It hasn't been the greatest of years PAD-wise, as I stopped doing it each and every day far earlier than I have for each of the last few years. As usual, the winter months of June and July had a pretty woeful number of entries in them. I'll have to look to that next year. It was starting to look like for the 4th year in a row I'd have fewer PADs than the year before, and indeed the first year (2010) is the only time to date I've been north of the 200 barrier.
Of course in reality it would have been impossible to do it this year anyway. It's not been one of unrelenting and never ending disasters, but there have been some pretty bad bits to it. I was always afraid that 2013 was going to give triskaidekaphobia a bad name, and in some respects it's lived up to that. But in others... it hasn't.
This was one of those times. This is the first day of a week that we spent in Western Australia; a couple of days in Perth before heading to the Margaret River. To say that I enjoyed the trip would be an understatement. And yes, during this period I have a photo for each and every day. Our first port of call was one that was of more interest to me, which was the Aviation Heritage Museum. If you're into aviation, or even if you're not and just want to know a little bit about history, it's worth a visit. Among the headline features are an Avro Lancaster, a Catalina flying boat, a C-47 Dakota (Skytrain if you're American) transport aircraft, en ejection module from an F-111, a Canberra bomber (B-57 to our American friends), a 1960's vintage air traffic control setup, and many other aircraft, engines, parts, avionics...
And of course here's me (well, more or less a replica, give or take the 20kg or so that I need to lose; a decent replica of me as I was in 1917, anyway) standing beside my Sopwith F1 Camel (well, another replica, I think).
What I suspected but didn't know for sure was that this was the beginning of the end of a long-standing relationship. During the shooting here I kept getting error messages that the camera couldn't communicate with the lens. It turned out that it wasn't the 40D; it worked fine with the 10-22 lens. It was the 24-105 f/4L, my long standing primary walk around lens. It had to go in for two repairs in 2010, each costing $450.I decided after the second one that if there was to be a third... there wouldn't be, because that would exceed the cost of a new one. Though I didn't know it at the time, within a couple of days the 24-105 would fail to function at all, and the oldest piece of hardware that I had which has been in continuous use (the 300D is older but hardly ever used any longer) would have to be consigned to history.
