Steam Power

The toilet tank gauge clicked over to half full at lunch time so another month must have passed.

Another static day whilst poor Jan attempts to recover from whatever nasty has decided to use her as a host.  Her symptoms look very similar to those I had a week ago so I’m probably the generous person who has given it to her.  I’ve almost recovered and was chomping at the bit to go for a country walk.

The Open Street Map is missing quite a few of the local footpaths which made it rather easy for me to create a trace and download it to the Garmin GPS.  In the end I didn’t cover as much ground as planned because the midpoint trace ended in a sea of stinging nettles which I was unwilling to force myself through.

Rugeley and the Trent & Mersey Canal in the bottom left corner

The first interesting feature was the series of well maintained ponds which look to be a wildlife haven.

As I walked thought the fields I could see a plume of smoke on the skyline.  The stretch of footpath actually terminated at a road adjacent to the location of the source of the smoke.  I turned the bend to find a beautifully restored steam tractor building a head of steam next to the local farmers barn.

Manufactured in 1907

On the other side of the hedge six enthusiasts were starting the engine of a restored steam roller.

The signage for the footpaths in this part of the UK aren’t as clear as other places I’ve walked to date.  The map actually showed paths through the middle of crops but I’m reluctant to walk directly through a farmers crop and detoured around it.

There was a ridgeline with a view of Rugeley on the return half of my route and I stopped to take a couple of photos.

The dominant local feature…… Rugeley power station

Rugeley

Readers might recall yesterday I bought two 2Gb SD cards and used one in the Mio PDA.  The other was installed in our old Pentax Optio 550 digital camera.  The camera came with a 64Mb SD card which I subsequently updated to a 256Mb SD card.  Yesterday I discovered it would actually accept the 2Gb SD card.  This is a massive increase over the original 64Mb memory capacity so I changed the photo format from JPEG to TIFF.  The latter produces a much larger file with more detail.  It’s made quite a difference to the quality of the photos (but not the ability of the photographer!)

This following photo was taken with full zoom.

Then I cut out the blossom in the middle and pasted it into it’s own frame.

The TIFF format has captured far more detail than the previous JPEG.  The only downside is because the file is so large it takes about five seconds for the camera to save the image to the SD Card.

Can you remember the days when you could make a telephone call from a red public phone box.  We had them in NZ as well.  Of course most people know the police used to have dedicated blue phone boxes.  Dr Who still uses one!  However today I saw a green phone box.  This was something new!

On investigation I discovered it was in a car park and being used to collect the parking fees.  It might be the only green box in England!