MORE TRAVELS WITH BOB

So where do we start with this gallery of photos from Bob's 1999 trip to Australia? Regular visitors to Northern Thunder will know that planning for this adventure started nearly a year earlier. So we'll start with some pics of our shop in North Vancouver that we had to vacate in the fall of 1998. After twenty years of accumulating "stuff" it was a major thrash to dispose of what wasn't needed in Australia and get the good stuff organized for the trip.

Next are pics of the lead-up to the trip taken at Centerm Container Terminal in the Port of Vancouver (Canada). This company has been my employer for more than ten years now and in that time I've watched and been a part of its growth from a small-time operation to the major shipping terminal it's become.

When I started at Centerm, the volume of business was so small that it was possible to direct operations by simply telling a driver to "go get that blue can behind the light post". Now, even with a state-of-the-art computer system, it's a daily struggle to keep track of the two or three thousand containers on the site at any time.

Since the whole purpose of travelling to Australia was to prepare and race my Top Alcohol Dragster, we first had to pack and ship the race car, truck and equipment to Brisbane. We purchased a used shipping container and spent the winter of 1998-99 preparing and packing for the six-week voyage to Australia.

After a week of loading, bracing, securing and worrying about the conidtion we'd find the race car and truck in when the container arrived in Australia, it was time to safely position the container in the yard until the ship arrived. As we left everything to (almost) the last minute, that was only three days. I arranged for the best driver on the dock to carefully transport the loaded container to a safe location and then made plans to ensure the safest possible stowage on the ship.

After a couple of sleepless nights (not difficult to understand if you know I was working the graveyard shift at the time), the Hanjin Kaohsiung arrived. As often happens in the shipping business, it was late and luckily for us it had to bypass its next port of call (Portland, Oregon) and leave directly for Tokyo. This removed the requirement for lots of additional paperwork required by United States Customs, even though the container was destined for another country. The loading process went rapidly and within 24 hours of its arrival, the ship was outward bound for the Orient. Sayonara, Northern Thunder. Have a safe trip.

Move on to the next page to see the first pics from Australia when we arrived on May 7th. Then continue on to see how the container and its valuable contents arrived in Brisbane in June. Before we leave though, a few more pics of what I was leaving behind for this "Big Overseas Adventure".