Category: travel

I just booked a one-way train trip on Amtrak, from Birmingham, MI to Emeryville, CA. Danielle will fly out a couple days after I arrive, then back just under a week later, with me flying back home a few days after that.

This is going to be an interesting ride. It’s a bit over six hours to Chicago on the Wolverine, a couple hour layover, then another 56 hours or so to Emeryville on the California Zephyr. To Chicago I’ll have a business class seat, and then beyond that I’ll have a private Superliner Roomette.

This weekend Danielle and I rented some backpacks, sleeping bags, pads, and a tent from REI and headed out to the Pinckney Recreation Area to hike The Potawatomi Trail. After riding it on Memorial Day we figured that it would be a good location for a first overnight backpacking trip, and it was.

For food we brought along MREs in both surplus and civilian versions. They are decent meals, and at just over 1 pound each aren’t bad for an overnight trip. The food is general TV dinner quality, and about 1200 calories per meal. Eating one yesterday afternoon after setting up camp and another this morning before leaving, we were quite satisfied. I was also able to use the flameless heater in them to make this video of an MRE heater being burned in a campfire. In short, it burns hot and bright enough to overwhelm the CCD.

The second day of hiking was quite a bit easier than the first, which may be attributed to our leaving camp before the hottest part of the day. Another upside to finishing the hiking early is that we were able to return the rental stuff to REI a day early and be refunded an extra day of rental costs.

If you’d like to see more photos from this trip, click here: Potawatomi Trail (July 2009)

Danielle and I have just returned from visiting Dominic / while he is in Toronto for a wedding. We drove up there on Wednesday morning, stayed at a hotel in North York, and back this (Friday) evening. We’ve done a lot in the last few days, and here are some of the more memorable things:

· Ate lots of coffee and doughnuts from Tim Hortons
· Visited Niagara Falls
· Went to the top of the CN Tower.
· Ate poutine at Smokes Poutinerie.
· Ate at Richtree.
· Was photographed by an art student (unfamiliar with her camera) playing The Getaway pinball in an arcade in PATH.
· Walked around lots and lots of the city.

Photos will come later, as soon as I get a chance to upload them. I still haven’t taken the time to upload the ones from the San Francisco area when I was visiting Jeff / in February. Those will come soon too.

Here is a teaser image from when Jeff and I went to the Nike Missile Site in Golden Gate National Recreation Area today. This site, formerly SF-88, is probably the best preserved, best restored Nike site in the country. While there we were shown the inside of two of the command and control vans, were able to go down in the magazine, ride on the elevator holding a missile, and generally wander around.

While riding the elevator down into the magazine we were told that we had to “keep a hand on the missile”, which felt very strange. I presume it’s an effective way to ensure that one doesn’t get caught in what is a gigantic pinch point, but I felt strange touching a museum piece, much less a former nuclear missile. Here is a video that Jeff took of the missile elevator in action from inside the magazine.. We both have more videos and photos than this, but they haven’t been uploaded yet.

After visiting the launch site and being shown around the vans, we started hiking up towards the IFC (Integrated Fire Control) area, which was located on one of the higher peaks overlooking the launchers. It turns out that we took the not-quite-right trails, ending up on one peak over from the IFC, about 500′ away. We could have made it over there by winding our way up steep hills and through brush, but as there were clouds beginning to envelop the mountain tops, sun getting lower, us having no extra water, and no visible hole in the fence on the side of the were facing we headed back down to the car.

Thus far this has been a great trip. Visiting friends, meeting new people, eating lots of good food, and just generally having a relaxing, nice time. Not to mention the weather… It’s like Michigan in May.

It’s two weeks since Danielle and I returned from the UK and I finally captioned the photos I took while there. So, if you’d like to see them, here they are: London (November 2008)

Here’s a few of the more notable photos:

· Danielle’s giant kosher meals via NWA: 1, 2, 3
· Mornington Crescent!
· Camden Lock.
· Food cooking near our hotel at Best Mangal.
· Remains of Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth.
· Church of Scientology London.
· Toilet at Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing may have pooped.
· Working rebuild of Colossus.
· Wire wrapped and soldered terminals in a Marconi computer.
· Danielle’s seafood curry from a vendor in Borough Market London.
· Chorizo and rocket sandwich.
· Toasted cheese sandwhich from Kappacasein.
· Obama bumper sticker on a Mazda Miata.
· Portabello road on market day.
· Danielle outside a TARDIS.
· Empty Piccadilly line Tube platform because we got there too early.
· Nearly empty plane for the flight home.
· Nifty shadow / rainbow effect caused by the sun being behind the aircraft.

Danielle also now has a photo gallery and all of her pictures have been uploaded. She doesn’t have them captioned yet, but if you’d like to look through them, they are here: Danielle’s London 2008 Photos