What’s the most famous place you’ve been to?

The places I went with experiences.

Golden Gate Bridge 1994 - this is a spectactular structure but by the end of walking across it twice, I was expecting an earthquake to shower me in rusty bits - they have little roofs over rotten bits of metalwork in the structure, some quite amazingly holey bits of steel.. Like a lot of USA infrastructure it was suffering from lack of maintenance.

Death Valley 2009 - HOT HOT HOT. Stayed in the Death Valley Ranch hotel. The room had aircon, open the door was like an oven outside. Go for a swim in the outside pool and you just stepped out of the water and dried off immediately. Out in the hire car, the lithium ion battery packs in one of our cameras started swelling up in about 10 mins. About 42-45 degrees C.

Buckingham Palace 2004 - a bit faded, a bit battered, with deep red carpet, but an amazing collection of Old Master paintings on the walls.

Most obscure - about 2010 West Papua - Babo airstrip - once the extreme reach of KLM pre WW2. Still had bomb craters.

 

Golden Gate Bridge on a tandem in the fog it was a great view during the ride to it then couldn’t see a thing crossing it.
Top of Menara Towers in KL. Eifel tower. Budah temples of Bankok. Grand Canyon.
Sydney harbour bridge.
Some were on business some on holiday. In these lockdown times memories of past travels round the World seem like a distant memory.
I feel very privileged to have been able to do it.

 

I've been under a number of these Bridges

 

Fascinating engineering features.
Cheers.

 

I was in Comdex Las Vegas in 1994, on the Philips Semiconductors stand marketing 4x CDROM chips, and the day after the show closed, I hired a really awful car that was basically a Vauxhall Cavalier with really bad suspension for $100 - I was screeching round corners because it was going too fast. Stopped in the desert and saw a road runner. Drove to the Hoover Dam, walked across the timezone line to Arizona. Took the guided tour of the Hoover Dam power plant. Other notable things - shopping in Caesars Palace, deciding to walk rather than take a taxi for the 5 miles from the show centre to the hotel (cold at about -1C , 5000+ ft ASL) , saw the then longest-running picket line in the USA on the way. Another night, went to Cirque du Soleil (paid $35 for the ticket - superb). Sat one restaurant table away from Andy Grove, CEO of Intel at the time on another night out.

 

Broome Western Australia about 2010- marauding bands of emu at the beer shop, £8 a pint of beer because of a large local aboriginal population. And I saw one locust.

Exmouth Western Australia 2010 - hotel with about 3 women running it, the men were all in Perth, 1000km away earning good money. Nearest airbase/airport to Indonesia.

Samarinda Borneo 2010 - hotel where the bill was 10,000,000 rupiah for a week. Mosques and Catholic churches filled the evening air with chanting and amplified choirs singing. Spent a fortnight commuting to work on a speed boat out into the river delta. On the way back had to take a long boat trip and then road trip with an armed commando guard (local dynamite thieves and bandits taking potshots) because the airline I had flown out on had been condemned by the oil company - I could have sworn I flew in the same one time KLM Fokker Friendship back in the 1980s to Eindhoven..
Strangely the area I passed through as almost wild is where the Indonesians are going to relocate their capital city - instead of sinking into the mud , this area suffers tsunamis from underwater mudslides.

 

Colloseum Rome, Vatican city, Raffles Singapore, sky tower Auckland NZ, Fox Glacier South Island NZ, Sydney opera House , Sydney Harbour bridge, great barrier Reef, Tijuana Mexico, San Diego, Los Angeles, Giants Causeway, Isle of Man TT all amazing places

 

Did you meet Daenerys? Phwoar.

 

And there is more. ....on one of several work trips to Norway, went for a meal one night --2 steak meals + 2 desserts + 4 bottles of beer ...total cost £250. Good job it was on the company. Also 3 laps round Charlotte Motor Speedway as a passenger in a Nascar car. There was 2 cars on track alternating between inside and outside lines, going down the straight I could have reached through the side safely net (ha ) and touched the wall! The young driver said that for public runs they were speed limited to 160 mph.

 

La sagrada familia ,

Cartuja de Valldemosa ,

And I have stood /crouched petrified on scaffolding halfway to the top of Salisbury Cathedral

 

Famous Bridge pictures part 2. Canals to follow.

 

Many years ago a school mate of mine was an intern in Washington DC with access to the Capitol building. So he took me for a personal tour. I got to see the Senate and House of Representatives as well as the canteen!

 

The Everglades.

 

I've stood on the roof of Broadcasting house in London. I had a friend who was an engineer there and had the tour, including the famous Radiophonic workshop.

I gave a talk at Zurich University a couple of years ago. Very large room with a huge ornate marble pulpit (if that is the right word). After my talk I came down and sat in the front row, only to read the plaque on it saying that Churchil gave his famous 1946 speach from there, where he called for a united Europe. My talk was somewhat less memorable.

 

Did you visit the Gaudi Park in Barcelona? That’s quite...weird.

 

You were going very Gram Parsons on us there at first!

Did you work in Microelectronics?

I did part of my apprenticeship at GEC’s GaAs fab in Northamptonshire.

Nothing like a clean room to warp time.

 

Gaudi park is bonkers - love it !
The sagrada farmilia always has queuing around the block so having been to Bar-c a few times never actually been inside but thats the whole point ...
I don't feel the need to waste hours for a shuffle around the building site - spectacular as it is .
The Vatican however worked out really well . Actually organised ourselves and booked online , walked to the front of a mile long queue and bimbled around all day - amazing

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I’ll go against the flow and say I can’t stand Gaudi, or ‘Gaudy’ as I like to refer to his architecture. In fact on a railing outside the Sagrada someone had graffitied that they’re a Dali fan not a Gaudi fan and I go along with that.
Sagrada looked to me like a cheap copy of Disney castle complete with balloons on the turret tops.
Having said that the interior of it is the complete opposite, purely functional and simplistic with flying buttresses and arcing soft angles in plain white.

Like you I did a pre-arranged tour of the Vatican which bypassed all the queues. Still, the crowds inside are shuffling along at such a pace that you’re carried along with it, but interesting all the same.

 

Must admit I don’t really like his stuff. Just too weird and curvy. The Gaudi House is full of it: looks like the tilers were all on acid.

Ditto the Sagrada - impressive, but looks like a giant anthill IMHO.