The 23rd March being Saturday, I was able to spend some time with my hosts during the day. Rick and Liz took me in to the centre of Sydney via a stop at a pleasant tennis club near Church Point. I initially went hunting for slide film processing places but apparently they all close at the weekend.
I did a bit of long-delayed clothes shopping and got some new trousers to replace the worn out corduroys that I’ve used far too much during the last few months. I bought them in a department store called Grace Brothers, which I’d always assumed was a fictional store, invented for the popular and long running sitcom “Are You Being Served?”. But it seems to be real enough, here in Australia!
Then I headed back yet again to Circular Quay and the Harbour Bridge, this time to go up to the lookout at the top of the bridge. The view was tremendous and I spent a lot of time up there before heading down in a rush and heading off to meet Rick for a pub lunch.
After lunch I got a train back to the centre, to go to the Powerhouse Museum. This is a slightly disorganised, but very entertaining, science museum. I was delighted to see an exhibit in which a beachball was made to hang magically in mid air, thanks to an air blower pointing up at an angle. This would have been useful to see while being baffled by aeronautics lectures at the Engineering Department at Cambridge, 8 years ago…
The most amazing exhibit in the museum was the world’s oldest working rotative steam engine, the Whitbread Engine, built by James Watt in 1785. It was huge! From the museum I went once more to the Circular Quay area where, after taking yet more photos, I caught a ferry across to Manly, 15 km away on the north side of the Parramatta Estuary.
Getting the ferry to Manly was pleasant, and substantially reduced the amount of time subsequently spent on the bus to get out to Church Point. Back at Rick and Liz’s house I found that “Miss Brahms” of Grace Brothers had forgotten to remove the ink-filled anti-theft tag from my new trousers. I examined it and decided that with a couple tools that Rick lent me, I could engineer its removal without spilling the ink, and thus saved having to take the trousers back to the shop on Monday.
The beachball trick is a nice one. I first saw it at school doing physics A-level . . . vacuum cleaner converted to blow rather than suck air down its pipe directed at a ping pong ball.
I also recall the London Science Museum also having a demo of an aerofoil, air flowing past it and a ping pong ball in a vertical tube through it which rose and popped out of the top of the tube.