Adelaide Day 1

I gave Ian a ring just to confirm details and left the campsite and drove up to the the North of Adelaide and managed to find Ian's house without too much difficulty, well I went around one block twice but that was because I got stuck in a left turn only lane. Ian and I have known each other from years back when the internet was still in it's infancy and we used a service called Compuserve which had forums for special interest groups. We were of course both in the Scouting Forum and Ian was already an Admin. Each October there is an international 'virtual' Jamboree called JOTI which originated on Amateur Radio and soon spread to the new fangled internet. We used a great new gadget that allowed the Scouts to be able to message each other directly on the Forum and we had Scouts at locations all over the world communicating. This was way before things like Instant Messenger or even the mass use of text messaging on mobile phones so it was a big thing then. At Middlewood we had a dial up connection and the bill was not cheap for the weekend! The event started to grow world wide and I think Ian made me an Admin and along with some other leaders around the world we promoted and monitored the chats amongst the Scouts.
So we have kept in touch ever since and it was really great to at last meet up. We played about for a bit on the Ian's PC whilst I uploaded some pic's to Flickr and also fixed the keyboard on my laptop whilst bobbing out to watch parts of the Olympics on TV. Ian also got me the details for the local Scout Campsite and rang them to check if it was ok for me to come up the following day, and at $10/night it was certainly cheaper than thepublic site at $22/night. Suddenly it was dinner time so we nipped out to the chippy to get some chips to go with the tea Ian's wife had made. Chippy's are different here in that the all have a salad bar as standard and the vast majority use frozen chips rather than fresh cut. Soyou have to wait for your order as they are cooked to order, and the size of the portions, they are huge, at least double a UK portion. After tea we went round the corner to see Paul who helped Ian in the early days of JOTI and who it turned out was also a Amateur Radio Enthusiast... well probbably a bit more than that! Ian had a radio shack (room full for radio gear) to die for and an amazing antenna farm (garden full of aerials) to die for. His current little project is Earth-Moon-Earth and satellite communications – bouncing signals off the moon and back to earth or off tiny satellites that zoom round the sky ( and not big stationary ones like you get SKY/FOXtel TV signals from!) It needs big TV-like aerials that that track the sky and you have to build them yourself, not the sort of thing you can pick up at a shop. By now it was getting on for Midnight and as I was staying on the public site I had to drop Ian back at home and then get back. I was really god to at last meet up with Ian. (And thanks to Ian's wife who did a load of washing for me whilst we chatted!)