Watching a plane not land
The wind blew today. And having spent three of my formative years on a small windswept island I know something about wind blowing.
We decided this morning that the weather wasn’t going to improve so we would go kayaking no matter what. We hired two glass-bottomed kayaks and set out into the teeth of what proved to be only a step down from a gale. Ultimately the kayaking experience was good exercise, but we saw little and got nowhere to speak of.
The local coffee shop provided much needed refreshment while we decided on a fall-back position for the day. A fair chunk of the remainder of the day was taken up with computer games on the iPads which was nicely reminiscent of last year. But for some reason known only to Jennifer we had to head out to further exercise our abused legs.
We decided to ride round the Island’s main roads. There is really only me long road and a loop off up to the ridge, so it’s not a complex map. The real problem set in as we rode round the airport into a headwind that had turned the air-socks into rigid pointers; pointers pointing directly our way. It was exhausting. At the end we found an interesting information board about the local birds and found that many of them migrated from the Northern Hemisphere. Looking at them we realized we might have seen some of them nesting in Iceland last year, which was a pleasantly wry surprise.
As we rode along the side of the runway we were interested to see a large number of locals’ cars parked with people sitting waiting for something to happen. It turned out that the ‘happening’ was a RAAF Hercules does a series of touch-and-goes on the runway. Round and round it went, never landing but providing quite a show in the buffeting winds. You so have to love a place where the locals turn out in force to watch a plane not landing.
Just by-the-way in case anyone has noticed that the posts from Lord Howe are somewhat brief compared to other places it’s a combination of terribly slow internet and typing on the iPad that is to blame. It has been a bit frustrating.