11/11/17 – 17/11/17
Location: Coventry
Work: Aurrigo (RDMGroup)

The Australian Team has touched down in Adelaide with our Australian Vehicle ready to be put on a show and demonstrate the capabilities of Autonomous vehicles at the ADVI Conference (Australia & New Zealand Driverless Vehicle Initiative). Aurrigo was a big hit at the conference with pedestrian participation with our pod across the Riverbank Bridge in Adelaide, it was great to hear all the positive news while we were back the UK.

While it was all happening over Australia, I continued on working with Jaguar Land Rover and finishing off Validation tests on Our LUTZ vehicles, while also preparing as I was heading out Australia very soon.

17^th November has come around, half day at work then straight to the airport for my flight back to Australia!!

20/10/17 – 11/11/17
Location : Coventry
Work: Aurrigo (RDMGroup)

Back to reality after a beautiful week in Abu Dhabi and it doesn’t help that it is getting cold!

Now that one of the Pods is out the door and on its way to Canada, another one is being prepared to be sent to our South Australian Branch for the ADVI (Australian Driverless Vehicle Initiative) and Tonsley Innovation Precinct for trials that will be conducted. So all hands on deck ensuring everything is working perfect with mechanical, hardware and software. The pod is looking great and really stands out, I think it will be a hit once it goes down under.

I have spent a lot of other time with Jaguar Land Rover in running the trials and also working on our companies first ever Autonomous pods, the LUTZ pods, fixing up various faults and completing various validation checks on them before they are sent out the door.

I also decided to head up to Birmingham for a weekend, Birmingham is the 2^nd biggest City in the United Kingdom and it has more Canals then Venice ( even though I wouldn’t think of ever swimming in them), Had a good weekend exploring.

12/10/17 – 20/10/17
Location : Abu Dhabi, The United Arab Emirates

Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi Oi

Just want to start off by saying how proud I was of the Australian Skillaroos Competing in the 2017 WorldSkills International Competition in at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre. I was fortunate enough to be present at the competition for 2 days watching and cheering on, I don’t know if I am just being too patriotic but every time I saw an Australian Competing in a Category it felt like they stood out to me. The night of the awards ceremony I was at the Cheesecake Factory in Dubai having dinner and it was quite busy at the time but I wanted to watch/listen to the ceremony through the WorldSkills live Facebook feed so I sat at the restaurant for over an hour with my ear to the phone just listening and waiting for Australia to be announced. Australia has now been ranked in the top 10 Nation’s after this year’s competition, just showing the quality of talent being produced back home.

So what else did I get up to in the land of Skyscrapers, White Marble and Crystal Chandeliers?! A lot!

First day I had arrived, I was relieved I was in some hot weather ( I love hot weather), I walked around the city and beaches noticing it was very clean and not very busy at all. I thought it was a bit strange that it was not very busy until about 6 – 7pm when the sun goes down and everyone seems to come out then, it must be due to the heat during the day that everyone just stays indoors and gets everything at night.

I started my adventure on a tour bus visiting various tourist attractions which included the famous Sheikh Zayed Mosque, this was quite an experience to visit the Sheikh Zayed Mosque, I was required to wear thobe throughout the tour due to wearing short pants on the day but I did not mind at all joining in the with culture and experience, The Sheikh Zayed Mosque was a very beautiful place and just astonishing how big it was. After I had finished doing the tours through the day I had a short break then headed out on the Night Safari 4 wheel driving through Abu Dhabi desert which finished off with a belly dancing show and barbeque in the desert. This was an awesome experience and since I did this by myself I sat in the front seat talking with the driver, telling him about my what I use to back at home ( working on vehicles) and the car I use to own, a nice big 4×4 with all performance modifications that I use to take out 4 wheel driving and after we spoke about that he really started to get into throwing the vehicle around all dunes which was great fun. I was able to get some great photos of the sun going down over the desert from on top of the sand dunes in the desert and just felt so relaxing just thinking about everything going on in life.

Next stop was the world Famous Dubai Mall that has its own Aquarium and roller-coaster in the mall, I spent a bit of time walking around and then decided to go and do a tour of the world’s tallest building, The Burj Khalifa standing at 828 metres tall. The building just did not look realistic at all but is was time to tackle my fear of heights and do it. The highest level you can go to on the tour is to level 148 which stands at 555 metres high, so still quite high. I spent a lot of time up here on the observation deck taking plenty of photos and looking out over dubai. It will be something I will never forget.

Back to Abu Dhabi where I spent a few days going to Ferrari World and Yas WaterPark, Ferrari World known for all the crazy roller-coaster rides that are extremely fast, Since it was during the week there were next to no lines at the park and got to go on many rides multiple times straight away. I got the chance to go on the Formula Rossa which is the world’s fastest roller-coaster at 240 km’s an hour, awesome ride where you have to wear goggles while on the ride. I had a funny situation on the ride here the woman in front of me had her goggles blown off and smack me straight in the face which was pretty funny. The next day I was at Yas WaterPark, going on all the water rides then I noticed there was a Flowboarding wave machine there which was something I had always wanted to tick of my bucket list as being an Aussie who loved to surf and guess what since it was not busy during the week, I had the ride to myself for nearly 3 hours straight. There was no skim-boards available to stand on, so I stuck to body boarding the wave which was awesome. It was the most fun I have had in so long, even drew the attention of locals taking photograph’s as I was shredding across the artificial wave. By the end of it, I was absolutely buggered, so tired and missing a lot of hair from my legs due to the high pressure jets that form the wave.

The following night I went back to Dubai Mall to go in the world’s biggest indoor ski resort, Ski Dubai. 22,500 square metres of indoor Ski area, I had not done much snow-boarding before but I was able to pick it up fairly fast and most likely from previously doing a lot of surfing back home. I spent about 3 hours there and then went out to watch the The Dubai Fountain Water Show, While waiting to watch the show I noticed shooting across the sky a large item with a huge tail of flame, which after about 30 seconds blew up into a number of different pieces slowly disappearing, later working out it was a comet from Space shooting across the sky, after all that excitement I got to watch the Fountain Show which was very impressive.

Well it has come to the end of my United Arab Emirates visit, It’s my 22^nd Birthday (20^th of October) and it is time to fly back to the United Kingdom. I enjoyed every bit of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, I had plenty of time to just sit back with a view and have a good think about life. I spent most nights coming back to my hotel going roof-top where I had a beautiful view over the city. I will return again one day, once I save enough money up again haha!

20th November, 2017