This evening I drove the 18:45 Megabus from Winchester to Bournemouth, after Ringwood I take the A338 to Bournemouth. The A338 passes the east end of the single Bournemouth Airport runway where the approach lights are only yards away from the road. As I passed the approach lights my thoughts immediately went to Steve Fossett who is missing in the US. It was over this road, with his eyes on these very lights, that Steve Fossett flew GlobalFlyer for his last few seconds of flight before touchdown. He’d been airborne and flying solo for 76 hours and 45 minutes during which time he’d covered 26,389.3 miles (42,222.88 km.) for yet another World Record. That was at 17:07 on Saturday, February 11th, 2006.

But it’s for his ballooning that Steve is one of my all time greatest heroes. He just wouldn’t give up on trying to be the first to do a non-stop Round the World flight. Brian Jones and Bertrand Piccard beat him to it in 1999 but still Steve stuck at it and in 2002 he achieved a non-stop Round the World SOLO!

I’ve met Steve once, only briefly, at the Cameron balloon factory in Bath. I hope he’s safe and well.

The ‘Megabus mentions in other blogs’ at the top of this page are generated from a blog search engine RSS feed. I’ve used www.blogsearch.google.com, www.technorati.com and www.bloglines over the past few months, but haven’t been really happy with any of them. Then I found www.icerocket.com which, in my opinion, provided far better results than the other search engines. The big problem was that I could read the RSS feed in my browser but when the php scripting converted it to HTML for the blog it didn’t work and produced error messages. I asked questions in the forum which supports the RSS to HTML script and the only answer I got was from someone who suggested that icerocket appeared to have some type of filtering in place. This didn’t sound hopeful but I thought I had nothing to lose by e-mailing icerocket and outlining the problem. I did this on Sunday evening at around 21:00, at 21:55 I got a reply “thanks for the feedback. i will look into it and let you know”. Then, 40 minutes later another e-mail saying “i have fixed issue. try now”. It now worked perfectly!

The ‘Megabus mentions …..’ results are now courtesy of IceRocket and a great big thank you to them. Can you imagine any other search engine’s support department changing something on their engine, within an hour on a Sunday evening, because it didn’t work for one user? Incredible! Keep up the good work Ice Rocket :-)

I drove the 10:20 London to Brighton Megabus yesterday, returning from Brighton at 13:40. In Brighton I saw 3 bright yellow buses with Big Lemon on the side of them, I’ve never seen these buses before. Now I’m home I’ve just done a google on them and discovered that their service only started yesterday. The website is www.thebiglemon.com where they seem to be projecting themselves as the Ben and Jerry of bus services :-) This is their MySpace page.

The one thing I couldn’t find were any pictures of the buses. Must take my camera with me to Brighton next time.

Good luck to them.

I’m always surprised to hear this as a passenger boards the bus but not one day goes by without at least one person asking it. My reply is usually along the lines of “No one gets on my bus without a ticket, of course I need to see it!”. It made me wonder if there was any other form of transport which didn’t require the traveller to provide any proof of payment/entitlement to travel. Certainly not local bus services, nor airline flights. Trains? I can’t recall the last time I travelled by train so I’m not sure. Can you travel on a train without showing a ticket? I doubt it.

I hope the bay windows retract!