better indication of the actual steepness of the slopes, but is not really big enough for analysis of this sort. Like the map, both altitude profiles are coloured by speed.

The immediately noticable saw-tooth pattern of the altitude profile surprised me at first, but is of course the natural fingerprint of alpine resort skiing: up lifts and down slopes again and again. If you want to identify the specific features, here is a full list of the lifts we caught:

• Village 8 Express
• Forester Quad Express
• Blue Calf T-bar
• Blue Calf T-bar
• Blue Calf T-bar
• Blue Calf T-bar
• Blue Cow T-bar
• Blue Calf T-bar
• Blue Cow T-bar
• Car Park Double Chair
• Blue Cow T-bar
• Blue Calf T-bar
• Blue Calf T-bar
• Blue Calf T-bar
• Blue Cow T-bar
• Summit Quad Chair
• Terminal Quad Chair

Lunch

• Summit Quad Chair
• Terminal Quad Chair
• Brumby T-bar
• Pleasant Valley Quad Chair
• Piper T-bar
• Bourke T-bar
• Kaaten Triple Chair
• Bourke T-bar
• Link T-bar
• Telemark T-bar
• Forester Quad Express (to mid station)
• Mount Perisher Triple Chair
• Eyre T-bar
• Eyre T-bar
• Leichhardt T-bar

Since it was our last day on the snow for this year, this is a good opportunity to share a summary of skiing memories from the season. On the whole we were very lucky with weather, and the only real exception to this was August 10 when Luke and I skied though falling snow. Although the visibility was poor, that day was considered one of the best ever in Australia for powdery snow conditions. It was the first time I have ever needed to use chains on the car.

Another interesting thing that I managed to do on the snow this year was record some video. The day I spent skiing with Luke we took quite a lot of footage on his waterproof and shockproof GoPro camera. I haven’t yet had time to edit the highlights together, and still need to work out a good way to present the videos online, but I hope to show some of that footage here soon. I spent the afternoon with Luke’s camera strapped to the front of my ski boot, and the success of “boot-cam” videoing has caused me to seriously consider purchasing such a camera.

Clansi and I have also used our compact Nikon Coolpix S51 to record some video of each other, and it provides good feedback as we strive to improve our techniques on the snow. For now, however, I’ll leave you with a photographic summary of our ski season.

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A good Zoom gets Corbett in just the right mood for some impressive antics. He can do a standing jump up to waist height, which is more than double his body length above the ground. He loves the opportunity to rampage in confined spaces, such as underneath our coffee table and inside my uni backpack.

His universally favourite toy is anything made of rustling paper, whether its a snake-like strip or a scrunched up ball. He enjoys all the toys we’ve given him (and quite a few that he’s claimed for himself without our consent); but paper has just the right blend of noisiness, irregular movement, and non-toxicity. An added bonus with paper is that it is just so much fun to tear apart and destroy!

Here are a few photos of Corbett that manage to capture some of the antics that he has been up to lately. A few of them also show off his increasingly spectacularly marked coat.

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Another indication that he is growing quickly is the confidence that he has gained about his favourite perch – the human shoulder. He is also a lot more confident about nooks and crannies around the house, and loves ferreting in the scrap paper bin. Pleasantly, he is becomming more and more content to sit on the backrest of the couch and absorb sunlight streaming in the window.

There is no chance, however, of Corbett growing out of his cuteness anytime soon.  Enjoy these photos.

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The cliff was about 15 m high and we set up two ropes, one of which went down an overhang. We all had fun descending, and a few people practiced climbing back up with prusik loops. Although not everyone had a trouble-free descent, we managed to avoid any injuries and the day was a great way for us to notch up more experience.

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