Jack and Katrina's Place

I am writing this blog from a motel on the western edge of Minneapolis. My collegue Chris and I drove 450 miles today from Chicago. This week we had been at the Hawker Beechcraft factory in Wichita to complete the inspection of a new aircraft type that is coming to New Zealand. In the picture above we are standing next to the company's demonstrator model after we had been shown over it by the chief engineer. The HBC Model 4000 is one of the first midsize business jets to have an all composite honeycomb fuselage. The composite construction permits the aerodynamic shape to be optimised and as you can see it's a beautiful ship.

As we were leaving Wichita I spotted this huge steam locomotive undergoing restoration. As it happens I have a model of the same type at home. (Atcheson Topeka & Sante Fe class 3800, these locomotives took trains from Wichita west to Los Angeles acorss the desert hence the huge tender). Unfortunatley the museum was closed, but Chris took a photo of me on Thursday morning. On Saturday morning he transferred it to my memory stick as we blasted up Interstate 94 through the green wooded hills off Wisconsin. When we got to the motel I emailed it to Katrina. She showed it to Guy on her laptop, on a rainy Sunday lunchtime in Wellington,(while I was having diner in Wisconsin) and took this photo and emailed it back to me, and now I'm posting it on the web! How digital is that! As you can see Guy was delighted.

After Wichita we flew to Chicago to pick up a rental car for the trip up country to Fargo North Dakota where we are to meet an electronics manufacturer interested in supplying instruments to New Zealand. We spent a day in Chicago, where it was so hot (96 F/35 C ) that we took a boat trip out on lake Michigan to keep cool. The other photo is taken near our hotel on a brideg in the lower 'canyon' of the Chicago river, which flows out of the lake.

On to Fargo today, thence to San Franscisco and back across the Pacific.