Near Llanarthney, Wales we find a serene scene of rolling green hills, well pruned gardens and a few grazing sheep. Then, sticking out like a sore thumb is the massive Great Glasshouse of the National Botanic Garden of Wales.

Designed by renowned British architect Sir Norman Foster, this is the largest single-span greenhouse in the world. 95m long and 55m wide, the roof contains 785 panes of glass and is partially built below ground level, so that it seems to “swell from the ground like a grassy hillock”…

The Great Glasshouse contains more than a thousand plant species – many endangered – and conserves specimens from warm climates around the globe including Chile, Western Australia, South Africa, California, the Canary Islands and the Mediterranean. If you zoom in close enough you can actually see some of the plant-life that is able to survive here thanks to this massive glass roof.

Read more at Wikipedia. Thanks to TorIV

Ville de Bordeaux is a carrier vessel that has been specially designed to transport various pieces of the Airbus A380 around the globe.

Given that the A380 is the largest passenger airliner in the world, it’s no surprise that the ship which carries it has its own world record (although it’s not as exciting) – Ville de Bordeaux has the largest ever watertight stern door on a ro-ro¹ vessel!

Collecting pieces from manufacturing sites in Germany, Spain and Wales, Ville de Bordeaux can be seen here docked at Bordeaux’s Pauillac terminal, where she drops off the various plane parts. Look closely and you’ll see the cargo door is open, and an aircraft fuselage has been rolled across the pontoon and transferred onto a barge.

This is actually one of two specially built semi-submersible barges which collect the cargo before heading south down the river to Langon, where the aircraft is unloaded for road-transport to Toulouse for final assembly (where, as previously posted, you can see the finished product).

You can follow the full story of A380 transport on the Google Earth Community. There’s also ground level pictures of Ville de Bordeaux on Flickr or see where she is right now with Vessel Tracker.

Thanks to Rene73.

Reaffirming my belief that the most interesting things happen when the Street-view car is around, today we can see a man getting arrested in Tampa, Florida, or at least having his back pockets searched in a rather heated way.

The cause of the arrest is unknown, but seated behind the patrol car are two white sacks which clearly weren’t there when the police officers arrived!

Sadly the word ‘SWAG’ is not visible on either, so we may have to discount bank robbery in this case. Nevertheless, this alleged crime must have been serious enough to warrant a full shake-down by the (frankly rather unfit looking) cop duo. Which might explain why they seem to have called backup to help deal with this particular miscreant…

In the past, the street-view car has captured what looks like breaking and entering and even a drug deal in action.

Thanks to streetviewfun.

Update: Google has since removed this imagery.

It’s almost unbelievable (so much so that we missed it by a week), but Google Sightseeing just turned 3 years old! All the way back on the 6th of April 2005 our first post was Disney World, followed closely by the Hollywood Sign. We think our posts have got slightly better since then… but even so, nobody would have thought that three years later we’d still be going strong, least of all us.

In the past year we’ve successfully added a great new writer Rob Witherow to the team¹, launched our iPhone specific site, and we’ve even branched out into multi-lingual Google Sightseeing with Google Sightseeing Français and Google Sightseeing Italiano; written by Julien Gremillot and Alexei Popov respectively.

As always there’s plenty more to come in the next 12 months:- we’re planning to launch even more translations of the site; we’ve got some new features that we’re just putting the finishing touches on at the moment; and of course we’ve got loads of cool new sights to show you once the most recent imagery hits Google Maps (it’s currently Google Earth only, and we like to wait until everyone can see the latest sights right in their browser).

Plus of course there’s about 300 cool things on the never-ending to-do list we’d like to implement – some of which we’ll get round to eventually

Finally, a huge big thank you to every one of you that reads and comments here – it wouldn’t be possible without your continued support, and it’s great to still be here!

Here in New Orleans the party looks to be so good that the guests have all spilled out into the street!

It looks like they’re gathered around Joe’s House of Blues – and yet the giant red arrow outside clearly indicates they should be inside instead. So on the off chance Joe’s sound system isn’t all that loud, why else might all these people be hanging around outside?

Thanks to Joey.