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North America

California and Las Vegas 2025

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Parent Category: Travel
Category: North America
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LA Public Library

 

 

 In March 2025 Wendy and I flew from Sydney to Los Angeles (LAX) and caught a shuttle bus, south, to San Diego.

 After a couple of days in San Diego we joined an eleven day cruise to Mexico, aboard Holland America’s ‘Zaandam’. 

You can learn about the cruise and an earlier Mexico trip by following this link: Mexico

On returning to to San Diego, we hired a car to make our way up the coast to: Santa Barbara; San Simeon; and Carmel-by-the-Sea; to San Francisco. 
We then flew to Las Vegas before returing to LA, for a few days before flying home to Sydney.

 

To see my photographs from the California trip follow this link

The text is copied from contemporary postings to my Facebook page

 

To lean more about Hurst Castle follow this link

 

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Travel

South Korea & China

March 2016

 

 

South Korea

 

 

I hadn't written up our trip to South Korea (in March 2016) but Google Pictures gratuitously put an album together from my Cloud library so I was motivated to add a few words and put it up on my Website.  Normally I would use selected images to illustrate observations about a place visited.  This is the other way about, with a lot of images that I may not have otherwise chosen.  It requires you to go to the link below if you want to see pictures. You may find some of the images interesting and want to by-pass others quickly. Your choice. In addition to the album, Google generated a short movie in an 8mm style - complete with dust flecks. You can see this by clicking the last frame, at the bottom of the album.

A few days in Seoul were followed by travels around the country, helpfully illustrated in the album by Google generated maps: a picture is worth a thousand words; ending back in Seoul before spending a few days in China on the way home to OZ. 

Read more: South Korea & China

Fiction, Recollections & News

A cockatoo named Einstein

 

 

 

A couple of days ago a story about sulphur-crested cockatoos went semi-viral, probably in an attempt to lift spirits during Sydney's new Covid-19 lock-down. It appears that some smart cocky worked out how to open wheelie-bin lids.  That's not a surprise - see below.  What is surprising is that others are copying him and the practice is spreading outwards so that it can be mapped in a growing circle of awareness. The cockies are also choosing the red (household rubbish) bins that may contain food, disregarding yellow (cans and bottles); blue (paper and cardboard) and green bins (garden clippings). Yet, now they have also been observed checking-out other potentially food containing bins.

One has even been observed re-closing the lid - presumably to prevent other birds getting to the food.

Back in the 1950's I was given a pet sulphur-crested cockatoo we named Einstein. I was in primary school and I didn't yet know who Einstein was. My father suggested the name - explaining that Einstein was 'a wise old bird'.

Read more: A cockatoo named Einstein

Opinions and Philosophy

The race for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine

 

 

 

 

As we all now know (unless we've been living under a rock) the only way of defeating a pandemic is to achieve 'herd immunity' for the community at large; while strictly quarantining the most vulnerable.

Herd immunity can be achieved by most people in a community catching a virus and suffering the consequences or by vaccination.

It's over two centuries since Edward Jenner used cowpox to 'vaccinate' (from 'vacca' - Latin for cow) against smallpox. Since then medical science has been developing ways to pre-warn our immune systems of potentially harmful viruses using 'vaccines'.

In the last fifty years herd immunity has successfully been achieved against many viruses using vaccination and the race is on to achieve the same against SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19).

Developing; manufacturing; and distributing a vaccine is at the leading edge of our scientific capabilities and knowledge and is a highly skilled; technologically advanced; and expensive undertaking. Yet the rewards are potentially great, when the economic and societal consequences of the current pandemic are dire and governments around the world are desperate for a solution. 

So elite researchers on every continent have joined the race with 51 vaccines now in clinical trials on humans and at least 75 in preclinical trials on animals.

Read more: The race for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine

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