Yesterday afternoon I went to an Engineers Australia tour of the MRH90 helicopter training simulator at Oakey Air Base. We were allowed to take some photos, so here they are. Calculated using a 20 year life cycle, they said it costs $10,000 an hour to run. But that is cheaper than training in the real helicopters, which costs around $270,000/hour over the life of the helicopter. The movement part of the simulator was turned off when we were allowed inside the cockpit, but even with just the projection screen running it tricked your brain into thinking it was real and that we were actually moving.

On Sunday we went for a drive to Goomburra State Forest, which is part of the Main Range National Park. There was a tonne of people camping there because of the long weekend. There is a road right up to the top, although we had to do a creek crossing in Rachael’s Yaris. From Mt Castle lookout you are supposed to be able to see Brisbane, but it was a pretty hazy day so we couldn’t even see Mt Cootha.

Here are some photos from the council parks.

Tom, Bec, Sarah & Lewis all come up to Toowoomba for the carnival of flowers, so we went to some of the winning prize gardens. They were all one’s we had to been to previous years.

So we went to the carnival of flowers again this year, and it was a bit disappointing. They had improved the layout this year, so we were pretty impressed on the Friday night. There was much more food to choose from this year, which was great. The bands playing weren’t all that exciting though, and the wines choices weren’t as good as last years. Was mostly dry wines, which Rachael and I don’t like.

So amid yet more news about metadata collection by government, I decided that Facebook probably doesn’t need all my old data either and it might be a good time to try and clean it up. Looking at the activity log for my account, the first bit of data is from Sep 4th 2007, which is just shy of 7 years ago. So I thought I would try and delete my history, but Facebook doesn’t have an option for that and the scripts available that do do it aren’t working at the moment.

Last weekend Rachael had the weekend off work, so we went for a drive down to see the Stanthorpe and Granite Belt Region. We stayed at Sommerville Valley Tourist Park which is on Storm King Dam. They had kayak’s you could take out and we are keen to go back in Summer when the water is less freezing. On the way we did the fruit run tourist drive and had a look at some of the wineries.

Over the Easter weekend we went on a 2-day hike in Lamington National Park with our roommate and some of his friends. It was my first time camping where you have to carry everything with you, and can’t just drive to the camp site. This meant we put a lot of thought into what to bring, and took a lot less gear then normal. Ultimately this led to a much less pleasant camping experience as no swag meant for a very uncomfortable sleep, and we didn’t have hot food.

Rachael had last weekend off work so we went to the Bunya Mountains to camp. The drive up was pretty good, we stopped at Acland (a ghost town) on the way, and closer to the mountains we saw an echidna on the side of the road. We had lunch at the main “The Bunyas” restaurant which was good, but not great. There was tonnes of awesome rainforest walks from here, which is where the main campsite is.

So leaving Hakuba we got the same local train back towards Matsumoto. From there we went to Nagoya where we got to catch our first Shinkansen (bullet train) to Osaka. It wasn’t as fast as I was expecting (250km/h) and was much the same as the ICE train we got in Germany. Our first day in Osaka, we went to Kyoto as told in the other post. Before heading back to the hotel we went to one of the shopping centres and on one floor they had Pokémon Centre.