Trip to Europe.
After six years, I'm back in Europe for three weeks. I flew to London on July 13th (10 years to the day when I moved to California), spent 4 days there. On Saturday, I went to see the Kew Bridge Steam Museum.It houses a collection of steam (and diesel) powered water pumps used to provide running water to London as well as other cities. Most pumps were in operation on that day. Only the two large beam engines were not run. I took some pictures, visible in the gallery. On Sunday, I went to see the Brunel pump house museum. It is located at the end of the first tunnel under the Tames that was engineered by Sir Marc Brunel and his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The museum was very small and a bit of a let down. I did buy a biography of Brunel...
On Monday, I took the Eurostar train to Paris. It was quite an experience ridding at 300KPH while reading how Brunel though "high" speeds of more than 40 to 60MPH could not be achieved on standard gauge track! It is also interesting to note that the method used for digging the Chunnel (tunnel boring machines) is a decendent of the method used by Brunel to dig his tunnel (using a moving shield followed immediately by brick layers)...
There I met with my parents. We stayed overnight and picked up my new car (Volvo Overseas Delivery Program). We then drove over 500Km to my parents' house near the border with Switzerland.