day 9, the last day; the end.

More visiting in the morning, then we headed out for Syracuse around 10 am.  We expected to get here in time to see the Michelangelo exhibit at the SUart gallery for a couple of hours and drop my dad off at the airport around 3:30.  That worked out perfectly.  The exhibit is really nice.  Much smaller than either of the other two museums of the trip, but something that can be appreciated many times- the skill that is involved with even the sketches is quite impressive.  I expect it might be part of my lunch time routine, until it is gone in October.

After that, I went to my friend and colleagues house.  He and his wife had generously offered to let me spend the night in their spare bedroom until I could move into my apartment on Monday.

Our route:

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And now the journey is over, and the new one is beginning.

day 8, the music festival

The trip is almost done, but there is one more thing to do. My dad really wanted to go to the Chenango Blues Festival, it's near Syracuse. Well, relatively near, it's actually about 1.5 hours from Syracuse, about 4.5 hours from Buffalo, and about 2.5 hours from where we're going to spend the night, at another cousin's house in Corning, NY.


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The festival was nice, but I was tired, and left early with my cousins. My dad and other cousin stayed 'til the end. I really enjoyed two shows, although I only heard Cephas and Wiggins live. Samual James I heard after my dad got there and brought the cd he bought.

I had beef on white (?) for the first time, a simple sandwich that is roast beef, in au jus, on a kaiser roll with pumpernickel and salt. Also horseradish if you like it.

We whiled away the evening with stories and jokes. I was invading a girls night a little bit, but they didn't seem to mind too much. It was a very nice visit.

Another comfortable nights rest.

day 7, or five states in a day!

Our main goal for the day was to get to my cousins outside of Buffalo, NY.  We succeeded, but a bit later than we thought we would be.  We had a very nice visit, and a very comfortable nights rest.

This is our route:

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Here is a picture:


travel day 2008 August 15.

day 6, Chicago part 2

I'll be even more brief, now that I have actually arrived in Syracuse.

Very little linear progress was made Thursday as we spent all of it in Chicago.  Some of the things we saw were: Buddy Guy's Legends and Lurrie Bell, Jazz Record Mart, the Chicago History Museum, several Chicago neighborhoods, House of Blues Chicago and Deana Bogart.

We walked about 5 miles (or so it seemed) and all the while the Blue Angels were practicing for the air show on Friday.  It was jaw dropping to see the blue jets roaring around over head, seemingly darting between the tall building of the Chicago skyline.  That went on for about four or five hours, all afternoon, while we walked from our parking near the Trump International Tower, to Buddy Guy's Legends club.  The club wasn't crowded at all, which made for very intimate setting with Lurrie Bell, and a very enjoyable set of Blues standards.

Then we walked to where I written down that the House of Blues was (hob), but I'd gotten a North written as a South (or maybe it was the magazine I had transcribed it from that got it wrong).  It didn't actually make that much of a difference for our route anyway.  We walked up State Street with all the business people, made dinner reservations, then headed over to Jazz Record Mart.  I bought two cd's, Out of the Cool by Gil Evans because it was playing in the store and sounded so great, and The Clown by Charles Mingus, because I wanted to expand my Mingus collection (to two cd's).  They're both really great.

Now the great treck up to the Chicago History Museum, which was open until 8 pm on Thursday nights.  It took about 45 minutes of wandering the hard Chicago pavement to get there.  A long walk, but it was really nice to see more than just the office buildings of downtown.  We passed many brownstones (I guess), and a neighborhood that seemed to be entirely restaurants.  Finally, our destination was in sight.  While not as impressive as the Field museum, it was still really cool to see all the Chicago history.  I had forgotten what an important city it is!

The food at HOB wasn't particularly inspired, but the atmosphere was fantastic, as was the entertainment.  We couldn't stay for the whole show, but I really enjoyed Deanna's performance.  I'll be looking for some of her cd's in the future.

Our trip out of Chicago was mostly uneventful.  We ran into some traffic, so out speedy escape wasn't so speedy, but still we did get to a hotel out of town.  It also started out 5 state day, but that is the next story.

Here are some pictures:

road trippin' 2008 August 14

driving, day 5 - not much driving

Today we only had to go from Racine, WI to Chicago, IL.  We did that, parked at the north end of Grant Park and walked down to The Field Museum.  I really enjoyed this museum, and am very glad that I visited it.  It is waaay too big to see the whole thing in one day, or even appreciate very well in a week.  Well, maybe in a week you'd be pretty comfortable with it.

We saw only a fraction of their collections: ancient peoples of the Americas, native poeple of the northwest coast, ancient Egypt, Tibet, Reptiles, Gems and Meteorites, and inside Natural Disasters.  We paid for three temporary exhibits, on top of just regular admission, for a total of $33.  We only had time for one of the temporary exhibits, and could have easily just gone with the regular admission of $15, had we known there was so much to see.  Next time, I think I'll just get the $15 rate, and stick with that.

I truly enjoyed both the ancient Americas and Egypt collections.  It rekindled my interest in Egypt and reminded me of the amazing things that the Native Americans did.  Both of these collections had hundreds of actual artifacts, and not many replicas.

I could go on and on about all this stuff, but I'll just leave it with this: I'm looking for a haida art poster/print and something Egyptian (probably a replica of something I can hang on the wall).

After leaving the museum, we walked back to the car, paid our $20 for parking, and headed for U.S. Cellular Field to catch a White Sox game.  Unfortunately, it wasn't to be, the game sold out just a couple of minutes before we got to the ticket window.  Oh well.

So, we headed for dinner.  We got lost in the concrete canyons of downtown Chicago.  Eventually we found our way to Solerno's, which was actually a good place for being just a random pick with no guidance.  Better than the place in Madison.

That's all for now.

Here are some pictures:

road trippin' 2008 August 13

driving, day 4

I'll be brief, I think.

We covered the rest of South Dakota, all of Minnesota, and much of Wisconsin, currently we are in Racine, WI.

There were a couple of exciting things we saw today, but they weren't the scenery.  We saw our first accident: a semi was laying on it's side on the other side of I-90.  Nothing obvious about why, just laying there, taking a nap maybe.  Actually, it looked like the shoulder had a steep, uh, bicep, and the truck had pulled a little too far over onto it.  Later, after crossing the Mississippi River, a biker's helmet fell off the back of their bike and bounced across the lanes right in front of us.  Nobody panicked, and the biker didn't even notice.

We stopped for dinner in Madison, WI, like we knew where we were going.  We got off I-90 onto highway 30, followed it until it ended, made a left on the first busy street, and a right into Cafe La Bellitalia's parking lot.  I was hoping for something similar to Amalfi's, and this had a good look for it.  I was a little disappointed, maybe because of the Midwest spin on the Italian food.  I could definitely see it being a winner if I was a local.

That's about it.  Oh, and we're about a day ahead of where I thought we would be by now.  I think we'll take some extra time in Chicago.

Here is our route:

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Here are some pictures:

road trippin' 2008 August 12

driving, day 2

After our extravagent stay at the Livingston Motor Inn, we decided to eat on the cheap today. We stopped at Albertson's on the way out of town an picked up a few things, then headed for Yellowstone!

What we saw during the day: Devil's slide, Mammoth Hotsprings, Mammoth, Norris Geyser Basin, Veteran Geyser eruption, upper Yellowstone falls, bison in the road (see photos below), mud volano, North Fork of the Shoshone River canyon, Cody WY, Big Horn Mountains, Pre-Cambrian Granite (2.5 GYr old!!).

We spent the night at 7700 feet (2350 meters) at the Cabin Creek Meadows primitive campground.

We only saw Wyoming today. But it sure was cool!

Here is our route:

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Some crappy cell-phone pictures of the trip:

road trippin' 2008 August 10

driving, day 1

Last night was a blast: we had a few people over for wine and a good send off. I think it was the right thing to do. I'm very pleased that the that my Château Margaux (1978) and and my wifes Clos Du Val (Zinfandel, 1977) were both excellent!

The next morning we went to breakfast, loaded the car, had a tearful departure, and got out of town only about 30 minutes late.

The drive itself was mostly uneventful. We did see a few thing though: coulees, scabland, forest, mining, beautiful Montana fly fishing rivers, bubble mammatus clouds, purple rocks, lighting and a little rain quite heavy rain actually, twice, open pit mines, a complete rainbow with a little double at either end, and another thunder storm.

With all that list, I must say that the most interesting things to me were the geology and stones exposed along the roadside, and the lightning storms. We don't get those too often in the pacific northwest.

Also, leaving home was not that easy, but I think the really great send off party lastnight really helped show that we have plenty of great friends that will sticking around in with Stephanie.

Here is our route so far:

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last day and trip home (bonus day!)

Sunday was our last day in Syracuse. Our flight left at 3:30 in the afternoon, so we pretty much had a full day to mess around. Lunch and coffee with Eiichi, we really had to drive around to find a place open on Sunday morning! That was kind of a surprise.

Now, some highlights from the return voyage:

• due to a canceled flight prior flight, we were selected to change travel arrangements. In the end it didn't mean much- we flew to JFK instead of Atlanta, and then nonstop to Portland.
• The Delta Connections pilot from SYR to JFK was kind of a "race car driver"- taking the corners (on the ground) kind of fast compared to other pilots, and accelerating out of the turn at take off. Not scary, just unusual.
• Departing from JFK we experienced some "congestion", there were quite a number of planes queued up to leave the terminal. So many in fact that we couldn't back up. While taxiing around the airport I could see about 6 planes in front of us at one point. Later the pilot announced that we were number eight in line for departure! In the end we were only 20 minutes late (the really flew to get us home) from our original landing time. This would have been over an hour from our earlier itinerary, except that plane was delayed too and arrived at the same time as we did!
• Our checked bag took the Atlanta route.
• When we landed in Portland it felt like 2 AM!
• We got in the car at about 6:30 AM pacific time, which felt like 9:30 AM, but we still only got about 5 hours of sleep.
• On I-84, we saw two interesting things: an entire box car (for rail) laying on its side on a flat bed truck; a pickup truck with the bed full of wagon wheels, some of them looking really old!
• It took us almost two days to get all the way home. Still, I find it utterly amazing: we flew across the entire country!

Forgot to mention above: we were upgraded to Business class (first class? we were in row 1) for the 6 hour flight from JFK to PDX. This got us dinner (good for a plane, I would say) and complimentary movies/games on the in flight monitors. I watched two movies which I'll sum up:

1. There will be blood: gruesome. It was very well composed, but due to the subject matter, I'm not sure I enjoyed it.
2. National Treasure 2: dumbest plot ever. I expected this. The first one was better, but it was okay- if your stuck on a plane for six hours.
   

two photos

The first picture is of the Quad. As you can see, they have rolled in the special weather for visiting students. The sky is blue, there is no snow, and there are a lot of people on the grass. Aparently we are 20 degrees F above average today.

The second pictures is inside the geology building (I know, random) which has an interesting piece of art on the wall, and several casts of fossils along the right. It also has some very large windows, which the physics building does not have.

Syracuse, Day 2

This was the first full day. It started off quite early by pacific time standards but didn't feel that way. I dropped Steph off at the Carousel Center, a giant mall. They happen to be working on it right now so there was a lot of construction going on.

I found my way to campus by feel, after reading how to get to my final destination, the Quad 4 VIP parking. Getting to the lot went pretty smoothly. I walked passed the Quad (which was filling up with people) and headed for the Physics building. Inside I didn't immediately find the people I was looking for because the floor plan was a little odd. On the first floor there is a lecture hall, but on the second floor there is another hall way and more offices- it is hidden behind the free standing wall with the stairs and the elevator.

Once in there I chatted with the people I knew, and was introduced to a few new faces. Then I got a piece of good news. I've been upgraded from a TA to a RA! I'm pretty excited about this because it means I'll be able to keep working on LIGO from the start. I'm not sure how hard exactly, because I need to get the classes taken care of too.

After this I had a 'grad student's lunch'. Six of us, grad students only, went to King David's restaurant. It was an okay place, I think you just have to know what to order.

Next up was a little bit of work- the post-doc and I took the eLIGO telecon. Then it was back to the Carousel Center to pick up Steph and head back to the hotel for some down time.

Dinner is at 6:45 with two professors, the post-doc, and a friend of mine, one of the senior grad students.

getting "lost" in NY

We tried our hardest, but didn't actually get lost. Navigating by intuition, we did this:

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We'll try harder tomorrow, adding destinations, splitting up, etc.

writing from Syracuse

We made it!  The trip was mostly uneventful.  Some high lights:

1. landing at Atlanta was the "droppy-est" that either of us had ever experienced.
2. barely had time to get any food after landing and before boarding the hopper to SYR.
3. Although the Syracuse airport is much larger than our native Pasco, about 4 times, I would say, it is just a sleepy.
4. The necessary toll to get from the airport to the hotel was 20¢!
5. This place is very flat.

There are a couple other things, but I'll save them for later.  Gotta make sure I have something write about!

boarding planes to Atlanta

I'm so glad PDX has free wi-fi.  One hiccup at the security gate: I forgot to unpack my leatherman.  The nice man helped me mail it to myself.  Very friendly guy.  No other problems so far.

looming departure

We'll be getting on the road in about 30 minutes, I hope. This is about an hour behind schedule, if you ask me, which I find frustrating. I would like to be in Portland by 9, but that isn't possible now. Even getting there by 10pm is unlikely.

the latest

On Tuesday we drive to Portland to catch a plane to Syracuse, NY. We'll be there for about 3 1/2 days, which isn't much time. I hoping to see a couple of apartments, see the campus, get a road tour of the area, meet my new colleagues, and find out where good coffee and food is. We'll see how it goes.