The Life and Times of Drew Hess

Heading further Oeste

2009-06-19T10:40:00.001-07:00

Following the long journey across Missouri and Kansas, we finally arrived in Denver looking for some help in filling our propane tank. After multiple unsuccessful attempts, we parked in downtown Denver to explore the area. I quickly remembered the presence of the Greenpeace members soliciting donations, as we were approached by a good 15 people in our short hour walk through the city. After some disc golf in Arvada, we headed towards Granby where we’d be meeting up with a high school friend, Mike Armstrong, at the dude ranch he’s working at for the summer.

I-70 threw its first test at us as we ascended the front range…and Evan and I couldn’t have had larger smiles on our face. As we began to head up hill, Hoppy kept slowing and slowing until we finally found a nice spot in second gear that would give us a reliable 30 miles per hour up the hill. We certainly weren’t in any hurry to get anywhere, and it was a good thing because we didn’t have a choice. We made it through the mountains after driving through some snow and dropped into the valley where Granby lies under the auspice of gray clouds and a fine drizzle. We drove right into the ranch and found Mike sweeping the floors like a good first year ranch hand. We dropped off his mandolin, stayed the night and went on our way to Rocky Mountain National Park.

After greeting an adolescent moose at the entry gates, we made the decision to drive to where the summit pass was closed to cross our fingers and hope they opened the road. Holly and I went through this same procedure last year and got shut down, so we had to drive a couple hours out of the way to get where we were going. So we drove to the parking lot at 11,000 ft. and decided to go for a hike to pass the time until we were sure they wouldn’t open the gate. A short hike proved difficult to complete because of the deep snow and no tracks to follow. We found a steep hill to body slide down to pass the time and shortly after we returned to the car, some rangers appeared out of the fog and opened the gate! It’s hard to convey the excitement we experienced then, as we would have had to drive another 2 hours to detour and continue heading north. We had our doubts as to how Hoppy would handle the high elevation…but she didn’t seem to mind. The ranger warned of the 50 ft. visibility because of the intense fog, so we unfortunately didn’t get to see much of the surroundings on the highest paved road in the continental US (12,183 ft). We dropped down the east side and found a campsite in one of the few campgrounds that was open. There has been significant damage to the forests in the area due to the pine beetle infestation. The pest has killed entire hillsides and appears to eat all of the bark off the trees. It looked eerily like autumn in some places because of the deep green and auburn mix of tree colors from a distance. A large number of campsites were closed because they had to clear all of the trees in the area. The next day the weather cleared and allowed us a magnificent view of the skyline.

After a quick stop through Boulder to show Evan Pearl St., we headed north to Fort Collins to visit my friend Christina Minihan from my last study abroad in Australia. We had an incredible stay in FoCo, as they call it, where we went on brewery tours, played in the park, climbed trees, a little disc golf, food fights, fishing, etc. Christina is a ball of energy and happened to have some time off from her internship to be an incredible host. One of the highlights of Fort Collins is the New Belgium Brewery, a staple of the local economy and of the social scene. Every day they offer free tastings and there is always a crowd ready to have four glasses of whatever you want to sample off the menu. Atlanta has a few breweries that have the same premise but none are as generous as New Belg. They have a fun atmosphere, as the best known symbol of their company is the cruiser bicycle after their headlining beer Fat Tire. They had hula-hoops outside for the people waiting to keep themselves busy with, postcards that they would mail for free, disc golf discs for sale, and a wait staff that was incredibly welcoming. One of the more interesting facts I remember from the tour was that the founding couple of the brewery were originally an electrical engineer and a social worker. I was intrigued by the change in lifestyle they must have gone through after gaining success…supposedly they founded the company vision while on a hike together. Crazy Coloradoans. We toured the Colorado State University campus while there, they have an incredible green space in the middle of campus that is lined with old growth trees and is just plain expansive. Christina was moped-sitting for somebody, so Evan and I got to ride around campus looking like the guys from Dumber and Dumber. It was just generally a really fun stop that brought me back to my childhood a little bit, just being silly around the neighborhood.

Heading west through southern Wyoming, we stopped next outside Ogden, UT at Snowbasin Ski Resort. They helped host the Winter Olympics in 2002 and are a very expensive resort to ski at. We tried to mountain bike here but were 3 weeks too early for the mountain to be open. So instead we played disc golf during the 40 degree rain/hail storm. It was only a 9 hole course and the 9th hole was a doozie…488 ft with a 134 ft. drop in elevation. We promptly lost 4 discs on this hole, as the wind would catch your drive and throw it deep into the woods for you to go find. I found all but one, fortunately. We left Snowbasin and went to Eden to visit my dad’s aunt and uncle, Le and Gordon Langren whose condo I stayed at to ski in March. They kindly allowed us to join them for dinner, some card games, and again for breakfast. They told me about some relatives in Boise, our next stop. They also mentioned that they would be in the Portland area later in the week, just like we were going to be. We left with a few more resources than we came with, and looked forward to seeing them again soon.

The drive from northern Utah to southern Idaho is a mundane one. Idaho has a phrase that it uses: “Keep Idaho Green” – it’s questionable whether this part of Idaho was ever green to start with. We arrived in Boise to meet my dad’s uncle, Glen and Helen Fairborn, relatives I don’t think I had every previously met. These are relatives of my dad’s birthmother who passed away in 1968, and are some of the kindest people I’ve ever met. They invited us for dinner and breakfast as well, after a wonderful tour around Boise. Glen worked for Ore-Ida, the well known potato/French fry company. It took a while to dawn on me where the name Ore-Ida came from…but it wasn’t long until I realized where I was in the country – near the border of Oregon and Idaho. Georgia Tech played in the Humanitarian Bowl there at Boise State multiple times while I was in college so I recognized their stadium. One of the main things we wanted to do while here was float the river through town, a popular thing to do in the summer. Unfortunately, they were letting a lot of water out of the dam upstream that flooded the river and made it dangerous. We played a little disc golf and headed out of town seeking the Oregon Coast.

Starting off in Hoppy

2009-06-19T10:33:00.000-07:00

Howdy Pilgrim! After crossing the Mississippi and finding some time to sit down to start the account of yet another summer of freedom and travel, I begin to realize yet again how lucky of a kid I am. Evan Wimpey, a friend of mine (of internet fame from the “Lecture Crashers” videos on Youtube) from Georgia Tech, is driving my 1984 Toyota Huntsman Motorhome that has been chugging straight from St. Louis to Denver like a champ today (16 hrs). This style of travel isn’t for everyone, because we oftentimes have trouble pushing 55 mph over the rolling his of the Great Plains, but after a few hours of realizing there’s no hurry anyways, the RV (from here on known as “Hoppy”) begins to grow even more on you. We’ll talk more about my summer home in a little bit.

I began the journey last Thursday, May 28^th when I picked Evan up from a MARTA station in north Atlanta. He threw his bags in the back and had the biggest smile on his face for the first few hours from the pleasant surprise of such an incredible road tripping vehicle. From there, we made our first stop in Franklin, TN to see Gil and Jill Eustice, the parents of my former girlfriend Melissa Eustice who passed away in a car accident in Feb. 2008. I coached the summer league swim team for two summers with Megan and Melissa while their dad Gil ran the actual meets and the officiating. The Eustice’s moved to TN a couple years ago and I really wanted to get to spend an evening with them in their new home. They are infamous for having lots of cats, and there was no mistake as we were greeted by 13 of them. They had an elusive white squirrel that lived in the back yard that’s managed to stay away from their grasp. After a nice dinner and time to catch up on their new Tennessee life, Evan and I headed north to Bowling Green, KY where we’d be caving at Mammoth Cave National Park the next day.

Arriving right on time to our 6 hour tour of Mammoth on the Wild Cave tour, a concert pianist named Janet Smith was our guide for the day. Janet proceeded to bring us up to speed on what we were getting ourselves into, and said that where and how far we went would be determined by our abilities to keep up. There were only 6 of us on the tour, all in good shape (as weren’t allowed on the tour if you exceeded certain dimensions because we’d be squeezing through crevices all day) so I was excited about a serious day of caving. We descended into a 230 ft. deep shaft that had been blasted to access deeper parts of the cave, where we popped out into a nice big cavern. We walked along the cavern for a bit, came upon a small hole next to a rock on the side, and proceeded head first down the hole for our first crawl. Janet is a speedy caver…did I mentioned she’s 73 and leads this tour every summer? Our expedition covered 6 miles over the course of the day and took us through holes that you could only squeeze through if you laid out like Superman and inched your way through them. One of my favorite parts was when we all got to a spot where we could sit together and turn our lights out and experience the intense darkness and silence that deep under ground. I can’t imagine exploring the cave in a time where your oil lantern could fail and leave you stranded 8 hours underground. Not the kind of thing I’m interested in. These caves are much different than the stereotypical cave site because they connect together to make an incredibly long network – 370 miles and growing! They still actively find new passages. The caves are different additionally in the sense that they were formed by flowing water and thus do not have much in the way of stalactites or stalagmites, as the area above the caves is largely capped by sandstone which prevents water from seeping in. I really enjoyed the parts of the tour where we popped out from under a rock into a large cavern where a different tour group happened to be walking by…I could imagine how jealous I would’ve been if I were one of the kids on that tour. At the end of the day, we were filthy, tired, and hungry, but extremely happy with our caving experience. Just for information, if you wondered what “spelunking” means like I did, spelunking is what a novice caver participates in. If you have experience caving, then you are a true caver.

From Bowling Green, we ventured west to St. Louis. The weather was superb all weekend for us, raining only at night while we were asleep. We made our first grocery stop, went on the Annheiser-Busch brewery tour, stopped at the famous Arch and learned a lot about St. Louis’ role in the westward expansion of the US. I guess I’ve crossed the Mississippi on road before, but learning more about Tom Sawyer, riverboating, and what it must’ve been like to ford the river was very rewarding. We met up with college friends Eli Riddle (at Washington University’s Med School) for some famous Ted Drewe’s Frozen Custard. It goes to show that a business really has something special when the locals are as numerous as the tourists late on a Saturday night. Some of Eli’s friends recently graduated from Yale in New Haven, CT, so it was nice to get some insight on what my new home will be like. The following day we met up with Patrick Odneal (working near his hometown at the world’s largest concrete plant) and toured the St. Louis Cathedral and Forest Park. The Cathedral was incredible, one of the few churches esteemed enough to have the “Basilica” designation. The entire ceiling of the building was covered in mosaic tiles, taking 84 years to complete. Afterwards, we drove around St. Louis’ flagship park that covers more ground than Central Park. The plethora of free museums, expansive greens, sports fields, pavilions, etc. was impressive and is something to be cherished by the resident’s there. We set up my slackline for a little fun in one of the groves of trees. You’ll see me talk more about that later but slacklining is a balance control ‘sport,’ if you will, where you tie a 1” wide nylon strap really tight between two trees and essentially tight rope walk across it. It’s fun, easy to set up, free, and challenging. We had some St. Louis style pizza and then played disc golf outside of town. St. Louis was a fun place to visit, emphasized by some great friends and incredible weather.

Hoppy has been running fabulous. I didn’t know what to expect from small truck a year older than me, but the 97 hp 4 cylinder hasn’t had any trouble yet. We’ve had to add a little oil and a little radiator fluid but otherwise haven’t had any complaints. We learned a little bit about packing groceries against doors that could open during turns, but otherwise haven’t had too bad of luck with the novice camper syndrome. My parents were extremely helpful in getting me prepared and set up to hit the road, I certainly couldn’t have done it without them.

My road trip is tentatively planned to last until July 15^th, when I will return home, pack up my stuff, and head to Connecticut. My two roommates Jon Berggren and Steve Young will have already been working for a month and will hopefully have most everything figured out by the time I get there. We settled on a nice little 4 br 1 ½ ba in the west haven part of New Haven, check it out at 128 Maplewood Ct. New Haven, CT on Google maps. I start work on July 27^th and am excited about the working world. Oh wait, I have 2 more months of road tripping before then…woohoo!

American West Road Trip Planning

2009-05-09T12:35:00.000-07:00

All,

I've decided to take some time to road trip out west for a good chunk of the upcoming summer. As I have finally graduating with my mechanical engineering degree from Georgia Tech, I will be starting work July 27th in Stratford, Connecticut with a helicopter company named Sikorsky (they make the Blackhawk) and hope to enjoy my freedom before then.

I'm going to be driving in a 1984 Toyota Huntsman RV that I recently bought. It sleeps 3 with a toilet, shower, stove, fridge, generator, etc. The trip dates are May 28th to July 15th and I'm welcoming people to join me along the way for as long as you want. Call me at 706-399-9745 or email drew.hess@gatech.edu if you're interested in coming for any part of it so we can start brainstorming!

-Drew (still working on my road name for the CB)

Cairns

2008-08-02T21:39:00.000-07:00

8/1/2008

Cairns (pronounced Cans) #2

Taking it easy for a night so I can recap my experiences over the last two weeks. Not only do I want to update y’all, but I want to make sure I remember everything that’s gone on for my memory’s sake. I’m picking up at a mental lapse that occurs in Sydney…

After a little over two months without a haircut, I started getting complaints about it as well as getting tired of brushing it out of the way (mind you, I got my last haircut the morning I left the US). A few of the guys in class had gotten a cut recently, and after asking around, it seemed the going price at the campus barber shop was $15. Reasonable, you say. Well, I stroll in to the salon, and sit down for a mop chop. I tell her what I want and then she gives me over to the other lady to wash my hair. I get my hair washed sometimes at the hair cuttery in Atlanta, so it wasn’t that big of a deal until I noticed how awkwardly long she was washing my hair for. I was tense for the first part of it but realized I should probably enjoy the head massage while it lasts. I didn’t understand why a customer would want or need a full shampoo and conditioner rinse BEFORE the haircut, but whatever. When the lady finishes, she says “Come thru” to me. I didn’t know what she meant so she repeated “Come thru…” and I said “I’m sorry I don’t know what you’re trying to say” and she just tells me to sit up. I sit down in the barber chair and the stylist says “So, you’re having trouble understanding accents aye?” I replied by saying I didn’t know “Come thru” meant for the person to get out of the chair, as it certainly wasn’t obvious for me. They had a nice laugh, and the lady proceeds to cut far more off of my head than I instructed. Luckily I had short hair in DC so I could deal with it, or else I may have been a little more flustered. The next shock came when I stood at the register, ready to hand my $20 bill only to hear her say “Forty dollars please.” I was so shocked that I couldn’t even respond to her, awkwardly pulled out another $20 bill (food for the next week), and walked out the door. I couldn’t imagine hair salons in Australia were up for bargaining, so I kept walking, laughing in disbelief while hating myself for making the assumption about the price. I failed to realize all of the guys in my class got buzz cuts without shampooing, ah!! The worst part of the story is that I then had to go buy gel for my do because it was too short to stay by itself, not to mention the drastic change for all of the people in my class, now making fun of me for needing ‘product.’

The next mental lapse comes on the following day before our presentation where I attempt to iron my pants. My lightweight Columbia hiking pants were a bit wrinkly, and using the iron without a functioning steam button was not a good idea. I touch the iron to the pants, immediately burning a hole in the crotch area. Hm…let’s just say I wasn’t too happy with myself for ruining a favorite pair of pants. No excuses for either story here, just a period of bad logic running it’s course. There’s more to follow.

I took a look at my bank accounts while in Sydney to get an idea where I’m standing, since I’ve only been dealing with cash since I left home. I’m very fortunate in many ways financially, primarily that this $11,000 program was paid for by generous scholarships, for which I could not be more thankful for. Secondly, I worked for ATA Engineering this spring, so I’ve had a few months to pad my bank account for this occasion. Due to some technicalities in NZ, I ended up living off the cash that I brought until last week, of which I’ve finally finished off. So when you consider that I’ve spent around $4000 since leaving home in May, you can see why living on the cheap side is a necessity for somebody who has to live on what’s left until after graduation. Not to mention I have two more weeks of traveling after our program finishes, so every extra $25 for a sheep shearing matters.

On Sunday, we made our way to Cairns and moved into our nicest accommodation yet – a $200/night hotel with incredible views, pools and service galore. Waking up on Monday morning with the shades wide open, I couldn’t believe the sunrise I could see from my queen bed. We’re 100 yards from the ocean, overlooking the coastal tidal zone just down the street from downtown. Cairns is the gateway to the tropics here in north Queensland, servicing nearby World Heritage listed Great Barrier Reef and Daintree Rainforest. It’s definitely a tourist attraction but weirdly doesn’t have a beach. There’s a “Lagoon” area where a manmade pool buts up to the ocean and that’s where most people lay out. The beaches in the area are a 15 minute bus ride away. Our classes pretty much ended on Monday, as we had one last classroom session followed by a field trip on Tuesday and final on Wednesday.

Tuesday, we traveled north to Mossman Gorge by way of a sugar mill. I don’t think our coordinators planned far enough ahead to arrange a tour, so we kind of drove through their staging yard, read a flyer, and left. There are lots of kane fields in the area, and the only real thing we could see were train cars full of chopped sugarcane. We snagged a few stalks and cut them up on the bus ride to see if you could taste the supposed 80% sugar inside. The stalks were sweet but took some chomping to get the sugary taste. In Mossman, we did a short hike through the forest followed by a couple hours of free time in Port Douglas. Apparently Bill Clinton vacations in Port Douglas, so that may say something about its ‘laid back but classy’ aura. Merritt and I attempted to rent windsurfers but decided taking the catamaran sailboat out would be a better use of our time in the choppy waters. It was enjoyable to sail in the ocean again, not quite as fast as I’m used to without a jib, but a lot of fun to catch a wave on the sailboat to ride into shore. When we returned to the hotel, Merritt, Nick, and I cleaned up and headed out to check out some lawn bowling for the evening. The sport is quite popular in Australia; I think I’ve only seen it in a couple places in California while in the US. It’s a less straining version of bocce ball basically. We arrived at the rink not knowing a thing about the sport and left with significant experience. We intended on playing each other, but later found ourselves in a social night tournament consisting of about 60 people (avg. age 55). The people helping to get us set up kept mentioning “The game will start at 7:30” and we didn’t understand because we just came to muck around. We kind of fell into signing up in the competition, listed as beginners so we could be split up fairly to the teams. Frank and Pam were my teammates – they were able to clean up the mess I created since the beginners bowl first. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the bocce ball idea, the came is centered around landing your teams balls closest to the white “Jack” for points. Lawn bowling is different in that the game is play on turf or closely cut grass, with gutters snagging the balls that roll long. The balls themselves are also interesting in that they are weighted on one side and they are shaped like squished spheres so they roll like tires, wobbling at first and then straightening themselves, then falling to the flat side normally when they run out of speed. The weighting causes them to tend to one side, especially when they start to slow down. This aspect is what makes the game so interesting. The terms used to describe a shot are “weight” and “grass”: weight meaning the speed of the ball and grass meaning the width compensation for the curve. I received lots of coaching and managed to score quite a few points for the team. We learned etiquette for the game, learned a lot from the locals about the sport, and felt very welcomed and in an Australian environment. It cost $6 for the four hour game, and we were lucky enough to catch a ride home with Ruth, a generous elderly woman headed toward town. Merritt was on the winning team and won a $25 butcher shop voucher, which they kindly exchanged for cash instead. It was an awesome experience, I couldn’t have asked for a better evening (or day, at that).

We have had glorious weather so far in Cairns. It’s been 80 and sunny every day, so I assumed it’s like this every day. We got lucky in more ways than one, as the three weeks prior in Cairns were rainy, windy, and gray, and it hailed in Sydney so much it looked like there was snow on the ground. It’s hard for me to sit on the beach contemplating a swim and think that it really is winter here. They say it’s paradise in the winter (dry season) and unbearable in the summer (wet season).

When the roommate signup sheet went around in Sydney, I got a taste of what my independence has gotten me. I’ve made a conscious effort to make friends throughout the different programs, but haven’t really spent much time with any one group of people aside from Mike. That being said, people have kind of paired up so there are groups of friends and they’re figuring out who they like and don’t like. On one of the bus tours, apparently the other groups were confronting the Energy group because they didn’t agree that the engineers must be smarter than everyone else. Anyways, for me this means I’m kind of out in the open and am not really attached which means it’s easy to get overlooked and forgotten about. I arrived in this position by being independent and doing my own thing, which was a conscious choice. It doesn’t bother me too much, it just makes it hard to get in touch with people when they all group up and go off together. I’d rather be by myself doing what I want to do rather than sticking with the group just for the sake of being with people. A lot of this feeling may stem from getting annoyed at people drinking incessantly and being immature, which may be a product of the age difference between the freshmen and sophomores and myself. At any rate, it’s been nice to spend some time with other kids to share the study abroad experience even if I haven’t made lots of permanent friends. I do like the idea of having even more friends to stay with across the country though.

The food situation in Cairns has been nice. We have a nice buffet in the hotel every morning that’s included in the program costs, from which I normally make sandwiches for lunch. Along the Esplanade (coast walkway), there are some nice barbeque grills that allow us to grill out since we don’t have any other means of cooking. It helps that the price of beef here is very low - $2 for a T-bone. They have marinated shish kebabs at the grocery store for $1.30 each, both of which have proven great ways to eat dinner.

On Wednesday, we finished our academic program with the final exam. The only warning we received from our professors as to its content was that it was easy and usually everyone passes. This statement normally implies to students that they don’t need to study too much, especially if they have 500 information-packed slides from the previous six weeks to look over. Thirty one multiple choice questions challenged us to remember detailed facts from all different parts of the program, supposing we memorized necessary equations and knew the efficiencies of energy use of different forms of steel shaping. Needless to say, I had trouble recalling any specific numbers from the thousands of efficiency numbers that I’ve seen since June 21^st and I’ve been paying close attention in class. I can’t imagine what the kids who play Sudoku every day thought of the test.

Thursday, Merritt and I decided to try to find some windsurf rentals up the coast. I’ve had two learning experiences and wanted to give it another shot. We were lucky and got a ride to Palm Cove with the tourism information director from the hotel, a nice 30 minute ride that happened to be on the way to her lunch appointment. We were asking about deep sea fishing, so she stopped at her house on the way to let us talk to her husband, who was tuning his fish finders in the driveway. He showed us some of his recent red snapper catch, then we hopped back into the car. Jacky said to us while we pulled away “Well, you’ve now seen some of the local wildlife: the husband.” We arrived in Palm Cove to find perfect sailing conditions but no windsurfers for rent. Port Douglas, apparently the only place in the area with the necessary equipment, was another 45 minutes and a $46 round trip bus ticket away. So to pass the time, we decided to swim to the island off shore. It didn’t appear that far away, but didn’t feel like the smartest idea when we started swimming. I was frustrated to find that Merritt was only interested in doing slow breast stroke to get over there, so it took 35 minutes of swimming to get close. When we started nearing the exposed land due to low tide, I remembered a sign at the beach in Cairns that warned of crocodiles in the area and suddenly didn’t feel so safe. As we got closer to the land, we realized the bottom was covered in coral and it wasn’t going to be an easy exit. Merritt got scared when he kicked the squishy bottom a couple times which flustered me a little more. We decided to swim back without spending any time on land. On the way back, a boat passed with a few people in it who waved as they went by. It was comforting to know they didn’t think we were in distress, as Merritt was starting to get a little tired and frustrated with the distance we had left to go. We got to shore a little ways down from where we started, as the current was picking up. When we got to our stuff and started walking to the bus stop, a guy with binoculars asked us if we were the guys swimming out there. He said that some people had just gone out to look for us, as they place we just swam across was called “Shark Alley” and produced a 6 ft shark the day before. We also didn’t realize the buoys in the water on the other part of the beach were holding up nets to keep the crocs out. Fortunately our 1 hr 10 min swim was eventless and we lived to tell the tale. On the way to the island, I was telling Merritt how stupid of an idea the swim was and we started talking about how Captain Cook had to take a few chances in order to reach the other side of the world, and this was a small challenge compared to that. Ignorance is bliss and I don’t intend on employing that kind of stupidity any longer. I’m almost home Momma…

Today, a group of kids and I went to Fitzroy Island for a real day in the tropics. This place appealed to me because for a $40 ferry ticket, you could spend the day on the island hiking, snorkeling, and sunning on an island protected by national park. We hiked straight to the summit, an incredible 1200 ft. high 360º view of the mountainous coastline with Great Barrier Reef offshore. The hike was hot until we reached the winds passing the summit, cooling us off for the next hour as we soaked in the view. We could even see whales breaching repeatedly about a mile offshore towards the reef. Stunning. We later made our way down to the beach where I swam around with my swim goggles (couldn’t fit the scuba goggles in my pack). I was really impressed with the amount of life in the water. In the hour that I was in the water, I saw sea turtles, a sting ray, a squid, lots of fish, and lots of neat coral. The rest of the day was spent lounging on the beach, trying to be smart enough to avoid lobster-like skin from the extremely intense sun. They Aussies say “Slip, Slap, Slop” for their encouragement of sunscreen use. I did a pretty good job, knowing that I’d be out in the sun the following day on my scuba trip. When we got back into the port, I found a shop to book my introductory scuba dive. Merritt and I were going to sign up together, but it turns out he doesn’t have access to his bank account until Monday so he canceled. I guess I’m going to have to make friends on my own tomorrow. I’m super excited about diving on the outer section of the GBR, this is top notch. Visibility(I’m told) is up to 20 meters out there.

Sydney #2

2008-07-28T15:50:00.001-07:00

7/25/2008

Cairns

Looking at the dates of my past blog entries, it appears I’ve kept from updating you for the longest period yet on this trip, something that is going to take a while to catch up from. I’ll start where I left off.

On Tuesday of our second week, I went to see what I thought was going to be an opera at the Sydney Opera House, but turns out I was just too naïve to know the storyline. We saw “My Fair Lady,” which is obviously a musical instead of an opera. The reason I signed up for this event was because it was the only ‘opera’ that our director was offering tickets to, but I didn’t previously know what “My Fair Lady” was about. Apparently I should know it as a classic as anyone I asked about it said “The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plains…” Fortunately, I wasn’t the only kid who didn’t know anything about the story, so I didn’t feel so bad. We got all dressed up and made our way downtown, ready for my classiest experience all summer. I bought a glass of wine, only to find out that I would have to drink it in the following 4 minutes because the show was about to start and drinks weren’t allowed inside. We got a few pictures and entered the theater, which was much smaller than I imagined. I didn’t realize that inside the iconic structure, five different theaters reside inside different sections that serve different purposes. As the show started, I couldn’t convince myself that they didn’t have microphones on. We were a few rows from the back, as far away as you could get, and I could hear the actors even when they were whispering. Absolutely incredible sound - I was most interested in the music emanating from the pit, as thoughts of my visit to Citta della Pieve in Tuscany to see my cousin Troy conducting for the orchestra filled my mind. The play was satisfactorily long, a full three hours with an intermission, where I found out some of my friends were taking perhaps the most expensive nap of their lives. I kept thinking during the play about how incredibly different those actors lives’ are than mine, their specialty being delivery and accent versus logical thinking and precise calculation. It was a very enjoyable experience, almost surreal to walk out of the Opera House after a show.

The next memorable experience I had was the sunrise coast walk from Bondi Beach to Coogee. My friend Mike and I got up early one morning and made our way to the beach, arriving just as the light of the early morning allowed the surfers to enter the water. I was encouraged to see all of the exercise activity going on at that hour, as a surprising number of people were jogging, exercising on the beach, surfing, etc. Mike and I needed to be back on campus in time for class to start, so we walked quickly along the coastal walkway, stopping to take pictures as the sun rose. It was a great start to the day, I’m very glad I was able to get up for that experience.

Thursday night, most of the kids went down the street to a bar where they have “Trashyokee,” the perfect chance for people to belt out whatever song they like. They didn’t have Foreigner’s ‘Juke Box Hero,’ so I decided to save my voice for another time.

Friday, Mike and I took the train a couple hours outside Sydney to a town called Katoomba, the gateway to the Blue Mountains National Park. We were very lucky to have great weather during our two day stay; it was nice and chilly in the mornings but perfect to keep cool during a long hike. Once in town, we found a quality hostel, dropped our bags and hit the trail. We hiked from Echo Point around to the Three Sisters. The landscape here is pretty interesting, the mountains are less mountainy than the name implies. It looks like a plateau with wide, gentle canyons brimming with eucalyptus trees. There is a large precipice that runs along the top rim of the canyon as it winds its way through the area, so you can imagine a plateau that stops at a ledge, drops down a 100 ft vertical rock face, then gently slops downward to the bottom of the valley. We saw quite a few falls along the hike, got some great pictures and unsuccessfully tried to hitchhike back onto town because our trail terminated a few miles out of town. It was fun to laugh at ourselves as all the cars drove by, though. We bought groceries at the store to cook for dinner, only to find that the kitchen we were cooking in didn’t have an oven for our pizzas. Fortunately the pizzas fit into the microwave, but it wasn’t ideal by any means. We roomed with a Dutch brother and sister, in town because his car broke down again. He said that he spent $800 on the car when he got to Australia a year ago, has spent at least that much in repairs since then, and paid over $1000 in parking tickets. Yikes. The next day Mike and I went to Wentworth Falls, a short train ride away, to do some more hiking. This trail was enjoyable because there were far less people, the trail was more rustic, there were lots of falls, and the ecosystem seemed to change every 30 minutes. One second it would be rainforesty, like New Zealand, then it would change to dry skinny tall trees, then a harsh rocky environment then followed by more rainforest. I can’t accurately describe them from a scientific standpoint, but the differences were quite obvious by the sights and sounds. One more interesting thing about this hike was the presence of coal just beneath the surface. There were remnants of old mines that were phased out when national park status was given to the area, but you could see the black presences in the place of some fallen rocks.

When we returned to Sydney, Mike and I decided to be spontaneous and go down to see Beethoven’s symphony Missa Solemnis performed by the Sydney Opera in the concert hall of the Opera House. This theater was much larger than the play hall, the organ was pretty incredible sitting high above the choir loft. The playbill for the symphony describes Missa Solemnis as one of Beethoven’s greatest works, written as church music for the crowning of a prince but was far too long for church and was four years late for the deadline. Given its connection to the church, it was not only an instrumental, but had four lead opera singers backed up by a choir. This was the kind of production I was after, as everyone was dressed to the nines and the music was the main attraction. I was blown away by the way the symphony worked together to produce such music, it seems almost unnatural to me to be that in sync with the people around you. I also cannot begin to comprehend how one goes about composing a body of music like that. How can you distinguish the differences between choir, opera, strings, wind, and tympani inside your head, any then translate that into written music? I don’t know, but I can appreciate the geniuses who do. My favorite parts of the performance were the parts of music where the different sections of the symphony played in waves, so you could hear the individual instruments as they blended into the wave before them and the wave after them. I also enjoyed watching the string instruments during a really fast section, where all of the musicians seemed to be moving with fury for a few moments in such controlled motion. My least favorite parts of the show was the $100 ticket and the 1 ½ long performance. A small price to pay for a memorable experience.

Tuesday thru Sunday, Sydney hosted the largest event in the city’s history: World Youth Day. The actual day, Sunday, was preceded by a week of activities consisting of and for the half a million Christians from all over the world who descended on the city. There were concerts, reenactments, performances, etc. that took place across the city. It was an interesting atmosphere in many ways. First, I’ve never been a part of such a massive gathering of Christians before, and second, I’ve never seen such a mix of people from all over the world, especially where a display of your nationality is encouraged. Unfortunately, I didn’t participate in any of the activities during the week aside from the walk from downtown to Randwick Racecourse, and that was because the buses could run because of the blockade for this walk. The racecourse is across the street from campus, and it hosted to largest events of the week, specifically the Evening Vigil and the Mass delivered by the Pope. On Sunday morning, I woke up and decided to see if I could get into the racecourse to attend Mass, which I did. There were so many people there, it was ridiculous. Adding to the craziness of the scene, most of the people there participated in ‘Sleep Under the Stars,’ and had set up their spots the night before. Everyone was sitting or laying on the ground, most with the thin metallic emergency blankets nearby. I saw a sweatshirt that said “I slept at Randwick Racecourse, only God knows why.” There were flags from around the world being flown all over the place, I suppose to show their presence as well as provide some sort of landmark for people to navigate by. I arrived just as the procession was starting – I believe the Popemobile already arrived and the priests and other people made their way down the read carpet and onto the stage. There was some incredible music, an orchestra with full choirs, opera singers and the like all working together to produce some wonderful hymns. The sound was very clear, and I found a good place to watch the action behind one of the big screens, as I was about halfway to the back and a little to the right of the stage, so I couldn’t see much by naked eye. The camera work was amazing, it was like watching a DVD before your eyes. It was a surreal experience, I felt like the second coming could have happened any second. I thought it was also unique that I was in the same city as the Pope for the second time in a couple months, but when he came to DC in April, I couldn’t go because the tickets went fast. The feeling surrounding these Catholics seemed to be much more contemporary than I’ve experienced in my visits to Catholic churches. I was also encouraged to see so many Catholics from around the world. It reminded me what a long history the church has and how extensive its missionary efforts are/have been. The presence of nuns and monks was surprising as well, I really respect the amount of devotion they have for committing their lives to Christ in such a strong way. I found it frustrating that so many people around the city complained about the WYD people, talking about how they were making the city a mess, making noise with their songs, and clogging the streets. I think it was incredible display of faith and was glad to be a small part of it.

Tuesday, I woke up at 5:15 am and hoped on a bus to Bondi Beach to check out the big swell that the forecasts were predicting. I arrived about 15 minutes before first light, so I decided to sit and watch the waves and the first couple guys go in to make a judgment on where I should paddle out. The first guy ran by me with his board, stretched, and started his paddle. After 15 minutes of struggling against the waves, he rode back in to shore. Frustrated he ran back up by me, looked back out at the ocean, and ran home. I could see a rip on one part of the beach, taking careful note to make sure I wouldn’t get caught up in it. The southern part of Bondi has rocks on it, so the waves actually hit and bounce back towards the oncoming waves. The only reason I mention that is because of the really neat way the refracted waves move through the oncoming waves, intersecting in very linear ways and throwing up a spray of water at the point of intersection. You can feel the refracted waves as you paddle out, as you get a boost every now and again as you paddle down a wave that’s going back out to sea. I got very lucky when I decided to paddle out. I timed it just right and caught a break in the sets, allowing me to get outside just before my arms wore completely out. I could feel the strength of the swell in how much water was moving with each wave. Duck diving through the wave felt inefficient because, as I tucked under the front part of the wave, the swirling water behind it would suck me back towards shore no matter how deep I dove. The surface was pretty messy, and the waves were crumbling more than barreling, which was comforting in some respect. On the other hand, though, I was paddling into waves with a 10 foot face and kept pulling off because I wasn’t ready. One wave I pulled off, turned around, only to see this monster wave breaking another 20 meters outside of me. I tried to duck dive under it but just got destroyed, and it carried me a good 100 meters towards shore. By that time, I was inside the break zone and decided to go to shore to rest. I waited a few minutes then tried to paddle out where it was smaller, but couldn’t get out. My arms were shot and breakfast was calling, so I went back to campus. After class, I headed back out to the beach without checking the surfcam. When I got to the beach, I couldn’t see any people in the water but I could see that the sea was raging. Huge nasty waves moving incredibly amounts of water filled the bay. I got some neat pictures of the fury of the waves, and a really cool one of a crazy guy braving the waves.

It rained the next three days, so surfing wasn’t really an option and I needed to do some work on my project, so things worked out well. Our group project was a 15 page paper and a presentation titled “Overview of Net Zero Energy Residential Home Options.” The idea is to suggest options for homeowners on how to lower energy use inside a household as well as generate power on site as well. Some interesting topics we covered were low consumption appliances, power generation, energy storage, building layout, lighting, spatial conditioning, and negative crediting. I enjoyed learning about the spatial conditioning aspects of the house, focusing on geothermal heating and cooling, chilled beams, and passive down-draft cooltowers. I realize that a 10 page paper can barely scratch the surface of the options available, but I was pleased to research a topic we suggested rather than settling for one of the recommended subjects.

Sydney

2008-07-14T15:08:00.000-07:00

7/14/2008
Sydney

I’m finally getting a chance to sit still for a few minutes so I write down all that’s been happening since I arrived in Sydney a week ago. I’ve been having trouble keeping in touch because the internet isn’t quite as accessible as they led on it would be. Since it’s winter break for the students here, most of the buildings on campus are closed after business hours and my free internet in the room shuts off after 7 pm, so while you guys are sleeping I have internet, and while you’re awake, I’m sleeping. I getting it straightened out this week, though, so here goes.

After getting settled into our dorms on campus at the University of New South Wales, we explored the main street we live on, Anzac Parade where there are tons of asian restaurants. I think it’s the cheapest option for dinner available (about $7), aside from buying groceries. The catch there is that we don’t have any facilities in the dorm to cook for ourselves, so unless you can microwave it, there’s no real way for you to eat here. Unless…you can survive on peanut butter and honey sandwiches like I am. No, I’m just kidding…I’ve been eating egg salad sandwiches too. We’re only provided breakfast and lunch at the dining hall downstairs; I think people aren’t considering how much even just a $10 dinner every night for three weeks adds up to. People keep giving me crap for being so cheap, but when I’ve already spent tres mil dolares ($3000) since I left LA, I’d say I’m in the lead for spending the most money.

On Sunday morning I went to a church called Hillsong, a very contemporary worship-based church that was similar to Buckhead Church in Atlanta. The guest pastor was from Louisiana and did standup comedy for most of his ‘sermon,’ but had a good message in the last 15 minutes about generosity, something I need to be more comfortable with. Jacky helped me realize that when she was telling me about how when she gets too much stuff she wants to give it to other people who can use it. I like that idea a lot.

Our ‘uni’ is situated in a convenient spot for access to the city – we’re pretty much directly south of downtown. The bus stop outside my window takes me downtown in about 20 minutes. There are a couple different buses that run to the beaches: Coogee being the closest, Bronte, and Bondi. The bus system can be figured out by knowing which number bus goes where…and you better have figured that out before you go to the stop because other than asking the driver, there’s no real way to figure out which goes where. Although we’re south of downtown, the area is referred to as the ‘Eastern Suburbs’ and the city center closest to us is Kensington or Randwick. Our campus is nice, our dorm is right next to the athletic field (a huge circle used for playing cricket and Australian football) and the tennis courts. Campus takes up one rectangular block of the area, with one main center walkway and an up-sloping hill that has endless sets of steps. It is a sort of technology school like Georgia Tech; it’s pretty obvious that everyone here is focused on science. On Sunday I took a run through campus and went down the other side of the campus hill to the beach. Lots of the people I passed looked at me funny in my t-shirt and shorts as they were dressed with big coats and scarves, it was a chilly 60 degrees during this bitter winter…not. It reminds me a lot of San Diego because the sun warms things up during the day and you can wear a light coat at night. Today it looked like it was going to rain in the morning and later at the beach it was a cloudless sunset.

On Tuesday, we took a fieldtrip for class to a steel recycling plant called OneSteel. This plant takes in scrap metal, melts it down and sells bars of high quality steel to customers for further manufacture. It was a great tour, the plant site mixed with the way they make their product was very interesting. This plant is situated right next to a large highway and also is surrounded by residential housing, so it was designed to have minimal sight, sound, and pollution effects. Because of this, you wouldn’t be able to tell it is an industrial site if you stood on the other side of the trees surrounding the boundary. The buildings were set up to absorb and contain the sounds from the processes so even the difference between internal and external sounds of the plant buildings were incredible. They bring in scrap metal from all over Australia and dump it into their indoor scrap yard. A large magnet then grabs loads of metal and dumps it into a bin. The bin is stacked with light scrap at the bottom, heavy scrap in the middle, and light scrap on top of that. The bin then supplies the working metal for the furnace. This plant uses what’s called an ‘electric-arc furnace’ and is basically a huge lightning bolt style electricity arc that melts the metal so it can be formed into other shapes. The temperatures for this process are ridiculously high, somewhere along the lines of 6000º C to keep the metal in a molten state. We watched from inside the control room the furnace loading process: the cap opens as you can see the radiating glow off the roof of the molten metal in the furnace, the bin releases a load of fresh scrap metal into the furnace and huge flames shoot up feeding on the impurities and coatings of the scraps, the lid comes down and clamps shut, the graphite electrodes spark up and the incredibly loud sound of repetitive, constant lightning bolts pulse through tons of metal, heating the pile from the middle into a molten soup while a lance with measuring equipment waves through the soup, spitting lava-like debris out of the lance hole. Then we got to see the bottom of the furnace, where the metal exits, being formed and cooled at the same time. The bars of metal are glowing yellow orange and are radiating so much heat you can’t stand to get closer than 10 feet or you’ll get barbequed. The rods are sent down an assembly line until they cool enough to be cut to length and stacked. The plant reminded me a lot of my time at the chemical plant in Augusta, FinnChem, where I often thought about how much stress the work environment puts on the operators’ bodies. With so much heat, metal dust, and electricity pulsing through the area, I couldn’t imagine the effects on someone’s body over the course of 20 years.

Following the trip, my Penn State friend Mike and I went for a walk along the coast to check out more of the beaches, and made a stop to check with a lady about a surfboard I found for sale on the internet. This was our first attempt at figuring out the bus system on the fly and it worked out pretty well. I felt like I was making forward progress on exploring the nearby area. Since we traveled well on Tuesday, he decided to accompany me on Wednesday to an area next to the University of Sydney to check out another surfboard. After class, we hit up a few thrift stores in the area and then went to see how good my bargaining skills were. The guy I found on the internet was moving a few days later to France and had a combo board/wetsuit for sale. He was nice and the equipment was in pretty good condition – the board was impeccable other than a repair from this guy’s accident on a 5 meter tall wave the year before. It was a little longer than I was hoping to get, but I figured I could use that as a arguing point and if it wasn’t cheap enough then I could walk. So whenever I offered him $225 for the board and the wetsuit which he had listed for $300, he looked at the ground, groaned and said in his thick French accent “Ohhh…you are mean…” We settled on $260 for all of it: a 6’6” pintain surfboard, full 3/2 wetsuit, and a shortie 3/2 wetsuit. I’m pretty pleased with the purchase, I’ve been out on the board 3 times and it feels much different than my 6’8” at home because it’s a lot thinner.

Later that night, I walked across the main drag of campus to find some wireless so I could talk to Amira on Skype, but I was having trouble finding any buildings open at 8 pm. I decided to walk a little further to see if I could find another one. As I walked out onto the main walkway, I heard some scuffling behind me. I turned around to see this group of guys surrounding this other guy on the ground. I thought they were friends wrestling at first, but after I saw one of the guys standing up kick the guy on the ground and another grab his backpack, I knew they weren’t friends of his. I stood about 20 feet away trying to see anything distinctive about the 6 guys in hoodies, but they were running down the street before I knew it. The guy on the ground got up, picked up his glasses and started walking towards me. I asked if he was ok and he was fine, just stunned from being mugged. I didn’t really have any options for helping him since there were so many of them, but I stuck around to help describe to the police what I had seen. It was really surprising to me that it happened on that part of campus because it was right next to the tennis courts (with lots of people on them), in the well lit center of campus. He lost his wallet and car keys but still had his phone and house keys so he was able to call the credit card company and the cops. I had my laptop in my backpack and probably would have been fuming if those guys had chosen me instead. People have been making fun of me for carrying around a pocket knife but you never know what could happen. It seems that only the couple girls from Philly are the ones who brought the keychain style pepper spray. It was a good lesson that walking alone or even girls walking without a guy is not a good idea. The thing I hate most about the ordeal is that the victim had just gotten repaid a debt from a friend so he had around $400 in cash in his wallet, so those thieves were in a sick way rewarded for their efforts. Mom, I know this doesn’t help your worrying at all but I figured you’d rather hear the story than not. Let’s just say it helped to make me more aware of my surroundings.

Thursday, we had a field trip to show us some sustainable buildings around Sydney. We briefly visited a development that had solar power and rainwater reclamation, but didn’t inform their tenants of the energy conservative building because research shows that people tend to misuse energy in that setting, for whatever reason. Our next stop was a five star rated commercial high rise with a very unique design. With a mostly glass shell, the individual levels were open air, no walls to separate offices or areas. I assume they had low cube divisions, but from what we could see the offices were very airy. One side of the building butted up against the foundation of the building up the hill from them, where the architects cleverly left the bedrock exposed to the building to act as a heat mass, where it’s cool in the warm weather and warmer in the cool weather. They also used ‘chilled beams,’ which were just metal pipes that had cool water running through them, effectively cooling the air around the beam which then sank to the floor acting as AC. The last thing I’ll say about this relatively boring field trip was about the heating for this building. Theoretically, the heating system would be activated by running hot water through the pipes beneath the floor, heating the floor which would heat the air at the ground level. Heating air at the ground level wastes less energy than heating air from the ceiling (since we’re not walking around up there).

I went surfing Thursday afternoon by myself and again on Friday. Thursday was pretty good, consistently chest high surf with a few overhead waves. Friday was much smaller and weaker, just like today’s waves. Friday night, I went to a rugby game with most everyone in our program. It was a good game, fun to see in person, but not nearly as popular as I expected. There were 10,000 in attendance and it was a very social atmosphere, kind of like a baseball game. Afterwards, our group went out to a couple bars in Paddington. It was the first time we’ve been out in a small enough group to meet real Aussies. It was fortunate I went there because the next day I navigated for our group to make it to the Paddington Markets, a Sunday artist market around the church there. It is a very trendy area and reminded me of NYC with all of the interesting styles walking around. Afterwards, we went downtown to the Paddy Markets, a flea market full of cheap trinkets and souvenirs.

Sunday, I went downtown and took the ferry over to Manly. I didn’t know much about the town but heard a couple guys were going and decided to tag along. It’s on the north part of the harbor and gave us a great chance to see the city from the water. There were hundreds of sailboats on the water, big 30-40 footers cruising in the wind. We got to the Manly Wharf and decided to walk down the main street to see the beach on the outside of the peninsula. On the way there, one of the most coincidental things happened. We’re walking and talking and I saw a girl that looked like one of Melissa’s best friends from Augusta. I look a little harder and see Coleman Carter, a good friend of mine who went to Lakeside and goes to UGA. We were both flipping out and wondering what each other were doing in Manly. Turns out she came to Sydney for a week by herself to go to Hillsong Conference, a conference hosted by the church I went to the week before. She met some people through a friend and was spending the day with them and just happened to be walking down the street where we were. Her friends gave us some suggestions for things to do in the area, we exchanged numbers and decided to meet up later. We went for a walk out to the North Head, a west facing landmass protected as a National Park. Mike, Bryan, and I hiked up to secluded rock cliff and sat to see if we could see any of the Right Whales that were migrating northwards. Sure enough, we saw a couple groups pass by, about ¼ mile offshore being trailed by boats. We couldn’t see much more than the mist from their breathing and a little of their backs and tails. It was definitely a plus of the trip though. Later, we walked down the beach and watched the surfers before heading back to the ferry terminal. Coleman met up with us there and we went back downtown for dinner. We ate in a little restaurant in Darling Harbor and then Coleman and I walked around making our way back to the ferry. It was good to catch up with her, I hadn’t talked to her since I saw her at Melissa’s funeral and even then I didn’t get to say much. I couldn’t believe all the things that had to go right in order for us to run into one another…what are the chances. I felt bad for her because her flight left the next day and she hadn’t gotten to see much of the city since she was in a conference all week. It was good to hear her say that this trip inspired her to travel more, a lot of people from back home are scared or just don’t have an interest in doing that.

In class today, we watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth followed by a rebuttal film that spoofed his movie and countered it with scientific evidence as well. The most interesting rebuttal was that, in the past, it appears that a rising general temperature drives CO2 up instead of the reverse. One thing that really bothers me about Al Gore is his self-centeredness. When he came to speak at Georgia Tech, I could only stay for the first 45 minutes of his speech and all he did for that period was stand-up comedy about himself. I value his efforts, though, because he is trying to get people to realize what’s going on in our world. I can’t get over the fact that, apart from global warming, the world population is increasing so rapidly. The world population increasing almost four fold during one person’s lifetime is something that nobody’s really experienced…except maybe Adam. I’m not sure what we can do about that, or if we need to do anything.

After class today, most of our group went to Bondi Beach for surf lessons. I tagged along for the free ride down there and got to see some of the group catching the whitewater on their longboards. I got lucky and got a hold of one of the longboards and had some fun. It’s so much different than shortboarding, the rides are so much longer and smooth. I also had a fun session afterwards on my board on a different part of the beach. I surfed next to a kid I met the other day who was out there with his dad. My new 13 year old friend was telling me where I should go in Byron Bay when I’m there, they said I won’t want to leave when I get there. I found a couple guys in my program who’re wanting to rent a car and go surfing after we’re done classes on July 31st, so I think I’m going to have some travel partners for one of the two weeks I’ll be on my own before I go home.

Upcoming events for this week: Opera at the Sydney Opera House, Sunrise Cliffwalk, Blue Mountains Hiking Trip, World Youth Day.

The Red Centre

2008-07-06T20:49:00.000-07:00

7/5/2008
Uluru

Leaving the outback, heading towards the city, lots of red sand below us. We just finished with our trip to the Red Center – a few hours in Alice Springs, sight seeing in Uluru (aboriginal name for Ayers Rock).

Tuesday was Territory Day in the Northern Territory, the equivalent of our July 4th (that was soon to follow). We ended our afternoon class by following our professor around the hotel as he pointed out different architectural designs that were efficiency suicide as far as energy conservation is concerned. In a climate that never gets below 80 degrees (as they have a wet and a dry season in the tropics, as opposed to our four seasons), it’s not smart to have windows facing constant sun, necessitating constant use of the AC. We actually calculated roughly how much heat the sun was pumping into our conference room… It only became evident how absurd the design was after he finished the calculation, showing how placing 20 space heaters in along the windows in the room and needing the AC to counter that.

In the evening, everyone headed to Mindil Beach, where Darwin was having its official celebration of Territory Day. Apparently, people in the Northern Territory (NT) like to be different than the rest of the country and are typically seen as the rebellious southerners of the American south would be seen – slow talking, carry guns, drive 4WDs, that kind of thing. I got to the show a just in time for the grand finale, as I was finishing dinner with a friend who’s a chef a little later than planned. I was very surprised to find our friends so quickly, as there were thousands of people packed onto the beach. The tide was out and there were four large palettes on the edge of the water, a hundred yards or so from the crowd. Beyond the palettes, you could see the lights of a hundred boats just offshore. There were four large green lasers slicing through the smoky air throughout the show, it was pretty awesome. I think the only show that rivals it was the one I saw in Pamplona before the Running of the Bulls. After the official show was over, the civilian show was just beginning. For the next couple hours, people lit thousands of fireworks on the beach in fairly close proximity to the crowds…but I think only a couple people got hurt this year, unlike years passed. It was fun to see the community out and see how many people there actually are in Darwin.

Following Wednesday’s classes, we went to the other side of town as a group to see what they called the ‘deckchair cinema.’ We watched Lucky Miles in some lawn chairs in the open air. We saw some huge bats and had a friendly little possum searching for crumbs beneath us. Possums here are much different than in the US, and those of NZ were much different as well. They are much furrier and cute, but pests nonetheless. The movie was about some illegal immigrants to Australia and their attempt to survive in the bush after getting dropped off on a beach from Indonesia. It sounded like a great plotline, but the movie was a disappointment. Afterwards, I went home to get packed and sleep for our 4 am departure time the next morning for Alice Springs.

In Alice Springs, we went to the Center for Appropriate Technology, an organization run by aboriginals to provide technology and support for lifestyle improvements for aboriginal communities. Mostly, this organization designs and provides solar powered electricity systems for rural communities. It was very interesting to hear their managing engineer talk about the challenges of providing a system that could withstand fairly harsh weather conditions and require little to no maintenance. It’s almost funny to hear them talk about finding old photovoltaic (PV) systems (solar power system) that have stopped working and have since been put to use for other means – like using the panels for a table, or using the batteries as anchors, etc. It’s also very interesting to me how one goes about teaching someone how to use and maintain a system that just supplies power for an outlet…without knowing what is actually going on to make that power. I realize that a lot of people don’t really know how electricity works, but teaching someone using representative pictoral symbols and communicating in broken English would be an extreme challenge. We saw their display of other appropriate technology like water heaters, water pumps for wells, low maintenance latrines, and other equipment designed for these rural bush communities.

Supposedly Alice Springs’ water supply is predicted to run dry in 65 years. That was the only other interesting thing that we informed about in Alice. We took a 6 hour bus ride to Ayers Rock, stopping along the way to give people a chance to ride camels and see a wallaby or two. The camels were very interesting, especially the way their reigns are connected. Instead of a harness, they pierce the camels’ nostril and tie a rope to the piercing, making the camel follow whoever’s controlling the reign connected to the inside of their nose. They appeared very ornery but I couldn’t tell if it was because of the way they were being treated or they’re just like that in general. Also, it was crazy to see their hind legs that have a hip, a knee that bends like a bird’s (forward), a lower knee that bends like a human’s (backwards), and an ankle. I didn’t ride one but was jealous of my cousin John Joe’s all day ride in Morocco wearing a turbine, whereas this ride was for only for 100 yards.

The stars on the first night at the Ayers Rock Resort were pretty amazing, there was a dune nearby that perched us above most of the lights in the little town. After everybody went to bed, me and a buddy just sat up there talking about how so many people miss out on the relieving freshness that living in nature brings. Camping and hiking become rejuvenating to those who appreciate it. The Milky Way is oh so present from that viewpoint, a huge cloud of stars almost like a rainbow across the sky. It was weird not to see Orion’s Belt and the North Star, but instead the Southern Cross and Scorpio. Quite a few shooting stars with far fewer satellites than I’m used to seeing. Last ones to go to bed and first ones to get up for the sunrise, I’d heard that sunrise and sunset are the main attractions at Uluru. I guess as it is with any desert, there’s literally no chance of rain and very little clouds to obstruct the view. They said that the rain is very erratic in those parts, some years raining 20 inches in two storms and zero rain for a couple years thereafter. We went to the Cultural Center on Thursday morning to hear a talk from one of the rangers. It was surprising to find out that, after the area became a National Park, the landscape became dangerous from the European way of land management, as they didn’t practice the regular fire control like the aborigines were accustomed to. Because they put out every fire that started in the park, the undergrowth became a dangerous amount of fuel and proceeded to wipe most of the park out in a 1978 fire started by lightning. Because they hadn’t continued to burn sections regularly, they in essence shot themselves in the foot by providing enough fuel for the fire to be uncontrollable. In the aboriginal fire practices, burning occurs at a slow enough level that most trees and fire activated seeds live through the flame. But with increased fuel, nothing could withstand the heat and the park was nearly wiped clean. From then on, the park management realized that putting the traditional owners of the land back in charge would be the best option for managing the habitat. Also, the huge rock formation, formerly known as Ayers Rock but now being called by its original name Uluru, is a sacred place that no aborigine climbs. Conversely, most of the people who come to Uluru come to climb the rock, a 248 m monolith, the largest in the world. The rock is a unique, red sandstone looking giant, continuing another 4-6 km into the ground. The rock is almost smooth, with ribs and ridges that appear to sanded by a glacier or something. The crazy thing is that, while there are markings from water flows, most of the water flows haven’t cut into the rock like we normally see because there is so little rain throughout the year. From afar, it appears like a uniform rock rising out of the outback. Up close, it’s much more textured and has ridges, holes, caves, and valleys. The crazy thing is that where the sides of the rock plunge into the ground, there is little evidence that it is eroding. The flat red sand runs up to the rock just like water would to an iceberg, no piles of sand or rock at the sides. It’s also interesting to find out the history of tourism in the area. Before 1960, few people came to see the natural formations in the area. Following that, people came to climb the rock and that was about it. They told us that many Japanese tourists still fly in for the day just to climb. But now, as the Australian culture is coming to respect and appreciate the aboriginal culture, people are buying shirts that say “I did NOT climb the rock” instead of those from days of old that said the opposite. I could definitely have spent more time there, but for some reason we had to rush back to the hotel to eat lunch and have free time. In the evening, we went back out to the sunset viewing area with a bunch of other tourists who were having cheese and wine as the sun set. We were between the rock and the setting sun, watching to rock to see the changes in color as the sun’s rays change the way they hit the face. There were clouds on the horizon, so we were able to see the changes in color until the clouds blocked the sun out for the most colorful part. Looking back over my pictures, though, you can definitely see the different moods of Uluru in the span of 45 minutes.

This morning we woke up early to go out to Kata Tjuta, or The Olgas, for sunrise. These huge domes of rock are the only other real geographical feature of the area, 34 round rocks that are about 500 m tall. The previous day, the ranger said the hikes around there were the best in Central Australia and recommended we do them. So I prepared for our outing to be hiking, only to find out we were going to a viewing spot for sunrise and then driving back. I was frustrated that we were so close to being able to hike but didn’t have time to due to some poor planning by our director. It was awesome to see the sunrise from that perspective though, I certainly can’t complain.

We arrived in Sydney yesterday afternoon and unpacked into our one person dorm rooms. We’re on a main road south of Sydney by about 20 minute drive, 30 minute walk to the nearest beach in Coogee. I ran there today in about 15 minutes, but I’m not sure where the best surfing will be yet. I got lucky and have access to free (albeit spotty and slow) wireless internet in my room, so I did some research on the bus system and used surfing equipment (board and wetsuit). It’s weird not to be rushed by a timer cutting you off like I’ve been living with for the last month. It’s definitely a welcome break from constant use of computers, but when you need to do research for a new place or for school, it makes things so much easier to flip open your laptop. We were playing pool in the game room tonight and talking about how the kid who’s always recording on his video camera is probably not going to look at his videos until he gets bored when he’s 42, at which point he’ll pull out his 20 year old laptop and see if it works. For me, the aged piece of technology that we always pulled out was the silver VHS video recorder box – it must’ve looked like the news crew was doing a special every time mom taped one of my baseball games.

I’m looking forward to spending some time in Sydney, I foresee a really busy three weeks ahead. We’ve got two field trips this week, and I’m probably going to take weekend trips for both of the upcoming weekends. The pope will be in town next week for World Youth Day/Week, supposedly the largest event that Sydney has ever hosted (according to a catholic girl on our trip). This morning, I went with some friends to a church called Hillsong, a very contemporary worship based church down the road from the university. It was much like the mega church Buckhead that I’ve been to in Atlanta, and it was ironic that the guest pastor was from Baton Rouge and told jokes for most of the sermon, even showing funny pictures of what life is like in the “Dirty South,” as he referred to it. He showed a guy lying in a swimming pool in the back of his pickup, a guy at a nascar race with the #3 shaved into his back hair (I’ve seen that!), a Cajun’s first kiss which was a little girl kissing a pig, a doorbell that was the hind of a deer where the button beneath his tail, those kinds of things. It was good standup comedy but certainly more than I’m used to. He did make good points though about being generous, of which I need to learn to be more of. I feel like what I’m learning in school here, though, is pulling me in the opposite direction. Let me explain – I asked our professor (who’s household grid power usage is 70% lower than the average Sydney household) how one differentiates between being frugal with energy and just being plain stingy or cheap. He made a good point that he’s not living a different lifestyle because of his new energy sources, he just had to make some conscious decisions about where that energy is coming from and how its used. Now that statement should come with a note because he has certainly helped mold his family’s habits so they use less energy. That difference is something that I think takes stealth and some understanding on the people participating in the energy savings because it is indeed realistically possible to pay less, use less energy, and live the same with a little coercing, it just needs to be done in the right way. I guess by stealth I mean solving problems in early steps, so people don’t have to think about them. For example, when my mom came to visit my apartment in Atlanta during Spring 2007, I asked them not to use the heat because Nate and I were trying to keep from using the heat or air for the whole semester (for costs reasons , but I suppose you could say we were energy conscious, even if it for stingy reasons). Now if we could have somehow found a way to add insulation to the walls instead of asking my mom to use a pile of blankets, we would have stealthily found a way to be energy conscious. But instead, we needed to use the heat because the pile of blankets would have been unreasonable for mom’s cold toes. I realize that my mom is worth much more money than I could ever pay, so I should spend whatever necessary to pamper the woman who gave so much of her life for me. But I’m going to try to be able to pamper her in cost effective ways now ;) One of those ways, as it’s recently dawned on me, is massaging her shoulders whenever I get the chance. It takes so little effort and reaps such great benefits, I think I’ve found a great way to say thank you.

Picture upload

2008-07-01T01:24:00.000-07:00

Hey guys, just wanted to let you know that I figured out how to upload pictures on Picasa. I'll be uploading more in the next few days.

http://picasaweb.google.com/hess.drew/

Kakadu National Park

2008-06-30T00:49:00.000-07:00

6/30/2008

Darwin

What an incredible weekend. We’re now moved back into our hotel in Darwin after returning last evening via long bus ride from the watering holes we were swimming at. I got some amazing exposure to the aboriginal culture while we were away and feel like I understand much better their culture even though I’m sure I just got the tip of the iceberg.

Last week, after our second day of class, we took a tour of a liquid natural gas plant outside of town. A chemical engineer talked us through the plant, their gas recovery process, and the business side of things. The offshore gas field that they pull from produces a couple products, some of which are directly loaded on a tanker at the near the platform, and the rest comes through a pipe laying on the sea floor to the plant outside Darwin. The plant is owned mostly by ConocoPhillips, and contains a couple areas where their industry secrets lie. There are three big white boxes where the operators know what goes in and what goes out, but not what or how things work inside. In the presentation, it was obvious that the guy didn’t care for the “greenies,” the people making sure they didn’t have adverse effects on the environment. There was also an area on their property that was undeveloped, still forested, because there are still unexploded bombs and mines there from WWII. The LNG plant felt like it brought real industry to the Northern Territory, and was proud of its role in bringing money to the area. They have a LNG storage tank that got struck 300 times in one hour by lightning. And, bringing me back to my days at the chemical plant in Augusta, the record for climbing to the top of it was 48 seconds.

On Friday, we left Darwin and our first stop was a crocodile cruise, a chance to see some crocs up close. They had some big pythons that they brought out to the group before we boarded the bus, I was surprised to see how many people were afraid of them as well as how many had never touched snakes. We then got on the boat and had an awesome view of some huge living dinosaurs. What they did was drive down the river and look for some crocs that were interested in eating and the guys standing on an overhanging balcony would lower some buffalo meat on a string into the water to bring the animal closer to the boat. They had a no jump, no eat policy with the crocs, which meant when they would get close to the food, the guys would raise the meat above water and make the crocs do a tail stand in order to get the food. With the crocs just on the other side of the glass lunging out of the water, it was pretty incredible. It was a great way to not only be able to see the anatomy of them, but also to see them in their natural environment. I was curious how many tours this company ran a day, though, because I didn’t like the idea of crocs hanging around so they could get some food from a passing boat. As we went down the river, they started feeding some of the birds that were flying nearby. They would throw small bits of meat into the air and these birds would come swooping through and catch them with their talons. They were amazingly coordinated, and they are a rare species in that they eat their catch on the fly, so we could see, after they caught the food, the birds reaching down to pick the meat of the bone as they flew to shore. Very cool.

Next we stopped at the Ubirr Rock Art trailhead, where we learned a lot from our guides about the history of the paintings on the various rocks around. Kakadu is a unique park because it is a World Heritage site for both natural and cultural reasons. These paintings were similar in some ways to the petroglyphs I’ve seen out west. Most of the paintings were of animals and highlighted the fatty areas of the animal, I guess to show the best parts to eat. Some of the most interesting things about the culture: longest continually running form of communism in the world, the ‘sick areas’ that the people knew to stay away from were found to be those with high uranium deposits, they use controlled burning to clear the bush land helping to promote growth and encourage wildlife, they have distinct anatomical differences in skull shape from their supposed relatives in Africa. I was intrigued by the way they learned to live off the land, and many still do so to this day. The evidence of the presence of fire is everywhere in the countryside. Darwin and the surrounding country are supposedly the most lightning intensive places in the world, and I assume that the native people used controlled burning much in the same way that lightning would do naturally.

The camping setup was nice, lots of two man tents set up in a small field. The first night we had kangaroo, crocodile, and buffalo burgers for the meat portion of our meal. The kangaroo was a dark brown, tougher meat that was delicious. The crocodile was a softer white meat like chicken. We learned out to play didgeridoos around the campfire, had smores and listened to Johny Reed, our aboriginal guide, tell us about how his people use the plants and trees that we could see around us. He was hilarious. “Took me 20,000 years to get this tan!” They walk around bare foot with no sun screen or bug spray, having none of the problems that kept a lot of the kids uncomfortable in the camp ground.

The next morning we went to Mary’s Place, an aboriginal woman who’s an artist and opens her home up for people to see how things run. She showed us some pictures of her and her family gathering food in the traditional way. The most interesting one was that of her, her husband and kids gathering file snakes from the river. Apparently the snakes are harmless to humans and are usually fat and slow. So they go into the edge of the water and feel around with their hands and feet in the mud, exploring roots and holes to find the snakes. When they find them, they bring them up, stick the head of the snake into their mouth, bite down, and pull, killing the snake. Pretty hard core to see a woman grab a snake, put it in her mouth, kill it and move on. We got some more lessons on the didge while the girls made bracelets out of pandanas leaves. The kids who lived there were pretty amazing at the didgeridoo – the hardest part about the instrument is learning to do circular breathing. I started to catch on but moreso just learned to appreciate how good they are at it. Coincidentally, there was an installation team there finishing a hybrid solar/diesel electricity source. Our professor went to talk to them and found one of his previous students doing the install, so we got an impromptu walk-thru of the solar setup. It was interesting to hear Mary talk with such little fear about the three dogs they’ve lost to crocodiles in her back yard in the past year.

After leaving Mary’s, we went to a billabong (pond) where we ate fresh pineapple while learning about the geological history of the area. This was to kill some time before our tour started at Ranger Uranium mine. This is a really unique and controversial area because the uranium was found before the creation of the national park, so there’s actually a uranium mine inside a national park because the park was made around privately held land. That being said, it is one of the most environmentally monitored mine sites in the world because it operates in such close proximity to preciously protected wildlife. They mine 10% of the world’s uranium out of that mine and are halfway to the bottom of their pit. Learning about how they take the uranium in dirt form to 400 kg barrels that sell for $80,000 a piece was really amazing. It was most intriguing to learn that while those barrels are 99% pure uranium, only 5% of each barrel is used after enrichment in the fuel rods in a nuclear power plant because in our current design, we only use U₂₃₈ and most of what’s in the barrel is U₂₃₅ . I don’t know much about the specifics in nuclear degradation, but it seems like a ridiculous amount of effort to extract that small amount to make power. I understand that a lot of electricity results from that small percentage, but it’s crazy how much work it takes to get there. I’m skeptical as to the optimistic projections for how little they impact the environment, and how their profit of $50 million a year is giving back to the area at all. There are some interesting things about the place – the power for the facility is created by 5 huge diesel engines, burning 23,000 liters of diesel each day, all the water that leaves the facility does so by evaporating into the air through natural evaporation from their holding ponds, they have gamma ray scanners that determine each truck load’s uranium content, they have 16 of those colossal dump trucks running around the clock. Our tour guide seemed to have some holes in his logic but had interesting things to say about the role of his plant in the world’s energy future. He made a connection to the Bronze and Iron Age to today’s uranium use, saying that bronze and iron were first used to make weapons, then found to have useful purposes outside of weaponry. He countered that point with the fact that even after the finer uses of bronze and iron were found, weapons continued to be made out of those materials. Obviously both statements apply to uranium today. His viewpoint was that the Baby Boomers (him included) were the ones who created most of the problems we have now, but it’s our generation’s job to figure out how to fix it. After leaving the plant, we dropped by another billabong called the Yellow River area, a beautiful lake with teaming with wildlife. We saw a couple crocs in their natural habitat, some neat birds, and a beautiful sunset.

Yesterday, we drove a couple hours to Gunlom Falls, our last stop for the Kakadu trip. We hiked up the ‘escarpment’ (as they refer to the mesa-like mountains in the area) to some natural rock pools in the river. It was incredible – nice cool water on a hot day, natural smooth rock pools at the edge of a 200 ft. waterfall into a lower plunge pool, looking out across the valley under a cloudless sky. There were a couple water monitors (as in iguanas) there that were definitely the largest lizard like animals that I’ve ever seen in the wild. I could have easily spent all day there, but unfortunately we only had time for an hour or two. The upper pool, that I went to while the group was packing up, was fed through a passage that reminded me of pictures I’ve seen of the wind-carved sandstone caves in the American southwest. It was awesome to be swimming in a deep creek with narrow rock walls shading the sun, terminating with a waterfall that you could swim under. When we hiked back down the escarpment to swim in the lower, much larger plunge pool at the bottom of the falls, people got a little unnerved when our guide, Jacky, said that there are ‘freshies’ (freshwater crocs) in the place that we’ll be swimming in. She said generally they don’t bother people but she couldn’t guarantee anything. Then she jumped in and asked who wanted to come with her to the other side of the lake. With no apparent danger, just about everybody followed.

Jacky is a brave woman. I talked to her a lot during this trip because I knew that she knew a lot more about the land than she cared to tell in the group setting and I wanted to see what more there was to learn. She was 30 and had been guiding up there for 6 years, has been adopted into an aboriginal family in a nearby area, studied environmental science, was a definite free spirit and traveled around the world for 3 years before she went to the ‘Uni’ (they refer to college as the university). Anyways, the reason I say she’s brave is because three years ago, on the UNSW trip, they were swimming at a different place called Jim Jim Falls when she spotted a snake in the water. It was swimming toward some tourists that weren’t part of her group but didn’t see the oncoming danger. So Jacky cuts off the snake from getting to the people, kind of trying to herd it off, staying about 15 feet away from it as people swim to shore behind her. Chaos I’m sure was breaking loose as she was trying to keep people calm but people on shore were yelling SNAKE!! As it swam closer, she grabbed it behind the head as it wrapped its tail around her arm. She wasn’t sure what kind it was but had a couple of guesses, hoping it was the non-poisonous guess. She grabbed just barely too far behind its head so it was able to reach back and bite her twice on the hand. She tried to remain calm and tell herself it wasn’t poisonous, the two bleeding fang marks on the area between her thumb and first finger said otherwise. She had to swim 50 meters back to shore with the snake and there here fellow guide identified the snake as a Western Brown snake, one of the most poisonous in the world. They immediately laid her down, bandaged her arm up and went for help. The helicopter arrived an hour later, taking her to the nearest town, Jabiru, which is the town that’s next to the Ranger uranium mine. There, she waited 5 hours until the medical evacuation helicopter arrived to take her to Darwin. While she was fine for the first couple of hours after the bite, she started having some difficulties in the coming hours. As the doctors in the medvac copter tested their general anti-venom on her, giving her 3 mls to start, she felt fine. They boosted the vaccine to 90 mls, accidentally pushing her over the edge and putting her into anti-fallactic shock. The next couple hours she was unconscious, with not a whole lot of options for treatment. Johnny Reed (who I mentioned earlier) is the traditional owner for Jim Jim Falls, and was really upset that this happened under his watch on his land. He was telling me around the fire that we were looking a living legend, the living dead. She did just the right things in order to be alive today, nearly losing it. She said there was some numbness for the next couple weeks in her arm but has otherwise recovered. The central nervous system is a delicate thing to mess with, and when a natural poison that goes straight for it gets in the mix, there’s not a whole lot you can do. I could tell Jacky was a little hesitant to tell the story again, as I’m sure she’s told it many times, but it was an incredible story. She’s definitely one of the coolest people I’ve ever met. I got some advice from her while we drove 5 hours back to Darwin for the rest of my travels in Australia. I think she’s convinced me to go to Tasmania on one of my free weekends in Sydney. She also was pushing the freedom of being on the road, not needing to be confined by tradition as far as getting out of school and getting a job immediately. Hm…I’ve got some ideas brewing but we shall see.

Maybe you’re asking yourself “Is this kid actually doing any school work while he’s there?” Well, the answer is yes and no. Class has been incredible so far, we’ve finished our time with our first lecturer and have been getting acquainted with our second, as he was on the weekend trip with us. Iain, our first lecturer, deals with energy policy foremost, trying to aid the people who make the big decisions in seeing all parts of the picture. It is an incredible challenge to be knowledgeable and understanding of all the different aspects that affect alternative and renewable energy. You first look at the infrastructure that we have now. Then you think of ways to change that or clean it up so the adverse effects are removed. The hard part is that doing so involves an incredibly complex economic system, a system of ethics that governs the need to protect our environment, provide electricity for those who don’t have it, the fairness in doing so, the psychology of the general population in changing a mindset to prevent further disaster, forecasting of resources and changes based on the use of them, etc. etc. etc. There are so many complicated and interdisciplinary issues that I would have to say that I think this is one of the most difficult problems that engineering could be associated with. Uncertainty in the numbers is such a huge question mark that we can’t sit around and wonder how accurate they are; it’s time to move. Unfortunately, changing a system that seems to work wonderfully is going to be hard work, and due to human nature, there’s not much chance to get everybody on board unless it somehow affects large numbers of people. It becomes quite obvious that we’ve got to change something when you realize how unsustainable the current system is. I guess you could use a simple analogy of a car: works wonderfully until it runs out of gas, at which point it is of no use. There are so many caveats and counter points to every issue, it is absolutely fascinating to discuss. I thought it was humorous that in the seasonal changes in the Top End (northern part of Australia), there is a period at the front of the rainy season where a type of cloud called ‘political clouds’ move in, bringing lots of promise but no results. Of course, that’s followed with two meters of rain in about a month’s time, but funny nonetheless. It is currently winter here in Darwin, a chilly 80 degrees F. In the summertime, it gets over 100 degrees with almost 100% humidity. They literally call that suicide season. Fortunately, we’ve come at the right time of the year because there’s still residual water left over from the last rain (in March), but it’s cool enough to actually do things. Anyways, back to the school part. We’ve got our first out of class assignment, a simple 300 word opinion paper. Otherwise, our classes consist of a four hour lecture that is both informative and introspective, helping us learn the background of the problem so we can be adequately prepared to learn about the technologies that are becoming part of the answer. Our professor for this week, Alistair, specializes in photovoltaics (solar panels) and energy efficiency. So we’ve gotten our base, now it’s time to build. One of our classes is going to be centered on what you can do in your house to cut energy use to bring the amount down to an amount that can be supplied by renewable energy. Definitely looking forward to that. Otherwise, I don’t feel like I’m in school much because I don’t really have homework, we don’t have any tests, our information is presented in slide form so we don’t have to read extensively, and our professors are curious about our personal interests to they can tailor their teaching towards those things. Certainly not used to any of those things, but I like it.

Our accommodation has been interesting, it suits me quite well because I have a mattress but there are vast differences between the setup in the types of rooms different people have. The kids of the entire summer program are situated in two different hotels, a couple minute walk apart. The smaller programs (imaging, wildlife) have a nice hotel where the rooms have washer and dryer, kitchen, living room, and multiple bedrooms. Our hotel, the other one, has two types of rooms: the one that I’ve been fortunate to get with a small kitchen setup, bunks and a bathroom, the other is room with bunks and a bathroom. So some people have to pay for laundry, some can’t cook in their rooms, some have ants, some have 5 to a room, others have 3. Everybody paid the same amount for the program, so I guess it’s just fortune whether or not you get the shaft (as some of the girls said). Overall, things are pretty organized but are casual enough to feel like they could have planned things out a little more. All's well here though!

Darwin (started in Christchurch)

2008-06-26T02:17:00.000-07:00

Alright, It’s been a few days since I’ve been at the computer and it’s time to catch up. My second day in Christchurch was quite an exciting one and I’m ready to tell you about it. I woke up the next morning and I went to the information site to see if I could book the Maori experience, the dinner and performance show from the local community who told the story of the original inhabitants of NZ that had been recommended to me earlier in my trip, but it was not running for the night. Instead, I decided to book a trip to a less thorough experience but included some of the wildlife of the country in the tour, like the kiwi and the kea I had been reading about in the museums.

When I was in the information center booking my tour, I ran into the same kid, Nicholas, who I had given a ride a week beforehand on the other side of the country. I thought after dropping him off that we should exchange plans just in case we were in the same place at the same time, but it seemed to work out that we didn’t need to. We arranged to meet up later in the day to discuss our travel plans to the airport the next day, as my flight had been changed to be the same as his the following day. I toured the botanical gardens for the rest of the afternoon and did some critical packing for the upcoming journey to Sydney.

By chance, I was selected to be the ‘chief’ of our 50 person group for the night of our Maori experience, having to accept the warrior’s peace offering which allowed our group to enter their settlement for the time being. I had to stand tall with courage to fend off the warrior’s attempt at scaring our group away, and then I had to make friends with the chief by shaking hands while touching foreheads and noses. It was pretty funny when the chief of the Maori tribe assumed that the girl sitting next to me was my ‘mate’ until the leader of the guided tour had to inform him that we had just met on the bus on our way there. We learned a bit of the haka, which is the war dance intended to scare off neighboring tribes, and had plenty of stage time to make fools of ourselves (especially me, being the chief). After returning back to the city, I had the luxury of my first meal at a restaurant in a long time. With dinner only being $22, it raised my cost per day of food by a whole dollar.

I don’t want you to get the impression that I’m this ridiculously cheap person who doesn’t do anything because it all costs money. I certainly enjoy splurging on the things I feel are truly meaningful, and wish I had enough money to buy everyone what they want. I just wanted to preface my analytical breakdown of the finances on this trip. I only went to the grocery store two main times on my road trip, planning it just about perfectly to have nothing left but a little rice when it was time to turn the campervan back in. I broke it down and it turns out I spent just over $12/day on food. I spent $950 in gas in three weeks driving just over 4000 kilometers. Man…that’s a LOT of money to spend on something that you don’t get to keep. I do have some incredible memories and wonderful pictures from the places it allowed me to go, though. Fortunately, this trip was amazingly timed so that I’ve been able to save up all semester during my last co-op in Virginia to be adequately prepared for such costs, so I’m doing alright. I have to keep in mind two things while abroad: if I don’t do it now, I might not be back to give it a second thought, and secondly, I’m not going to have a steady income until I graduate from college so my money needs to last for the next year. Although these are conflicting thoughts, they help me to realize what’s important and what’s not.

I wanted to add a few of the peculiar happenings to the story here that aren’t in order chronologically, but for me were just crazy. My first night in Christchurch, I was cooking dinner before I wrote my blog and I saw a shadow outside and then stop at the door. I saw a guy knock on my window and I was like Uh oh. So I opened the sliding door to see what the guy wanted. He was on his bike and said as I was opening the door that he had seen me parked there for a couple hours and wanted to know if I’d like to come take a warm shower and get some tea in the morning at his place down the street. My first thought was of caution because I didn’t understand why he would make such a generous offer without some specific intent. I said I would be interested, and he showed me on the map where he lived. We chatted briefly (my attempt to understand his motives) and I was reading all the signs I could to see if this was a genuine offer or not. His hands were dirty when he was pointing at the map, he said he’d been on the road before and knew how good a warm shower could feel sometimes. So I told him I’d meet him at 10 the next day and he went on his way. For the rest of the night, I was kicking myself as I thought of some better questions that I could have asked that would have let me see a little more of where he was coming from. I was analyzing our whole conversation to try to convince myself one second, why I shouldn’t go, and the next second, why I should go. Why would a dirty guy offer a shower if he wasn’t clean himself? Why didn’t he give me an address instead of saying the fenced yard with a black Prelude outside? Since he offered without knowing who was in the car, would he have offered to anyone? All these thoughts were making me quite unsure about what I should do, how safe it would be, worse case scenario, etc. Especially since I just found a public bathroom with a shower for $3. So when I ran into Nicholas the next morning and told him about it, he encouraged me that if I felt uncomfortable, I could always leave. His experience hitchhiking across the country made him feel pretty safe among the Kiwis. So I went to the guy’s house and took many precautions to make sure I had a safe exit, my car was out of sight, no peep holes in the shower, etc. I was being ridiculously skeptical but figured it couldn’t hurt. After I got out, he offered food but I said I’d rather just talk for a few minutes without the grub. It sounded like he had changed locations a lot recently and was used to living outside, just renting a room in the house we were in and thought it’d be nice to offer a shower since it wasn’t really his house. Nice guy…we chatted for a few minutes and I went on my way.

When I was waiting in the city square for the shuttle to come for the Maori experience, the couple who camped next to me both nights in Queenstown happened to be walking by the place I was standing. We talked for a while what we had been doing the last couple days, and grabbed a drink to say farewell. They inspired me – they’ve been traveling for 18 months and have been living off their money until it runs out, upon which they get good paying jobs, save up, and travel some more.

I turned the campervan in the next morning without any hitches; I was glad to have my $5000 deposit put back into my account. A quick walk to the airport and I was off to Sydney. It was a bit of a hassle figuring out what I needed to do for the 12 hours I was going to be in town, so I just decided to find a place to sleep in the airport, and was very excited to find a shower for the morning. A quick four hour flight brought us to Darwin, where we settled in and went to the Mindil Beach markets – a fair like atmosphere on the beach with tons of food and shops.

Our program is through the University of New South Wales and consists of four programs who generally have the same itinerary for the course of the six weeks. Some parts of the trip have been substituted for others, but from what I can tell, we have the largest variety. With nine professors over the course of the program, we’ll be getting input from some leaders in the energy. I’ve been really excited about our first two days of class, my mind’s been brimming with ideas and questions, things that are very intriguing and important in today’s energy market. I think for the most part we’ll just be viewing issues from a broad perspective, but enough to get me thinking about some neat ways to invent something. I’ll get into more detail after we have a few more classes so it’s not such a vague description.

130 new friends, all eager to meet one another. I’ve met almost everybody already, lots of kids from Pennsylvania, U of M, Auburn, Georgia Tech, and a few more. It’s interesting to hear the different opinions of class, some people find the four hours of energy discussion a living hell, whereas I’m really enjoying our topics. I don’t have any sympathy for them because they would have had a tough time in my Spanish LBAT, 8 hours of intensive Spanish class with lots of homework. Anyways, I’m excited about the possibilities.

We’re leaving Friday morning for a national park nearby, Kakadu. We’ll be camping there for three days, getting to see a uranium mine and see some neat natural features. I’m excited to hike but am going to have to remember to take it easy so I don’t power hike past everybody like I’ve been doing for the last three weeks. Catch up with you next week!

In Darwin

2008-06-24T02:10:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to leave a quick note to say to the few people who are keeping up with me that I have arrived safely in Australia. I'm in Darwin, on the north coast, getting acquainted with the other 130 some odd kids in our summer program. There are four programs over all: Film and Imaging, Wildlife, History, and Energy. Mostly guys in the Energy program, go figure.

I'm relishing the opportunity to be in an atmosphere again where there's lots of kids eager to meet one another, I think I've already met about 110 of them. I'll get back to you soon with a better update since I left Christchurch, there's been some funny things happen. Cheers mate!

Christchurch

2008-06-19T19:16:00.000-07:00

6/19/2008

Christchurch

Having just capped my three week trip with the best couple of days back to back, I’m pretty elated as I write this. I drove to Christchurch this afternoon after leaving Mt. Hutt. Let me go back a little bit to start where I left off.

The next morning in Queenstown, I played a couple holes of disc golf until my disc broke when it hit a rock. It was a free 1 ½ rounds of disc golf until you include the one-time fee of the worthless disc I bought. Kept me entertained while it lasted anyways. I poked around town, checked out Salvation Army, and gassed up for my drive to Mt. Cook. I made the couple hour drive from Queenstown to Mt. Cook in the late afternoon, getting to see the vastly changing scenery in the afternoon light. I first passed some treeless hills that reminded me of some I’ve seen in Utah; then I came to some desolate plains where I began to see these really weird looking clouds. The color of the clouds was almost blue-green, much different than the very grey ones to the west of them. I was really intrigued by their color and was trying to figure out what the deal was. As I drove closer, I got to see a huge glacier fed lake that was a unique milky blue color, obviously reflecting its color up into the clouds. It was getting dark, and the thick cloud cover prevented me from seeing any of the mountains that I knew were looming around me. I arrived at the little town of Mt. Cook, at the base of the highest mountain in Australasia, at some 12, 300 ft, and got to learn a lot about the mountain and Sir Edmund Hillary, the town and country’s hero. He trained at this mountain for his ascent of Mt. Everest. I asked a kid that I met a couple days ago how he could have trained for a 29,000 ft. mountain by summiting a 12,000 ft. one, but now I know. Mt. Cook has a lot of glaciers and standing ice on it, of which Everest certainly has its share. Hillary was actually chosen by the British team because of his experience with ice, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to go. Anyways, it was really neat for me to have the time to watch multiple of the 45 minute videos in the museum because 1. I haven’t seen or watched a tv in a while, 2. I wasn’t getting bored with the information and 3. I didn’t have anything else to do. One of the videos featured a guy who summated Mt. Cook, and then skied down. You should have seen some of the ridiculously steep faces covered in ice that he skied across, he was out of his mind. Another video highlighted Hillary and his Sherpa’s lives after their summit, something that I didn’t know much about. But best of all, I got to see an IMAX style 3-D movie that showed aerial footage of the top and the views from that perspective. It was a great precursor to the next day’s hike.

I woke up and read for a while because it was nice and cloudy out. As I walked to the bathroom, I looked out the window of the hotel to see the clouds had cleared, and I was in awe of the surrounding mountains. I went to the bathroom only to return to a valley shrouded in clouds once again. Kind of bummed, I wondered how well the forecasters of the supposedly fine* weather knew what they were talking about. I picked out a hike that would take me as high up as I could go in a couple hours, and was very pleased to find that the clouds were actually just a fog that was only a couple hundred feet high. As I climbed out of the valley on a really steep trail, I got to see the clear sky above the peaks with clouds below me lining the valley floor. Once again, I could only smile at the magnificence. I reached my stopping point on the hike, which was an overlook to an absolutely stunning view. I saw pictures in the museum of the area at different times of the year, and I think I must have been pretty lucky to catch a warm day with little wind and no snow on the ground at this time in their winter.

*Fine is a word that brings me to another one of those funny kiwi definition differences. Throughout my trip, I’d seen weather forecasts as describing the weather as ‘fine.’ I thought this was a pretty in descript term to be using for weather, as there could be many variations on ‘fine weather.’ At one of the information centers, I finally asked some questions about this description of the weather patterns. I asked “what exactly does ‘fine’ mean with respect to the weather, and what is the opposite of fine? Bad?” I thought it would be hilarious to hear the weatherman just say that we’re going to have “bad” weather, but not tell us what kind. Her response to me was that “fine” in this sense doesn’t mean ‘good’ like it does when I hear it, it means clear.

After hiking at Mt. Cook, I got some information on the best ‘ski fields,’ as they call them here, to make sure I was heading in the right direction for my next adventure. I drove to the base of Mt. Hutt, the only ski field that has enough snow to be open right now. They had a 35 cm base with a whopping 1 cm fall the night before. I asked myself if that 1 cm counted the snow they made during the night, but decided it didn’t matter. I slept at the base of the mountain last night and had a go at snowboarding today. It was an awesome day, certainly felt good to be back on the snow after a 3 year absence. Most of the mountain wasn’t open for use, just the runs that they could blow snow onto, but, being a Thursday at the very front end of the season, there weren’t too many people out on the slopes. This icy underlayer took some getting used to, as I’ve been very spoiled in my past experiences in Utah. I met quite a few people on the lifts, certainly some of the nicest New Zealanders I’ve met yet. I only took a couple spills and am very happy to say that I skied and surfed in the same trip. I would give up a $100 bungy jumping experience every day of the week for a full day on the slopes.

I’ve just got tomorrow to explore Christchurch and I’m heading to Sydney on Saturday after I turn in my campervan. I’ll be sad to leave my travel companion, but I think it will welcome the cleaning… It’s too bad my flight got changed, New Zealand is playing England in rugby here in Christchurch on Saturday night, that would have been a fun game to go to. Well, here’s to a good time in New Zealand!

Routeburn Track

2008-06-19T19:04:00.000-07:00

6/16/2008

Queenstown

I’m back to where I wrote my last blog update from, just a few campsites down from the previous one. I had an incredible 24 hours since I was last here, it started with a bang.

I’ve got a funny story to tell. In my last entry, I told you briefly about how stupid I felt when I locked my keys in the car and pained when it was a big hit to the wallet. At the time, I made a mental note to not go anywhere without having keys in my pocket. So let me give you the background of where the next story takes place. I finished here in Queenstown yesterday around 5:15 pm and drove an hour and half up the lake to the Routeburn Track trailhead. Past lots of farmland out to the parking lot where there wasn’t a soul for probably 10 miles, up in the foothills of some big mountains. The moon was really bright so it was neat to be able to see nearly everything by moonlight and not need to use my headlamp. I cooked dinner, read some, and packed for the next day’s adventure, as I was planning on starting my hike at sunrise. I made my bed, finished my dishes, and was ready for bed except for the bathroom. I had the campervan all locked up while I was inside it, so I had to unlock the sliding side door to exit, and when I got out, the door rolled shut so the click happened, even though the door wasn’t fully shut. I went to the bathroom, came back, tried the door and, to my disbelief, it was locked. I’m going to slow down with the story here to let you into my mental processes as the minutes progress. First off, I looked away from the car, pretended that didn’t happen, and tried the door again. Of course, it still didn’t open, and it was shut just enough for the lock to engage. As you probably thought when you first read that, I was saying to myself “WHAT AN IDIOT!” The second and third times I’ve ever locked my keys in the car come 12 hours apart. You can imagine the disbelief and disgust I had with myself at this point. When I realized the significance of this occurrence, I initially pulsed with fear of what the implications of being stuck outside my car with nobody around, just a t-shirt, fleece, and headlamp for the 40 degree night. I immediately tucked in my shirt and zipped up my jacket to conserve any heat that may soon become vital. My next thought was that I had to sleep in my bed, whatever that took. The last resort of breaking a window was my foremost thought. After a few minutes, my temper settled to allow me to think logically again. I never thought I’d say this, but needing the locksmith earlier in the day was a blessing in disguise. Fortunately, I was paying attention to what the guy was doing, so I knew the easiest way to get into the car (although he had a few special tools). I then decide to see if I can use the small monkey brain that I must have in there somewhere (that obviously doesn’t know how to carry keys around yet in this stage of evolution (haha, not that I support evolution fully)) to mimic his actions. As I laughed at myself in pity, I searched through the woods for a few minutes to find some appropriately shaped and sized sticks for my tools. Then I search for some rocks that could help as well. Earlier in the day, the locksmith attacked the car at the driver’s door, first using a crowbar to create a little space between the body of the car and the door at the top corner above the handle. Then he inserted an airbag, pumped it up to enlarge the gap between the door and the frame, and then inserted his metal wire to reach in and unlock the car. Thus, I use a stick to jack the door ajar, insert a rock to hold the gap. Adjust the jacking stick, pry, insert rock further. I managed to mimic his actions quite well, but the stick I had to reach in and unlock the door was too flimsy to do the job, although it teased me as if it would work for about 20 minutes. I started to rethink things a little bit as I was getting frustrated but closer and closer to success. Then I tried a stiffer stick that wouldn’t reach the lock, but was able to get to the handle that rolls down the window (manual, rotary handle). I was very fortunate that it was at the top of it’s rotation, so it was easy to push downwards. I nudged it far enough to get the window started, and it was downhill from there. Forty five minutes of work lead me to be able to get back in my bed, much more elated and thankful than when I last left it. If he hadn’t of shown me how to get back in, I may have had to deal with a much larger bill than $80. As I laughed at myself while hiking on the trail today, I was pretty proud of breaking into a car with a couple sticks and a couple rocks, but it’s obvious that I’m no genius, that’s for sure. I’m sure this doesn’t make Mom feel too comfortable with me driving around a country making such stupid mistakes, but Mom, it’s almost over.

Speaking of hiking, I walked for 7 ½ hours today on one of the best, if not the best, hikes I’ve ever been on. My curiosity made me lucky, following a side trail from the highest point on the main trail to take me to the top of Conical Hill. From this viewpoint, I could see in all directions, far above the tree line and amidst the remaining snow. The weather was absolutely incredible – not a cloud in the sky, little wind, warm enough for light pants and a t-shirt. I only saw 2 people on the trail, one which was at the top. He told me that a week prior, I wouldn’t have been able to make it anywhere near the top because of snow cover. He also said something along the lines that there were only 25 days a year that were like that, so I was lucky to be there. It was too bad I couldn’t spend more time up there, the view made me smile in awe. I’m really glad that I pushed my time limits a little to get all the way to the top, it was much better than it would’ve been otherwise.

Hopefully once I get to Australia, I’ll be able to upload more of my pictures so you can see a little more of my trip. I’ve got a ‘Best of NZ’ folder, so you won’t have to suffer through too many of them. Funny, speaking of Australia, I had a really coincidental experience tonight. I went to a bar to use a coupon that I found in the taxi in Auckland a couple weeks ago, just a two for one beer voucher ($6 for two drinks is even better than American prices!). Anyways, I forced myself to try to be social since it was only the third time I’ve been in a bar in NZ. I sat next to these girls in front of the fire, and found out that the girl across from me was from Indiana. She said she was studying abroad in Australia later too. After she found out we were doing the same program, she goes “Wait…is your name Andrew?” I was like what? No way? A couple days ago we(separately) got emails saying that our flight from Christchurch to Sydney had been canceled and we needed to decide on a new departure time. She said that in her email, the travel agent told her that another kid named Andrew was having the same problem and he wanted to know if we were traveling together. What are the chances? Anyways, she’s from Purdue and she’s doing the Tourism and Recreation part of the summer program that I’m a part of…crazy.

Queenstown

2008-06-14T21:11:00.000-07:00

6/14/2008
Queenstown

I flipped a coin a few hours ago to see if I should come here today, and the kiwi bird on the ‘tails’ side said yes. I was in Wanaka earlier, poking around and trying to get a better idea of what I should do in the coming days before my flight out of Christchurch next Saturday. Two weeks already gone by, wow that was fast.

I left you last when I was outside Punakaiki to see the Pancake Rocks. Nicholas and I did the short hike to the seal colony during low tide, and had fun watching the seal pups chasing each other in circles in one of the tidal pools. The Pancake Rocks were the above-ground version of the limestone formations I had first seen at the Waitomo Caves. They were really interesting in the caves because you could see a stack of layers, the thicker ones about 3 or 4 inches thick, with a thin 1/2 inch layer in between them. In the caves, the ½ inch layer appeared to be in the process of being squeezed out. At the Pancake rocks, the 1/2 inch layer was eroded away, so they looked like individual sheets of rock stacked on top of one another. There was a blowhole in the course of our walk, but unfortunately the low tide wasn’t making it active. The postcard pictures I saw of the blowhole looked pretty neat, although we didn’t wait the six hours it would have taken to get the action shot we were looking for.

We continued down the coast to Greymouth under overcast skies; Nicholas feared that the mental image of a perpetually gray west coast would be true during his stay. He was every bit correct in that thought, at least for this week. It started raining when I dropped him off at his hostel, and I drove out on a pier to stop for lunch next to the local surfing spot. Having changed from earlier in the day, when there were picture perfect lines of waves coming in from the west, there wasn’t much surf but plenty of wind.

From there I continued down the coast through the rain to Franz Josef, the town that supports the large tourist draw to the glacier in town. The most interesting thing about ‘the township,’ as they called it, was the public bathroom. They were the most high tech bathroom I’ve ever seen, with a door that would only slide open or shut at the touch of a heat sensitive button. The sink was inset into the wall, with soap, water, and dryer all poking out of the top of the inset sink. The robotic voice informed the bathroom patron that the time limit was 10 minutes, and proceeded to play a song for your movement’s pleasure. I shaved in there once and while I was bending down trying to wash my face, the sensors got confused and were alternating water and hot air because I was activating too many of them at once. I also just barely went over the 10 minute limit, and got scared at what the thing was programmed to do once a patron overstayed his welcome. Anyways, I took the next morning quite slowly, knowing that it was pouring rain outside and there wasn’t a whole lot to do. I finished my first book of the summer, the Monkey Wrench Gang, a couple nights before and hadn’t moved on to my next yet. The book was pretty good – it was about a group of 4 people who become eco-terrorists in the American Southwest, trying to stop the progress of bridges, mines, forestry, and the like from further invading the beauty of the land. Even though it was a bit over the top, the author has an obvious wealth of knowledge about the southwest, Utah, and the activity therein. Thanks to Amira for the recommendation.

I got up and decided to brave the downpour to go see what I could of the glacier. From the end of the paved trail, you could just barely make out the bottom tip of the ice river through the clouds. The trail continued on through the riverbed, warning of sudden changes in flow and blockages of the path after heavy rainfall. The people I’ve met on my trip so far said that this glacier was super touristy and wasn’t as attractive as another nearby glacier because of all of people. That being said, it was kind of nice to be the only one there, although it was certainly wet and the river was raging. I hoped across the rocks of the small stream crossings on the way to the glacier terminus until a Department of Conservation guy (ranger, in our terms) told me that as of 10 minutes previous the valley was closed and he would advise I not go any further. It was pretty obvious the conditions were not ideal, as he said we’d already gotten 50 mm of rain and they were predicting another 300 mm over the next 48 hours. He said the ice caves had already collapsed and the glacier was highly unstable. Clear enough words to my ears to know that meant snap your last picture and turn around. There were lots of little waterfalls cascading down the sides of the sheer cliffs coming down to the river, making it quite evident how quickly the rainfall was being funneled downwards. I am pretty upset with my rain jacket; I wanted to see how it held up under such difficult circumstances and the thing lets the rain drip off of the hood, down the inside of the neckline just above the zipper. That’s great if all you want dry are your arms and back, but it succeeded in even getting my boxers wet. My feet remained reasonably dry, in my new, supposedly waterproof Keens, but they took another day and a half to dry out. I was glad to see, however, that after paying $80 for those shoes with help from my cousin Chelsea’s discount, they cost a whopping $270 over here. Ridiculous. I continued down the coast another 20 km to Fox Glacier, the less popular but supposedly equally stunning glacier. I wasn’t able to see much, as the cloud cover was thick and the valley there was closed for the same reason as the previous. These glaciers are unlike most others around the world in that they come very close to sea level. They also buck the trend of global warming because they respond so quickly to weather changes, they can actually advance when other glaciers are retreating. This happens because the glaciers formed in extremely steep valleys, allowing them to collect snowfall much more rapidly than others can. I would have stuck around to try to get a better try at seeing them, but the weather forecast said there would be more of the same for another three or four days. That meant, unfortunately, that the best parts of the west coast that I had some to see would be shrouded in clouds.

So I continued driving south, arriving in Haast at 6 pm to find that their only gas station was already closed. I parked at a picnic area near the river for the night and went to bed sticky as the whole campervan was damp. While it poured, though, and I realized how bad I wanted to rinse off, I decided to use the rain as a natural shower. It was chilly quick rinse, but I felt a lot better afterwards. In the morning, a guy pulled into the area who worked for one of the jet boating companies that drive tourists up the river. He was checking the river level on the supports for the bridge I was parked next to. I asked how much it had gone up since a couple days previous, and he said…2 meters! That’s a lot of rain. I had been cautious to look at the river level the night before to see if it would be endangering my parking spot at all, but fortunately that wasn’t a problem.

Today I spent $180 on gas - dagger in my heart. I think I’m going to bike to the grocery store when I move into my house in Atlanta. Just take my hiking backpack to the store and stuff it with all of my groceries and ride back down 10^th St. We’ve got to find a way around this crisis, our incomes certainly aren’t rising at the rate of our transportation costs.

To finish up the day’s activities, I drove most of the day southeast, through Wanaka, not down to Queenstown. The scenery changed a lot today, starting at the coast in a flat area, following a river upstream until reaching the divide where a different river flowed in the same direction of the road. Before Wanaka, I reached the southern lakes of the south island – a series of huge, glacier carved lakes surrounded by soaring peaks. These mountains, unlike the ones I’ve been around previous, have little vegetation and are really, really steep, most with a snow dusting on top. Much less snow than I was hoping for. Ski season opened last weekend in Queenstown, and closed today because of the warm weather and rain that washed away any hope for snow. I’ve still got one chance at snow skiing this summer later in the week when I go to Mt. Cook, a little higher elevation.

Ok, now for a few things I’ve been noting during my driving time. I’ll attack these one at a time:

You hear there are lots of sheep in New Zealand. That sure is the case, there are a lot of those buggers. But there’s got to be nearly as many cows here too. Another peculiar thing I’ve noticed is that some of the grazing lands have deer penned up on them. Weird for me to see since we don’t allow that in the US. Some have bucks but most pens have doe. I’m like dang, look at that rack, but he’s tame enough where you could touch him; you don’t have to sit in a tree stand for the early morning hours to catch a glimpse. Along those lines, I’ve been seeing the premium that it costs to get a shirt made of merino wool, even the ones made here in NZ. It costs nearly the same to buy the same shirt in the US. I wonder how much it would cost me to buy a merino wool sheep, shear it, spin the thread, and make my own clothing from him. I’d like to look into that.

Speaking of sheep and cows, I’d like to point something else out that I’ve come to appreciate. I drive for hours and hours and see the livestock doing the same thing every time: eating grass. How wonderful it is to not have a constant burden to eat grass for most of the day every day. Needless to say, we’d get a lot less done if that were the case. Or else we’d all have these personalized feed buckets that were part of our wardrobe, with a hay machine next to the water cooler.

I’ve been driving alone for a while now, and I’m getting used to it. It was nice to have Nicholas’ company for a night, but it’s also nice to just do what I feel like doing and not having to worry about anybody else. I know I’ve already talked about that, but the reason I mention it again is not to focus on being alone in the car, it’s about being alone on the road. The ‘towns’ that I pass through are very easy to miss, some consist of just a few houses. After dark, it looks like they are empty and nobody lives there. When living in downtown Atlanta for a couple years, I sometimes yearn for the woods. These people have taken a step back in time and I wonder where they get their groceries from. I heard a guy on the radio talking about how much he loves the town National Park, outside Tongariro National Park. I mentioned that town earlier, having 100 people, 5 bars, and no church. He said they even have sewers and 2 policemen! Holy cow, you guys really are a town! Lol, what a change. I like the solitude, to a point, but that kind of space is something I’m not used to. Something like 1/3 of NZ is protected in some sort of park space. It is really quite evident when you drive across the country how few people there really are here. They’ve got 4 million for the whole country and there are 5 million just in the metro Atlanta area. Crazy. The guy in charge of the roads must be a conservative man, as well as I can figure, because almost all of the roads here have a single dotted line in the middle of them. They don’t indicate passing spots explicitly, I guess they just did that to denote the lanes while saving paint. Also, the fastest speed limit they have is 100 km/hr, about 62 mph. I guess that’s a good thing for me because it helps to save on gas, but I’m glad the speed limit is higher in Georgia.

There are few things in this world that can create temporary desperation like having to go to the bathroom insanely bad. It makes you lower your inhibitions, forces you to consider doing things you’d normally deem crazy. Having a campervan that doesn’t have a bathroom and eating wonderfully cheap but terribly fibery oatmeal for breakfast every morning brings this desperation into light quite often, unfortunately.

One last point: Kiwis have some weird words. They use the word “jandals” to mean flip flops. Where that came from, I don’t know. Also, one of the phrases that you often hear from the young crowd is “sweet as,” supposedly meaning ‘oh cool’ or ‘right on.’ When you hear it with American ears, it sounds like that dude just told me I have a sweet as$. I said, “come again?” and he laughed and explained to me the saying. There are plenty of others, but those were the most humorous I could think of.

I became just another one of those stupid tourists this morning when I succeed in locking my keys in the car. It pains me to tell you that it cost me $80 for the locksmith’s precious four minutes it took to get into the car. I am very fortunate, though, that this didn’t happen a couple days ago when I was hours away from any help. After that, I walked around town a little bit, finally figured out how to use the phone card, and played a Frisbee golf in the gardens here. Awesome scenery around here. The lake that edges up against the town is quite cold – I found that out when I had to go fishing for my disc. It’s a really deep lake too, some 900 feet deep in the middle. There’s a strange phenomenon where the lake rises up to 12 cm every five minutes and then sinks back. They don’t know what causes it, some guess it’s because of the air pressure. Because of the depth of the lake, the water temperature doesn’t change much throughout the course of the year.

I had to make a painful decision today to cut out Milford Sound from my trip, the budget just isn’t going to allow me to make the $250-in-petrol jaunt out to Milford and back. I am, however, going to do a day hike tomorrow on the Routeburn Track, one of the trails that I heard a guy speak about at REI in Fairfax, VA.

Westport

2008-06-11T23:13:00.000-07:00

6/11/08
Westport

Sitting in the parking lot after a wonderful pasta dinner, my newfound friend Nicholas and I are catching up on a few things. Nicholas and I were in the same group sea kayaking yesterday and found out that our plans coincided so we decided to ride together and share fuel costs. (I calculated a few things today, and after I was done I found out that my campervan gets about 20 mpg, and with gas at NZ$2.15/liter, the equivalent cost of petrol or gas per gallon is $8.13… and I thought we had something to complain about in the US)

Yesterday, I woke up in Nelson a bit late and skipped breakfast to see if I could make it to the kayaking place on time. I got there just in time to for them to add me to the day’s trip, and although it was a bit more expensive than I was hoping, it was a full day’s activity with lunch provided. There was one other American in our group, and we got paired to be in the two person kayak together. She was a couple years older than me and a New Yorker. She had a couple kayaks of her own so I was glad to find out that I wouldn’t be paddling her around all day with little help. Funny, actually, she was spending three months in NZ on holiday. Reason being, she worked in Elliot Spitzer’s law office before the scandal, and since she didn’t have a job anymore, decided to take the time to travel the world a bit. She talked pretty much the whole time, and since she was facing forward and I was busy paddling, I only heard half of it. She thought it was offensive when I laughed at her die-hard Boston Red Sox fan love of Fenway park, and asked if I had heard any recent news on the Braves. Of course I haven’t, and I told her that the only thing I’ve heard recently about the US is that Hillary dropped out of the presidential race. That sparked a whole political discussion and I felt like we were kind of boring the Irish and Kiwis present. Enough about the people though, kayaking was great. The weather was overcast, so the water wasn’t as brilliantly green as I’d seen in the pictures, but it was wonderfully clear and a pretty calm day. We got to see lots of Cormorants and seals (or gray furry sausages, as the guide called them…a true sausage party). Nicholas came with us for the whole day trip – he’s from Singapore, got out of his mandatory 2 year military duty, and is traveling for 3 months before heading back to study food science. He’s really nice and has lots of good information as he’s in the last two weeks of his trip. He didn’t mind being technical and splitting up the gas costs for his part of the ride, it worked out nicely.

After kayaking, I drove over a big mountain called Takaka Hill to get to Pupu springs (ironic), the clearest fresh water in the world. I stayed in the parking lot there and got up this morning to hike down to the springs. I didn’t think to take my polarized sun glasses, but the glare on the water made it difficult to see very much into the springs, but the water was indeed very clear. It was neat, though, because the springs pump out so much water there that they make a river in their wake. 14,000 liters a second, constantly makes for a nice river. It was cool to see, like the sign said, how deceptively deep the pools were. It looked like the water was maybe 2 meters deep at one point but it was actually like 6 meters deep. It looks so clear that it must be just right there, but it’s actually much further away. After the springs, I drove back to the top of the big mountain and went to a place called Harwood Hole. I drove for 30 minutes on a dirt road, across the top of the mountain, through many herds of sheep, to get to the trail head. Those sheep are funny, they ran like I was about to catch them for shearing, making it even funnier when they had so much wool that they look obese. It was also funny, one time, when I stopped after the road kind of cornered some of the against a fence, and rolled down the window to talk to them. They all stared intensely at me, I felt like I had an audience, but then after I spoke for a second, they all lost interest and went about their business. The two English guys in the parking lot were cleaning out their van and had a ton of crap in there. I had to hurry a little bit because I told Nicholas I’d pick him up from his hostel in town at 12, so I hiked my quick pace down to the hole through a really cool forest. I felt like a bunch of hobbits could pop out at any time. Very damp, dark, and cool with soft ground to walk over. I got to the hole, a 176 meter vertical shaft in the mountain, and was just in awe of its depth. Unfortunately I couldn’t see much into it from just the side, as there are just a bunch of boulders that the trail ends on and you’re at your own risk crawling around on them. I didn’t want to risk anything, but threw a couple rocks down to see how long it would take, and it was a pretty dang deep hole. I hiked(ran) up to the outlook, which I thought would be further above to hole, to see if I could see into it any further, but it was actually an outlook down the other side of the mountain. It was an incredible viewpoint because I was on a ledge on the ride looking down the other side of the mountain to the valley I was in the night before. A flat valley floor with mountains shooting out of the sides, just like in Switzerland. The marble rocks that I was standing on at the outlook were shaped unlike any I’ve ever seen before. They were like a microcosm of the surrounding mountains. They had ridges with groves cut out of them where you could see individual drops had taken away material, and they sloped downwards and branched out just like eroded mountains. They were hard to walk on because they were so pointy. I took a few pictures, then headed back to the car. When I got there, I noticed my neighbors, the guys in the van, had pulled everything out of their van and reassembled the seats. One of the things they pulled out of the car was their hamster cage, complete with an offshoot from the plastic box into some sphere wrapped in newspaper. I thought it was hilarious that, out of all of their crap, they thought it important enough to have a hamster to make their van feel like home. Different strokes for different folks, although I guess he could clean up the crumbs pretty well.

I thought of a few small revolutions I’d like to start:
-petition to get cell phone companies to change their voicemail setup so that the system doesn’t say anything like “press five to page this person” or any of that “after the beep, please leave your message.” I think it should just be like a home phone where the person’s message says what they want to say and then “beep.” None of this repeatedly wasting 30 seconds of my monthly minute usage on listening to the same thing I’ve heard a thousand times before. Besides, who wants to page anybody’s cell phone anyways?
-petition food making companies to package food in only a large enough container that their food is surrounded completely. For instance, what purpose does a potato chip bag that is 3 times larger than the quantity of chips its holds within? Not only is this wasting packing material, it’s a trick that doesn’t work on consumers, and it wastes shelving space in every store that that product is sold in. I understand that there is settling of the chips after they’ve been inserted, but if we petition to get them to shake the bag a bit when they fill it up, they’ll get the point.
-there are one or two more, but I’m not able to think of them at the moment…

I’ll get back to you after we hike to the seal colony and see the pancake rocks tomorrow. Have a great Wednesday (mine is almost over already)!

Nelson

2008-06-09T04:21:00.000-07:00

6/9/2008
Nelson

I’m staying in an empty holiday park tonight, outside the northern city of Nelson. The girl at the reception desk said that there were 2000 people here on New Years, so I can feel the change of the time of the year quite drastically.

My second day in Wellington went well, toured the city a little more, found some amazing free, city-sponsored public showers, 10 minute walk from the campervan. It’s incredible how a little soap can make you feel so much different. Upon discovery, though, I didn’t use them because I was headed back out to Lyall Bay to see how the surf was. It was a lot bigger than the day before, so I went back out and caught the biggest wave I’ve ridden in a while. Dropping straight down a near vertical face is an invigorating experience that can pump your confidence dangerously high. I didn’t have too much to worry about after that one, though, as I just caught an hour’s worth of smaller waves and went to sell my board. It was nice to have my cash back, although I didn’t have quite the satisfaction that a 47% increase in investment in a week’s time should. It was probably because everybody I talked to said that I could sell the board for a lot more if I did it on my own. Didn’t have enough time in one location to make that happen, so I took what I could get. Although I did sell the board with the bag, I kept the leash and the roof rack straps for later use. I guess when you count those gains plus the extra $45, I didn’t end up too bad. Good lesson to not be greedy like I may have been when I start investing in the stock market in things other than 401Ks. Side note on selling the board: The girl in charge of the register went out of the store for 10 minutes so I had to wait to get my money. While waiting, I went down to the beach to wash my feel off, and this big guy with tattoos all over him, who I’d seen swimming with just a bathing suit on earlier in the freezing water, walks towards me as I get near the water. He sees the last bite of snickers I have in my hand and asks first if I’m American and then if he can have a bite. I laughed and said oh you want a bite? (of the ¾ of an inch of snickers I have left?) He said yeah I’ve gone poor and so I gave him the last bit and he smile and walked away. That’s not how homeless have typically interacted with me in the past, but it was funny that that’s all he needed to leave me alone.

After I left the beach I went back to use up the rest of the time on my parking stub at the spot next to the museum. While there, I found out that I could park in the lot next to that one for the evening and the next day for free, another lucky happening as it was Saturday night, and I spent $19 the night before on parking fees alone. I saw the museum, showered, and ate some wonderful pasta. I met up with Kushla, her brother and friend and went down the street to an Irish pub to watch the rugby game. Unfortunately the pub was full of foreigners just like me who didn’t know much about rugby and weren’t very passionate about the game, but it was nice to watch the game in the company of some newfound friends. We went to a couple dance places after that, one place didn’t let me in because I had my “runners” on. My black Salomon running shoes didn’t cut it apparently, so we just found a different place. I was ready for the comfort of my convertible bed, so I bid my friends ado, and got some needed sleep so I could meet my appointment the next morning to talk to my parents for the first time since leaving LA.
I was kinda rushed out of Wellington, I felt like there was a lot to do there that I didn’t get to. My friends said that Wellington was more of a place to live than to sightsee, but it was the first city in NZ that I’ve really taken a liking to. Most of the surrounding areas to downtown are houses in the hills overlooking an amazing harbour, with downtown accessible within 10 minutes by most. There are huge mountains that plunge into the sea, making hiking and mountain biking popular activities.

As I got out of my car on the ferry, these huge tattooed Maori guys from the motorhome behind me scared me just by looking at me. One guy had tattoos covering his face, leather vest sitting atop a 6’4” 400 lb frame. All of his buddies looked like bikers too, all way bigger than me. For some reason they did kind of scare me, in addition to a few other things. Local news has been talking about the location of the body of a Polish tourist who went tramping and didn’t come back. Just outside Wellington, tourists apparently get lost commonly on the hiking trails, don’t take appropriate clothing, food, or water, and bad things happen. The guy I talked to on Friday night at the bar, who’s on the search and rescue team, said that the weather and your preparedness are the two main obstacles to surviving in NZ. It’s nice not to have to worry about snakes, bears, or mountain lions as I hike about on my own like I did in Colorado. I was also a little uneasy about driving around the south island, as there are a lot less people around if something goes wrong. I think my assumptions are a little incorrect, as I normally think about the empty dirt roads in Wyoming where you don’t see people for hours on the road when I think of empty space. There are certainly more people around than that, it just seems different because there aren’t as many big dots on the map. I’ve mapped a course for the next couple weeks that should give me a look at some of the best hiking NZ has to offer. I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of free amazing sights.

The ferry ride was pretty awesome, it was cool to be on such a big boat. Standing on the bow while we crashed through the huge waves in the Cook Strait was memorable. When we hit land, I drove to Anakiwa where I’d be starting my morning with a walk on the Queen Charlotte Track. The sunshine brought light to some amazing scenery; the inlet with crystal blue-green water, mountains covered in dark greenery all around. I parked next to the local Outward Bound headquarters and went for a stroll. Sidenote here: I got word from a co-worker that hiking trails listed trail distances not in length measurements, but time measurements, and those time measurements were hardly makeable. So I timed my walk between points of interest to see how I compared. I think they must’ve changed the signs since he came here because a 1 hour distance took me 25 minutes, and that’s probably because I felt challenged to see how much I could beat it by…hahaha. It’s hard to tell if I could extrapolate that equality for larger times, but most of the hiking won’t depend on those kinds of calculations anyways.
Like I said, I’m in Nelson now, and I’ll be making my way to Abel Tasman National Park in the morning to hopefully participate in my first expensive tourist activity: sea kayaking! They won’t let you go by yourself, so I’m gonna try it out. Gotta be there by 8:30 am, so I better get some sleep. After that, I’m going to check out a couple local highlights, then make my way down the west coast to the southern part of the island.

Hope all is well back home!

Cold night writing

2008-06-06T15:12:00.000-07:00

6/4/2008

Base of Mt. Tongariro

Bundled I sit, in a pitch black night with Milky Way shining brightly above. It’s freezing out here in the near desert, but I’m staged for a great hike in the morning on the Tongariro Crossing.

Things I’ve learned so far in New Zealand:

-The word ‘mate’ doesn’t have anything to do with a sexual partner

-Gas prices here must be decided nationally because they don’t change from station to station

-towns of population 100 are worthy of the third largest dot on the map

-the country is very well signed

-engine braking is not allowed when nearing houses

-few police are around, and those that are don’t seem to watch the traffic

-the word “Glen” in the name of a place doesn’t refer to the man Glen as much as it does neighborhood

-wineries are very private, with 30 ft. bushes grown around the vicinity to keep you from seeing how big their grapes are

-lots of people either road trip or picnic; there seems to be a picnic stop every 10 kms

- 60 degrees is cold to these people, I felt out of place in Auckland walking around in shorts and a t-shirt when everybody walking by me on the street had an overcoat with a scarf

I ventured back to Rotorua, and found surprisingly that a large amount of the geothermal activity there could be found in a park just next to the city center. The place was covered and grass and had nice little wooden fences to keep people out of the boiling mud pits and sulfur spewing holes. Much different than I had imagined, after previously comparing it to Yellowstone. I realized what more a spectacle Yellowstone is after this visit, so much diversity in one place. Anyway, I took an afternoon hike in the nearby redwood forest. Apparently in 1901 the forest service planted trees in a small area there to see which grew the best so they could use that tree all over the country to harvest. Although the redwood wasn’t the winner of the competition, it succeeded in making a nice stand of trees that is quiet, moist, and towering. I am jealous of the people I saw running and biking on the trails here, it must be quite nice to have such an awesome retreat just down the street. I drove up to the Blue and Green Lakes, but didn’t find much here. I did notice, however, after setting up my bed in my parking spot for the night, next to the redwood forest, that the kiwis have a sense of humor about them. Whenever I’m parked in sight of a road at dusk or dawn, people like to drive by tooting the horn to make sure you haven’t gotten too much sleep. I find this reminiscent of what they must be feeling with so many foreigners crawling around their country.

The quick drive from Rotorua to Taupo was nice, it was humorous to see my gas gauge be below the ¾ tank mark one minute and rise back up above it the next, just to make my emotions swing in the balance. I don’t like the cruel trick the car companies play when they make the gauge show full for so long and then the other ¾ of the tank only lasts a fraction of what that first quarter did. On my way into Taupo, I stopped at Huka Falls. The river that runs through these falls apparently provides NZ with 60% of its power through the 11 power stations along its course. Surprising that hydroelectricity is that commonly used (if I read correctly). The falls uniqueness here is that a huge volume of water is forced through a small slot canyon and is just raging beneath the bridge. Cool to see and hear the power of a large mass of water. On the way into town, I paused at an overlook to do some reading in my tour book. At 11:12 am, I found a coupon for bungy jumping for $88 before 11 am. It must’ve been an old coupon because the rate was now up to $95 before 11 and $109 thereafter. I watched some kids from Texas take the jump, and although tempted, decided that I’d like to spend $109 on some ski rentals and a lift ticket for some all-day fun rather than a 10 second pleasure. I would like to check it off of my list, but when I think back to sky diving on the North Shore Oahu for $120, I can see outside the tourist bubble.

I headed out of town to make some headway towards Tongariro National Park, not knowing what I might find before then. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much else on the way, so I just drove to National Park, NZ to see if any of the stores could help me figure out where the trail head was. I got some brochures from a ski rental place (apparently the volcano-side ski resort is a big attraction for those in the Northland), and went into a pub to see if there was anybody else I could talk to. The bar tender told me that they were barely a town, 100 people living there permanently; they did have a school, but no church. I saw on the map that this is where they drove the last stake into their railway. The only guys in the bar were some older men who appeared to all work as guides, running the ski resorts, etc. It felt pretty awkward to be the only tourist in town and be showing it off with my big white topped rental campervan. I wish I could squish the thing down when I’m not using it so I don’t give myself away so quickly. Oh well.

Hiking tomorrow, then down to the coast to see if I can catch some surf (if I’m really lucky, I just missed another swell), sell the board, and make my way to Wellington for my ferry to the South Island on Sunday. Talk to you then. Cheers, Mate!

First couple days in the campervan

2008-06-03T17:24:00.000-07:00

Little Waihi 6/2/08

As I sit at the kitchen table in my campervan, drinking my complimentary New Zealand bottle of wine while listening to the sound of the ocean waves crash on the shore, I can’t help but realize that I’m living the life. While this trip will cost a pretty penny (road tripping for three weeks on the equivalent of $8 per gallon of gas), I don’t know when would be a better time to make the effort to see this beautiful country, even if it has to be a solo trip.

My weekend in Auckland was great, a nice chance to relax and see a bit of the largest city in NZ. My body clock still hasn’t quite adjusted, I’m getting tired and ready for bed at 7 pm and ready to start my days at 5 am. I am a full 16 hours ahead of Georgia time here, enough to make me forget that mom and dad are still on yesterday when I think about calling. On the way to Auckland, I met a kiwi my a little older than me who was sitting next to me on the plane. He was returning home after working in Florida because his visa was expiring. We talked a little (he was very soft spoken and I had trouble hearing him because of the drone of the airplane engines), and once he found out that I was just planning on finding a hostel once in town, he offered to have me stay at his place and take me surfing at Piha after we caught up on some sleep. I was pretty excited by this offer but decided to talk to him a little more before accepting, just to make sure he wasn’t being overly friendly. I decided to take him up and we walked through customs together and made our way to the baggage claim, where he was lucky enough to get his bag first off the line. Mine, on the other hand, took another 20 minutes to show up. Since I didn’t have any of his contact information other than his first name, I was pretty much out of luck when I left the biosecurity gates and didn’t see him anywhere. I was bummed that I lost my sweet connection, but quickly learned a lesson I will need a lot during three weeks of solo travel: enjoy the time you have with newfound friends, but don’t sulk in their parting. I realized that I was back to where I planned on being, just making my way downtown and exploring on my own. Then I was fortunate to meet Tosha and Joy, two American girls who’d already done their research on how to get downtown and happened to buddy up before hopping on the shuttle. I decided to join them since I didn’t have any other plans. Joy already had reservations somewhere, but Tosha was looking for the cheapest place possible just like me.

By some interesting fortune, we ended up taking a three hour trip on this shuttle back out to the airport (by accident) but the German girl sitting next to me on the bus told me of a cheap place to stay and some inside secrets on places for free internet, etc. So we rode the shuttle back downtown and Tosha and I decided to split a room with separate beds so we wouldn’t have to worry about our stuff in a dorm-style room. After getting settled, we went over to the building where there was supposedly free internet (a student organization whom we had just gotten a heads up on). While I was emailing the fam there, this lady walks in with a surfboard and is talking to the receptionist about how to get rid of it. She says that she bought a car and the board came with it; straps, board bag, and 6’10” Gunther Rohn thruster(style board) stashed on top. She said some guys told her that she could sell the board for $200 but she said “how could I sell it for that much when I don’t know anything about it?” So I get the idea to offer her a really low price just to get it off of her hands, and see if she’ll take. So I ended up getting a surfboard, padded car straps, and bag for $95 with instant potential for moneymaking even if I don’t use the board. She sold me probably $350 worth of stuff, and I’m looking forward to the smile that will result in getting my money doubled in a week’s time.

After picking up the campervan, I headed towards Raglan to surf for the afternoon, a place called Manu Bay there has a right hander that was filmed in “Endless Summer.” I got there about 2:30 pm and had just enough time to rent a wetsuit and head out on my new board in time to turn the wetsuit back in by five. It was by far the most difficult entry I’ve had off the beach; big rocks covered in seaweed are what you have to walk across to get to the breaking waves. I succeeded in looking like a newbie, slipping and sliding with my board in hand to the knee deep water before I could start paddling. I also immediately felt my time away from San Diego coming back to bite me, as my shoulders started to give out even before I got to a decent resting place. The sets would come in really big and there were some guys ripping the waves – they’d make sure to let you know who’s boss by riding the wave as close as possible to you and spraying you with water. This break is cool because it wraps around a corner and makes the possibility of riding a wave for hundreds of yards possible. Unfortunately for me, this means that those same guys ripping it would be able to ride the wave from where they caught it all the way through my zone and take claim of most of the decent waves. I was feeling pretty rusty, new place, new board, messy waves, and all kinds of other excuses for my poor showing in New Zealand surf. It felt good to be sore from being out, though, and I look forward to more time in Australia to kick my shoulders back into paddling shape and being confident during the near vertical drop in that makes it all worthwhile. When I turned in my wetsuit, I asked the kid working there if he could give me and idea of what the board would sell for (since it was by an Australian shaper and I didn’t know the quality), and he said that they wouldn’t be able to take it for more than $200, but I could definitely make more than that on my own. He also said that the guy who could talk to me about that, Flash, wouldn’t be in until 10 am tomorrow, because there was a national holiday. After thinking how ridiculous a name like ‘Flash’ is and wondering if the guy is really as BA as his name implies, I asked what the holiday was. He promptly responded, “Well, it’s the Queen’s birthday weekend” in an extremely NZ accent, looking at me like I’m stupid. Trying hard not to laugh, I said something nonchalant and took my board and left.

Since it gets dark a little earlier here than I’m used to, I decided to cook dinner in the back of the van real quick and make some headway to my next destination: Waitomo Caves. About an hour and a half south of Raglan, nearing the caves, I found one of the little interesting picnic stops the kiwis have planned on the side of many of the country roads. This particular picnic stop already had a campervan parked in it so I felt some sort of shelter. I didn’t like the fact that, upon pickup of my van, they showed me a map of all of the top best ‘holiday’ parks in NZ, each of which cost $20 a night for you to plug your electrical cord into their socket. Now, an adult with some RV experience might have realized that when figuring costs into a road trip in another country. I, on the other hand, had not. Thus, picnic stops with other freeloading campervan users became a godsend.

It rained furiously at different points in the night, making me appreciate the elevated roof of the campervan as opposed to the terribly thin rainfly of a tent. Somehow, United Campervans realized how cold it would be at night and supplied wonderfully warm bedding for the converted double bed I will be calling my home for the next couple weeks. I’m realizing how a space heater, clothes to bed, sleeping bad, as well as warm bedding may be necessary when I’m at the bottom end of the South Island, one of the nearest land masses to Antarctica. We’ll see how much winter has set in when I get that far down.

In the morning, I at breakfast while reading the plaque next to the car, marking the spot where the first Maori king of NZ was crowed by his elders. I continued on to the caves, not knowing if they would be open on such a respected holiday. Fortunately, whoever holds the rights to these caves thought it appropriate for them to be open. I was one of three guests escorted through the caves (Waitomo is Maori meaning ‘where water passes underground’). We were the first tour of the day and were privileged enough to go where many other groups can’t go because of CO2 buildups throughout the course of the day. Our guide said we were lucky as our tour group of 3 people would be much more personable than the common groups of 300. Because of our small number (the others two young people from Vancouver), we were able to lay down on the boat at the end of the tour, and get the full experience of seeing the glow worms on the ceiling above us mimic the starry night, attracting the bugs to their sticky threads. Incredible underground formations, discovered by taking a boat upstream into the hillside to see the underground that the local people had previously associated with death. Another cave nearby was discovered when a local was hunting and the pig ran into a hole in the ground, which sparked the discovery of the second of some 300 local caves in the unique NZ limestone. Our guide spoke with respect about Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, making me want to add it to my “List of things to do as a Southerner.” I hiked at another nearby cave site to see a natural tunnel that a river carved out of the hillside, making it that much cooler that I could hike on my own and not have to pay $35 to walk through some caves. The forest in this area is incredibly dense, moist, and very much like a rain forest. The temperature was cool, but I couldn’t believe how much I felt like I must be in the middle of Costa Rica, sans the multitude of bugs. Not at all what I expected of NZ, but I am intrigued by its diversity.

I made a difficult decision to cut out the Coromandel Peninsula out of my schedule because it was just going to be too much driving. I would have included it but the swell at Raglan called for a change in schedule. After seeing the caves, I made my way to Rotorua a little ahead of schedule, where I decided to drive past the city and make my way to Maketu, a little city on the Pacific side of the North island (west, as opposed to Raglan on the east, Tasman Sea side from the day before). After driving through the egg smelling Rotorua (much like the smell of the sulfur in Yellowstone), I was excited to see a break in the clouds as I neared the east coast. I’ve seen more rainbows here in two days than I have in the last two years at home. I think it’s because of the sporadic mix of rain clouds and shining sun, but I like their presence. Somehow it reminds me of the mix of science and nature, a connection that gets spread too far oftentimes in my surroundings. One of the songs I listened to while driving spoke of the spirals in a sea shell, how there were a certain number of clockwise spirals and a certain number of anti-clockwise spirals. Can you imagine how exciting it must have been for the guy who discovered that the number pi was directly related to the spirals in a shell? Man…that must have been a moment where God was displaying his genius in the most scientific/mathematic way possible.

Here concludes my first entry of my summer (their winter) in the southern hemisphere. Is it fair to have two winters in one year? If you can spend them at the beach and hiking, I would say no. I realize how incredible this experience would be to have with another close friend, but will not be missing a second of that while on my own, recounting to you all of the most meaningful happenings while traveling south in the big white van, smiling, shifting with my left hand, into the horizon.

Side note on the driving situation. I’m fortunate to have a quickly adapting brain. Stepping into the driver’s seat of the van, after unsuccessfully getting in the left side of the car into the passenger’s seat, I understood what a challenge I was up for. Driving somewhere you have minimal directions to, on the opposite side of the street, shifting manually with the opposite hand you’re used to, turning the windshield wipers on when trying to hit the turn signal, and trying to pretend you know what’s going on in a vehicle you CANNOT get in an accident in. Needless to say, it’s a bit of challenge. When driving on open road this afternoon, I was deep in thought and found myself driving on the right hand side of the road. Whoops.

Roadtripping in Colorado

2008-05-30T15:04:00.000-07:00

Holly and I flew to Denver May 20^th to embark on a week of exploring the state of Colorado. We’ve spent quite a bit of time in Utah skiing, hiking, family reunion-ing and such, but never had the chance or reason to see what the nation’s skinniest state has to offer. We grabbed (a ridiculously expensive) rental car (being under 25, they stuck it to us), and headed for a meeting in Lakewood with my previous co-op manager Bob Schmitz. ATA is opening a Rocky Mountain office in Lakewood just west of Denver in June, and as they expressed interest in a full time offer, I wanted to see what the area looked like in case it becomes important in the future. Bob showed us around the nearly fully constructed office (complete with ping pong table, I mean conference, room) and we had a great conversation over dinner about finding jobs and grad school and the like. Holly and I then went on our way to look for a place to camp for the night, where we found the Colorado School of Mines to be quite inviting. We found a pretty secluded spot near the practice football field where we set up our tent just at dusk. Just before slipping in the tent to get some sleep, a police officer paid us a visit while looking for some kids who’d started a fire nearby. He was likely the most friendly cop I’ve ever spoken to, as he asked what we were doing setting up camp in such a weird place and then proceeded to ask about the specs of our tent and how he’d been looking for a similar one to take hunting. We were fortunate to get some sleep there and use the visiting basketball team’s locker room for showering facilities in the morning. I admit, it was a bit vagabondish, if you will, but it got the job done. We checked out the geology museum there before leaving to go take the famous Coors Brewery tour, which did not happen because they don’t give tours on Wednesdays. We then drove to Boulder to find a city full of life, freedom of thought, and happy people. Pearl St. is a big, pedestrian only outdoor mall with more outdoorsy stores than I’ve ever seen. We moved on to explore more of the city and see the beautiful mountains lurking just west of the city. On the plane the day before I sat next to a woman who told me all about her daughter, her travels to Europe and Australia, and said that she’d likely be able to give me some advice for my trip and to get in touch with her. So I left a message with her daughter hoping to at least be able to talk, when in fact, she called back when we were passing a park and said that she and a friend were about to hike in. So Holly and I joined them for a hike where she proceeded to offer her floor for our sleeping bags, as well as tag along for dinner with boyfriend and friend. The friend, it turns out, was a school mate who’d just returned from two years in China working as a study abroad coordinator. Her dad worked in China as well, and after making the wrong people mad, was chased out of the country by the Chinese mafia. She received an urgent call from her dad saying that she had a plane ticket waiting for her and she needed to leave the country immediately. Wow. Can you say stimulating dinner conversation or what. Our host, Kristen, was an experienced ‘couch surfer’ so she didn’t have any problem putting us up. For those of you who don’t know, there’s a website called couchsurfing.com where people are registered as hosts and others are surfers, and it’s a large network of people staying at other people’s houses for free.

Holly and I left Boulder for a quick drive to Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park. We saw the hotel that inspired “The Shining” to be written, and wandered in and out of yet more outdoors stores. We set up camp in Moraine Park, where the wind whipped through the trees at very audible speeds. For Georgians in May, high 30’s is a bit chilly sleeping weather in tent with sleeping bags rated for 40 degrees. I was using my padded surfboard bag as my sleeping pad as I didn’t have room for much else, so Holly was envied for her luxury extra padding. We hiked Glacier Gorge where we walked lightly on a snow covered trail up to a pair of frozen lakes. The snow was deep enough where we constantly risked sinking knee deep upon a misstep. Holly’s tennis shoes didn’t fare so well with the wet conditions, but otherwise we were totally prepared for the constantly changing weather. Holly was feeling poorly from the elevation so she napped while I hiked passed Nymph, Dream, and Emerald Lakes through even deeper snow. It was a lot of fun to run down the trail, slipping, sliding, and skiing on my feet. We saw lots of wildlife, elk and foxes aplenty.

The next day we waited for the Trail Ridge Road to open (the highest road in the US at just over 12,000 ft) but as a snow storm blew in while we waited forcing us to drive down through Golden and skip the western side of the park. We stopped briefly in Vail for dinner and were denied the chance to see Aspen and the photographic Maroon Bells because of road closure as well. We continued to Buena Vista where we dropped in on Younglife camp that Holly went to a couple summers ago. We were lucky enough to run into a couple of her friends from UGA and got to worship with the group of college kids that will be leading the camp for the summer. We pretended to be part of the group and participated in the name learning activities that they were doing. We met a girl who plays soccer on Rebecca Bohler’s soccer team at Samford University (Morgan Montague). After leaving Younglife camp, we stopped in a KOA campground to sleep for a little bit.

In the morning we got up nice and early and continued south to Great Sand Dunes National Park. We drove through a bunch of little towns, including Leadville, CO (elevation 10,500 ft.), and a demolished WWII training camp. The little towns, especially Leadville, seemed like we entered another country. Full of trailer homes, dirty streets, and old cars, it felt like rural Alaska or somewhere in Mexico. Holly and I talked about how the weather in an area affects the mental state of the people living there, and contrasted and compared how different people across the country deal with their weather. After being spoiled in the south with such sunny weather, I don’t know how I’d react to places with drastically different weather than that. I do know, however, that I can deal with San Diego weather quite successfully, haha.

Great Sand Dunes National Park (GSDNP) is an incredible sight. People who’ve never heard about it (like myself before 3 weeks ago) would have trouble believing it’s there. There’s a massive system of sand that has been migrating across the valley for thousands of years and now is caught in a cycle that keeps it in the same place. Prevailing winds from the west are constantly moving the dunes eastward, creating unusually tall mounds of sand. At the same time, snowmelt in the mountains to the east of the dunes continually carries sand westward as it circles around the dunes. Because the Medano stream is flowing over a bed of sand, an extremely rare phenomenon occurs in the stream that happens in only a few other places in the world, pulsing waves. Upon first viewing the stream, the subtle phenomenon is visible from the shore. There seem to be rushes of water a differing periods of time coming from up stream. The weird thing is that the stream is rarely deeper than a couple feet (at the height of the snowmelt), so the bystander wonders where these rushes are coming from. What happens is the water moves sand to form ridges along the bottom surface, in groups of about 7 or 8, as I noticed. It’s hard to describe visually what occurs, but the ridges create standing waves as the water passes over them. The water deposits yet more sand onto each ridge as it passes over it, creating larger ridges. To the person watching this process, it appears that flat sand soon creates waves, the waves move up stream for a few seconds, and then the ridges get plowed over by the faster flowing water. It takes about 30 seconds for each cycle to occur, and once the ridges are plowed over, the rush of water flows downstream. Crazy. Apparently the waves can grow to a couple feet tall when there’s lots of water coming downstream. Holly and I hiked to the top of the dunes, which took substantial effort considering the pelting sand, steep sand, and little forward progress. It was neat to see how quickly your footsteps were covered up after we started coming down the 300 foot tall sand dunes. When we got to the top, I could definitely tell how you could get lost in a hurry in that kind of setting. People would disappear below a ridge in a second and my distance perception was quickly fooled. It was neat to stand atop the dunes and see snow covered mountains close on one side and a huge grass covered plain on the other. Afterwards, Holly and I got a quick nap and I went on another hike along Mosca Pass, one of the few other hiking trails in the park. I realized on this hike how vulnerable hikers are to mountain lions, and began thinking of ways you could design a neck protection device to keep the lion’s first bite from being deadly. Then I realized how rare attacks are and how much of a pain it would be to wear. I guess mountain lion attacks are kind of like shark attacks, if it’s your time then it’s just your time.

We made our way to Colorado Springs, or “the springs” as everybody seems to call them in Colorado, and went downtown. I was surprised at how small the downtown was and how much of a suburban area the springs were. After receiving some good advice from the guys at an outdoors store, we headed toward Manitou Springs to see what “the incine” was all about. It was a hiking trail that we decided not to spend time on as we needed to find a place to sleep and do some laundry, since I’d need clean clothes to start my New Zealand trip. As this was my first time in a Laundromat, I thought about the scene in Fight Club where the devilish girl walks through and just pulls clothes out of the dryer for herself, and wanted to make sure none of my clothes took off. While here I got in touch with Bob Chipman, a good friend of my grandpa Hess’s, where he gave me some instruction as to how we could turn in our rental car and still have place to stay for our flight out the next day. Very insightful and generously, he arranged for us to stay with his daughter Susan Barker, who not only lived close to the rental car place, but also was kind enough to take us in for the evening and drop us off at the airport the next day. It was amazing to have a home cooked meal and a mattress to sleep on.

But that was after we left Manitou Springs. Something very fortunate happened before we left and I was very happy and much better off from it. Prior to the fortune, we drove through the Garden of the Gods, a neat park up in the mountains with these vertical rock formations that shot out of the ground. Then we made a stop at the Rock Shox office, a company under SRAM’s umbrella that is arguably the world’s leader in bike suspension technology. I would say the majority of nice mountain bikes have Rock Shox on them, but the only company really better is Fox Racing shocks, and they are much more broad. So anyways, I wanted to just pop my head in the office to see if I could have a little informational interview with an engineer there to find out how he got his job, what he’d suggest, etc. I was lucky enough to get set up with the Engineering Manager, and he took me back in the office and chatted with me for about 45 minutes before giving me a tour of the office, test lab, and prototyping area. It was an incredible experience. He was really encouraging in the sense that further education isn’t stressed in that atmosphere as much as hands on experience is. He also said something that I think could apply to me directly when he said we’re looking for guys who are a jack of all trades moreso than an expert in any given area. I do need a lot of work, as far as they are concerned, with the knowledge of certain programs they use as well as more hands on experience (which isn’t much through Georgia Tech anyways). I gave him my resume and he told me I needed to put more sports interests on there, since I don’t have any currently listed. I just made a general resume that I could hand out if necessary, and companies like GE and the other big guys that hire at GT don’t seem to care what bike races you’ve won or whatnot. Oh well, I’ve got time to refine it before I’m ready for employment. Incredibly successful stop, nonetheless. Holly could tell by the smile gleaming from my face as I got in the car. The job search has begun.

After leaving Colorado Springs, we headed for downtown Denver and walked around a bit. It was enjoyable, quite the mix of people there. Lots of Caucasians, and not a lot else, which was interesting to see. We drove back down to Centennial where Sue picked us up and things continued to work out wonderfully. Mr. Chipman came over and was incredibly kind, talking about things ranging from my Dad’s mom Wilma (who died in a car crash when he was 10), all the way to the difference between working in industry as an engineer versus his professor experience at UCLA. The next morning I said farewell to Holly, as she was headed back to Atlanta and I was headed to LA. She was an incredible traveler, up for anything I was. I’m glad that she had the opportunity to come because we hadn’t got to be together like that for a couple week’s time since the summer after my freshman year. She’s an incredible girl and I thought it was funny when she didn’t notice all of the guys staring at her as we walked down the street but I did. I look forward to seeing what directions she heads in the near future.

When I arrived in LA, my fortune continued, as my bag was the first off the rounder and as I walked outside, my friend Mallory pulled up. We went back to her apartment near UCLA for the afternoon, and I got to catch up with some of her roommates I met last summer. On the way back to the airport, we experienced some incredible luck and skipped 40 minutes worth of traffic on the highway. It appeared that a 4 car crash has just been successfully moved to the side of the interstate as we passed, so the road was completely open a 5:30 pm in the middle of LA. It was clear all the way until the LAX exit, were we got off and laughed at the peculiar experience of traveling freely during rush hour in the worst traffic in the country. Off to New Zealand I go!

Starting the summer

2008-05-30T15:03:00.000-07:00

5/27/2008

Traveling stories commence! I am turning a new page in my traveling experience this summer and I am here to update you as well as keep a log for myself as to what has been going on. I just finished my last semester of work at ATA Engineering, Inc.; this work semester took place in Herndon, VA while I lived with my Aunt Donna in Haymarket, VA. I kept quite busy during the semester trying to seize the opportunity to travel in the area. I visited a friend in New York City, a cousin in Philadelphia, two more cousins in Chicago, an old soccer buddy at the University of Maryland, surfing at Virginia Beach with co-op friend, the Foxfield (horse) Races in Charlottesville near the University of Virginia, and much exploring downtown Washington, DC. It was a semester full of fun and learning experiences.

My last summer in college consists of a string of vacations in the purest sense of the word. After stopping work May 1^st, I returned to Atlanta to see some close friends complete their undergraduate careers. It’s neat to see my network expand geographically as these people spread out, what a wonderful unforeseen benefit of friends leaving town! A week in Augusta followed with much fishing, mountain biking, disc golf, catching up and packing. The next week my mom’s side of the family and I spent a week at Lake Jocassee in the mountains of northwestern South Carolina. It was an incredible week of sailing, boating, reading, and relaxing. Holly and I then returned to Augusta for 24 hours to then depart on our next vacation: a week-long road trip through Colorado. For continuity’s sake, I’ll just finish the rest of my travel plans so Colorado can be my next entry. Tomorrow, May 28^th, I leave Denver to fly through LA and head for Auckland, New Zealand. I’ll be spending three solo weeks in NZ road tripping, hiking, skiing, (add more adventure sports here), and the like. The possibilities are endless for this trip, and I could not be more excited about the potential that this time alone will have for me. Then, on June 22, I’ll be flying out of Christchurch to Sydney to meet up with the rest of my group en route to Darwin. If I haven’t already told you, the purpose behind this grand escapade is to participate in a 6 week traveling study abroad program through the University of New South Wales that focuses on “alternative energy from an engineering and management perspective.” We’ll be spending a week in Darwin (on the central north coast), a week in Alice Springs/Ayers Rock/Uluru, three weeks outside Sydney at the UNSW campus, and a last week in Cairns (pronounced ‘cans’) which is the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef. I’ll be skipping the flight back to Sydney and taking two more weeks to weave my way down the coast hopefully surfing and exploring as I wrap up my trip. I return to the US on August 13 to rest before the start of the fall semester in Atlanta on August 18. I have two more semesters at Georgia Tech (fall and spring) due to my hiatus spent co-oping for ATA in the semesters passed. I’m scheduled to graduate Spring 2009 and look forward to the possibilities beyond that. I’m now beginning to consider graduate school but haven’t thought about it much at this point (I’ve been too busy planning for New Zealand :) ). Stay tuned, many stories to come.

Christmas Break catchup

2007-01-01T14:45:00.000-08:00

After a week and a half of Christmas break on the east coast, I am enjoying my time back with the family. I’ve seen both sides of the family in both Florida and Michigan, and both were very fun gatherings. I arrived in Jacksonville from San Diego on Saturday the 16^th and got to see the new house that my grandparents will be moving into shortly. We went to the IMAX theater in the World Golf Village, always a fun outing. Bright and early Sunday morning, Amanda and Angela Griffin, Holly and I got up to head to the race start for our first half marathon. I was eager to see how my body would hold up for such a long race, and was surprised to find out that my injury from the previous weekend’s soccer game was fully healed (I strained my groin fighting for the ball). So prior to the race, I had not run for a week and a half. Fortunately, I was in decent enough shape from my training that I didn’t suffer a whole lot from this absence of running beforehand. I didn’t train as hard as I expected to before the race, but I found myself weighing a surf outing versus a run, and I often chose the water instead. I guess my shoulders were in great shape from all of the paddling and may have even helped in cardio training. So, on race morning, I felt amazing for the first 7 or 8 miles, a huge smile on my face and holding a 6:45 minutes/mile pace. Amanda stuck with me for about the first mile, then I started decreasing my splits as my body felt able. The race went by quite quickly for me, it surely didn’t seem like 1:27.44 had passed since we started the race when I finished. I was trying to decrease my splits for the last couple miles, but still have enough energy left at the end for a kick down the last straight. I believe my last mile was somewhere around 6:00, but my calves were quivering and about to lock up with cramps in the last 100 yards. My parents, grandparents, and a couple of Holly’s friends were there to cheer us on, so that was pretty awesome to have them giving us support a couple miles away from the finish. My mom remarked that we all looked like we were just cruising with no pain, even at the 11 mile mark in the race. I thought this was an ironic statement coming from her because, there she was, standing on the side of the path, cheering us on, who were actually running in her honor of the nearly painless battle with those pesky fast growing cells. Afterwards, we were all very proud of each other, and I felt a bit more involved in her fight. It is unfortunate that I have not been able to be around during all of the doctors visits, surgeries, and rough times, but she sure is an amazing woman. I just saw her without her wig on today, and other than her being a beautiful woman even without hair, I’m looking forward to it coming back.

After running some errands and Christmas shopping in the Augusta traffic for a day, I was off again to go backpacking with Mike Armstrong and Lucky on the Appalachian Trail in North Georgia. We hiked up to Tray Mountain (2^nd highest point in Georgia), and there be enjoyed an awesome fire and a windy night with the helpful protection of a shelter there. Some mice defied gravity and made it past the bear and squirrel proof food hanging system, but they only got into a few granola bars and some hot chocolate. I can only imagine the celebration dance they do when they see the hikers set up camp and revel in the fact that the food cannot really be hidden from them. Mike read some of the entries in the trail log at the shelter to me, and one sentence stuck out: “A cowboy’s philosophy – if you got a hill to climb, waitin’ ain’t gonna make it any smaller.” There was an entry in there from some people from Kentucky who were either joking, or really have absolutely no idea how to properly communicate in written English. It’s hard for me to imagine how someone could make it through high school without knowing how to properly spell most words. Anyways, the hike was a great chance for me to get a deep breath of that cool mountain air. On the way home, we stopped at this little outfitter shop where they have some pretty hard core gear for sale, and I spotted a pair of Chaco sandals on sale for $25, down from the regular $95. The funny part is, they were size 14, and that just happens to be what size Mike wears – even if it wasn’t me making the purchase, I still got pleasure from the sick deal he got.

Wednesday night, my sister had a birthday gathering at our house, where I got a chance to see the beautiful Kayla Bourne, and also to speak some Spanish with one of Holly’s exchange student friends. My comprehension ability had not diminished nearly as rapidly as my speaking ability, but I was still pleased with my performance.

Thursday, just before we left to go to Michigan, my car arrived from its trip across the country. Covered in hydraulic fluid from a broken hose on the carrier truck, my car was filthy. I wiped it down before we left, finding scratches on the left front bumper and a broken wind guard around the sunroof, two things I was not very happy with. I think professionals should treat customers’ belongings as their own, and that didn’t seem to be the case in this situation. I understand that those shipping trucks are tight quarters, though, and am still very grateful for the fact that my company paid for all of my moving costs.

In Michigan, we had multiple family gatherings where just about all of my Hess relatives were present - all 16 cousins. We gathered on the night of the 23^rd at my grandparents’ house in East Lansing. It was fun to get to share some of the exciting stories from my travels of the last 8 months, answering many questions about life in California and recent interactions with the ladies. I think my most common comment about ladies was about finding Catherine, an awesome girl with logic, and her describing directions to her house in terms of street names and cardinal directions, which I thought was very impressive. It was awesome to see how they are all growing up; my dad’s youngest sister has four kids who are impeccably trained, with the youngest being five years old and incredibly fun to play with. My dad turns into a little kid around those cousins – he’s always a bucking bronco with a few rodeo clowns on his back or something along those lines. We also regularly have family musical time, where the kids display something they’ve learned with what musical instruments they play, and somehow I was coaxed into playing the recorder in front of everyone. I never really thought about it, but I remembered the song that I knew how to play being called Old Lang Syne, but it turns out that it was Amazing Grace, and I just didn’t realize it. They all thought it was quite humorous that I said one song and played another, and even more amusing that I didn’t have a clue that it was wrong.

Christmas was great, I got more than I expected and was pleased with all of my presents. I really enjoyed getting to play ping pong every night with my sister and my cousins. On Tuesday night, we went to Troy (a suburb of Detroit) for another family gathering where we went shopping, bowling, and I got a driving tour of Detroit with my dad and my grandpa. That was cool because I’ve been to Michigan so many times before, but never had a chance to see the famous Motor City. It sure has seen its better day, with lots of houses that are falling down and a few abandoned buildings right in the heart of downtown. The Lions and Tigers stadiums are right next to each other, which I thought was an interesting way to attract people back to the heart of this old city. I also didn’t realize that Canada was just across a river from Detroit – I thought you had to drive across a great lake to get to Canada. We had my dog Lucky in the car, and we didn’t think we could smuggle her in, so we decided not to drive over to Canada, which would have allowed me to be in the eightdifferent countries in one year. It was cool to see the headquarters for the big car companies, as well as the now famous 8 Mile road. My cousin John left the morning of our departure to go pick up his girlfriend and bring her back to Okemos. Unfortunately, we missed getting to meet here by a couple hours. His girlfriend, Kelsey, will be studying in Madrid for the semester, while he will be studying in Rome. I left him a note that outlined some of my suggestions for travel in Europe, namely some cool hostels, things to do in Switzerland, and some helpful websites. It’s really neat to be able to do that for him, just to say that I’ve been there already.

I have been reading a book called American Prometheus, a biography of the famous American physicist Robert Oppenheimer, who managed the Manhattan Project (that produced the atomic bomb). After reading much about the political history of that period in relation to Oppie’s surroundings of the day, I had many questions about socialism, fascism, communism, and the McCarthy period. Fortunately, my uncle used to be a history teacher and was able to thoroughly educate me on any subject I could ask questions about. My cousin John, who’s studying political science at Wheaton College in Chicago, was very well informed in this realm and started me reading Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, a piece of literature that seemingly had a large influence on Oppenheimer’s political views. This pamphlet, only about 45 pages long, speaks to those already informed of communism and presents the idealism of a man scared by the onslaught of unbridled capitalism. I find it interesting that the intellectuals of the day are drawn to communism because of its theoretical flawlessness. The reason this is interesting, in my mind, is that, due to the restrictions of the social interaction and the psychological tendencies of human nature, this supposed perfect system is horribly flawed. Maybe Marx’s ideas were so much ahead of their time that they actually apply to a world of artificial intelligence, where pride and prejudice do not play a role in the relationship between ‘individuals.’

Now that I’m done my share of economic theory for this blog, I’ll tell you what I did in the days following our return from Michigan. We got home from Michigan at 4 am on Thursday morning, and I started my drive to Greenville, South Carolina at 10 am to meet up with Hayley, the girl I traveled with this summer. She invited me to accompany her to a Debutant Ball, which requires me to wear a tux with tails and white gloves. If you haven’t heard of debutants before, here’s how I understand it: Its roots start in the high class southern families who made sure their daughters were educated in high society living, namely proper dancing, manners, and other skills necessary to court the high society young men of the day. Since then, this had transformed into groups across the south, who are based around the social circles of parents who were previously involved in such things. So the point of this whole deal is a young woman is to “debut” the Christmas of her first year in college, and through this process her father is presenting her to society as being ready to start takings suitors for marriage. Now that we’ve got that over, I can tell you how I got involved. As I do not know how to dance, am not from high society, and am still budding in my education of these things, I wouldn’t seem to be prepared for such an outing. As luck would have it though, my invitation included only the requirement of being able to munch and mingle, a skill in which I am fast becoming a professional. If I mentioned that I’m looking forward to seeing southern belles before, I think I’m about to hit the cream of the crop! It’s going to be an educational experience either way, and I am very much looking forward to it.

I will be moving into my new apartment in a couple weeks, and I’m looking forward to being in a more grown up atmosphere outside of the dorms. I think the coming semester is going to be a lot of work, I have five classes that will have multiple homeworks due every week. The wonderful thing about this, though, is that I will be done with class every day at 11 am. This means that I will be perfectly set up to workout and knock some homework out before going back to the distractions at my apartment.

Catching up on the second half of co-op term

2006-11-26T20:15:00.000-08:00

¡Feliz cumpleanos a mi! It’s my 21^st birthday today, and what a great day it has been. I’ll admit, it’s not quite the same as it would’ve been with my long time friends from school and home, but how many times am I going to be able to surf for a couple hours on my birthday? I received some very gracious gifts from immediate relatives, I am totally surprised by their everlasting generosity, thank you so much! One thing I admire about moms and Grandmas is the fact that they’ve planned ahead enough to have a card delivered to whatever location by the time of the actual event - I need to learn this wise skill.

Well, the last couple weeks have been anything but dull. My friends came to visit from Georgia Tech, and unfortunately, brought some of the weather with them. When I picked them up, it was misting – the first form of precipitation I’ve seen since in California. Luckily, it cleared up the rest of the afternoon so we were able to enjoy some decent weather. On Saturday, like I previously mentioned, we went my company’s outing to the zoo, which was amazing. It had been a very long time since I last went to a zoo; my last visit was probably in elementary school to Columbia, South Carolina. We first toured the zoo by bus, with the driver giving us the inside information on all of the animals, as well as a couple stops for behind the scenes encounters. Feeding a giraffe was pretty cool, especially to see the food move down his neck. My favorite animal was the jaguar, he was huge! One cool thing about him was that, unlike most other large cats, he kills his prey by crushing skulls rather than going for the jugular. Apparently, the zoo keepers gave him a bowling ball to entertain him one evening, and the next morning they found the bowling ball broken into golf ball size chunks – some amazing power in those jaws. We had a special presentation before lunch in a private clubhouse with about four different animals, and then a full lunch buffet. Catherine and I ended up sitting at the table where the higher-ups from our company gathered, and I found myself entertaining them with stories of the Lexus event.

Following the zoo, Elicia and Hallie went to meet up with one of Elicia’s mom’s friends in La Jolla. As it turned out, the lady owned a condo in the only high rise in La Jolla, where she said she bought her pad for $600,000 in 1980. I can’t imagine what kind of money that place is worth today, but it has windows that run the length of the condo as well as windows that turn the corner and run the width of it on one side. It had a view of all of downtown La Jolla, Seal Beach, all of the beaches running north towards Torrey Pines, and all of the incredible mansions in between. She had a telescope that we used to check out some of the most amazing houses I have ever seen. Another interesting point from that visit was seeing her interest in petrified wood. She had multiple chunks and slabs of beautiful brown rock, with a marble-like texture. Some were table tops, others were just pieces to accent the room. She said she bought a two foot section of a tree for about $60,000, and she told her kids if they ever needed money bad to have it sliced into thin pieces and sell the pieces. Elicia and Hallie had the pleasure of staying there by themselves a couple of nights, what a treat!

In the weeks following my longboarding outing, I found that I had much more confidence on the shortboard too, and have been having a good bit more success in getting up than the first couple months. A recent change to one of our surfboards was the addition of a custom shaped mahogany fin for the oldest board. I tried to do some research on the board, but could only dig up the fact that the finbox on the board was from the late 60s, and a replacement for this specific fin box would cost $120 or more. So I modeled the fin (through a fairly complicated process) in a 3D modeling program at work, and sent my dad the file with some other drawings to give him the dimensions. His friend Tom Lang just happened to have some mahogany laying around (we needed a dense hardwood to make sure the fin would hold up to the stresses of surfing), although it wasn’t quite large enough to exactly follow my design, the fin turned out great. It’s got the vintage look that the board needs, thanks dad! I surfed on it yesterday and it tracks great.

The weekend following my Georgia Tech friends’ visit, Andrew (my roommate), Adam(summer ATA intern), Adam’s friend Stew, and I went to Fontana, California, to the California Motor Speedway for the ZoomZoomLive Mazda promotional driving event. It was tough getting up to get there by 8:45 am because we all had been to a Halloween party the night before until about 3:30 am. The event was fun but for some reason I just wasn’t as impressed as I was at last year’s event in Atlanta. I did manage to beat the target time on the Mazda Speed6 course and held the lead for the hour for a little while, until I was knocked off by a few hundredths of a second by Stew. He was the leader for most of the hour until a guy knocked him off by a few more hundredths. Afterwards, we went to one of Adam’s friend’s apartments in Santa Monica, then went to a USC Halloween party in Brentwood, just outside of Beverly Hills. I dressed the same as I had the night before, as Dog the Bounty Hunter. The kids’ house that we were at was redunkulous – it was the size of my parents’ house for just two rich college kids. Apparently, rich kids like this are a dime a dozen at USC (I guess that’s what comes with colleges that cost $40,000 a year).

The following weekend, I had another round of visitors – Laura Faires and April McNeely, some of my good amigas from high school. Their trip couldn’t have turned out better. They got here just after one of my indoor soccer games finished, I took them back to fresh out of the oven marinated chicken dinner, and then we hit the sack. The following morning, we went on a short hike in Torrey Pines State Park to see the unique trees (not incredibly impressive, but still a nice morning). Following that, we went to La Jolla and browsed some of the shops, checked out Seal Beach, and enjoyed the sunshine. We went to the Yardhouse downtown for dinner, which was amazing. Following the Yardhouse [which supposedly has the largest selection (240) of beer on tap in the world], we rounded up the rest of the co-ops and went to La Jolla Shores for a bonfire. I’d been wanting to have a bonfire on the beach since I got to California, and this weekend would bring two beach bonfires in two nights! The next morning, Laura, April, Andrew and I went to LA for the grand tour of Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Malibu, and all of that good stuff. I had only been in that area once before when Adam Rollins gave dad and I the tour, but it wasn’t too hard to navigate. I thought it was humorous to see how much stuff April and Laura bought from the UCLA bookstore just because it said UCLA on it. I was glad to find out after an hour of driving north through Malibu that I did indeed remember where Neptune’s Net was - everyone was really hungry and I wasn’t positive we were on the right track. Fortunately, we were rewarded by not only stuffing our mouths with some delicious seafood, but by an amazing sunset right on the beach. April said that it was the prettiest she had ever seen, and I would have to agree that it was up there. On the way home we stopped by Hollywood to try to see some of the weird people I had been telling them about, and we did see a few, but not as many as I had hoped. It was dark by that time, or else I would have taken them to Venice Beach where I saw all the weirdos. We made it back to San Diego by 11:30 pm, just in time to change clothes and head to Black’s Beach for a very unique event. Every full moon, a group of people gather on the beach to form a drum circle around a fire in celebration of the natural light. It was super foggy and we had to drive really slow to find a parking spot, but there were hundreds of people there. The hike down to the beach took about 15 minutes, only to find a huge hippie party at the bottom! A huge bon fire, tons of drums, people dancing (a few in the nude), fire jugglers – it was awesome! We soaked up the atmosphere for a couple hours and then went to hit the sack. Eric, Laura, and I cooked breakfast around 3 am, then Eric and I both got the chance to get a massage from an up and coming massage therapist. I’ve never had a Swedish massage before, but I think it did the trick because I can’t recall the later half of the experience because I was slipping in and out of consciousness.

Meanwhile, during the work week, I have been doing a number of different things for my job. The test setup of the payload adapter, that I designed, drew up, and assembled, was being utilized in the lab. We did a number of different kind of tests, including pushing and pulling on the payload adapter with up to 6000 pounds. Unfortunately, we didn’t take the actual part to failure because it managed to support three times more than it was designed to. I have been put on hold on my part of the project with Rocketplane Kistler on the NASA contract, but have been recently given a new assignment. I am now working on finite element modeling the body of two different kinds of antennas that are on the F-15 fighter planes. If you pull up a picture of one of these planes, you will see these little white domes on the ends of the wings – underneath those domes are the antennas that I am working with. It’s pretty neat to think that even though I work for an engineering firm that only has about 75 employees, I can still work on such great projects!

Last weekend, I went to Irvine to participate in a birthday celebration of one of the girls that I met in Spain (Leyla). It was great because for the first hour or so, the guy-girl ratio was like 1-15! On Saturday, Andrew and I went on a road biking expedition in some of the hills east of where we live. Apparently, we picked a good road because everyone that we saw driving was just cruising. On one of the windy down hills, I got up to 47 mph, it was exhilarating! Sunday, I kept busy by playing soccer at 8:30 am, heading straight to church, going for a couple hour hike, then biking to the beach to watch the sunset.

Thanksgiving break this year was full of fresh air and breathtaking views. I drove to Yosemite National Park after sitting in the armpit of California (LA) for 3 hours of slow traffic. Needless to say, after that frustrating experience, I was ready to get away from concrete and smog for quite some time. It couldn’t have turned out better, as I unknowingly set up camp at the campsite nearest Half Dome – one of the best known parts of Yosemite. Thursday morning, I started the day off with an 8 mile hike up to the Upper Yosemite Falls. The amazing thing about Yosemite is its unique landscape. These sheer rock walls go straight up out of the valley thousands of feet. I traveled in both directions afterwards and the scenery looks nothing like Yosemite Valley. By the end of the day, the park was teeming with people – lots of Asians and Indians – but not overcrowded by any means. I’m sure it’s going to be a zoo next summer when the rest of the family and I go to check it out again. One thing that I’ve noticed about traveling alone is the fact that you meet so many more people! Everyone that I passed on the trail was incredibly nice, one guy even gave me a cookie as I passed him during his rest. I got a really good vibe from the park overall. I couldn’t stop taking pictures of the same things over and over. It was chilly at night, but I was camping next to the car and I was smart enough to bring an extra comforter to lay over the top of my sleeping bag. As I waited to be seated at one of the restaurants in the valley, I watched the NFL game in a nearby lounge and met a guy from Oakland who works with the Oakland Raiders. It was a bit lonely sitting at a table by myself, but looking at the unbelievable amount of stars made me forget about any loneliness I might have felt. I curled up and slept in my warm cocoon for much longer than I anticipated, making it at very relaxing Friday. I drove through the northern part of the park, which reminded me a lot of Yellowstone. I then drove south through Fresno and then into King’s Canyon National Park. I slept there on Friday night, and toured Sequoia National Park on Saturday. The trees in the mountains there are incredibly large. The main attraction of the park is the General Sherman Tree, which is the largest tree (by volume) in the world. On my way home, I stopped by Catherine’s house in Temecula for a movie. My trip to the mountains was a wonderful break from the concrete and traffic from the city life.

Hayley Rhodes (the girl who I traveled with after Spain) is coming out next weekend to visit for a few days. I’m hoping to get her to rent a longboard so maybe she and I can all surf together. The end of my fall out west is sneaking closer and closer every day, I’m going to make an effort to get to the beach as much as possible before it ends! I am looking forward to a busy break full of friends and family, it will be very nice to see everyone again. My plans for the Christmas holidays are as follows –

December 15^th – fly from San Diego to Jacksonville
December 17^th – run half marathon in Jacksonville in honor of my mom’s fight with breast cancer
December 22^nd – drive to Michigan for Christmas
December 27^th – return from Michigan
January 7^th – Move in to Atlantic Station in Altanta

Photo Update

2006-10-12T07:47:00.000-07:00

For those of you interested, I finally got around to posting a few of the thousands of pictures I took this summer. Unfortunately, I haven't had time to comment on what they are, but they pretty much follow my blog chronologically, so you can infer where things fit into the story. See link listed on right side. Enjoy!

Halfway through the work term

2006-10-10T17:35:00.000-07:00

The halfway point is near, it’s amazing that time flies even when you don’t even have homework! That is one thing I surely don’t miss about being back on campus, knowing that you have to stay up until your is homework done. It’s going to be tough to get myself to put in that much effort towards something, especially after five months of the beach mentality. Let’s not think about that too much now…

So the last couple weeks have really made me feel like I’m starting to settle in out here. The weekend after the Lexus event was the most socially active weekend yet. I went for dinner and a movie with Catherine on Friday evening (fine chica from the Lexus event), went to an Championship Offroad Truck(www.corr.com –in Chula Vista) race on Saturday during the day, a great party Saturday night, and another outing with some recently acquired friends from the party on Sunday. It was quite the busy weekend, with lots of new faces and friendly Californians. The truck race was pretty amazing; I had previously watched this style racing on Speed Channel, but never seen anything quite like this. My roommate Andrew and I went, scored a free ticket ($20 value!) from this nice guy in line behind me, and saw a lot of the California culture there. Lots of dudes walking around with long black shorts, wife beaters, hats with the bill rolled up, skate shoes with tube socks, and covered in tattoos. The first thing we did was walk up to the track where a couple of the pro trucks were doing demo laps to get the crowd pumped. We walked up to a corner where a bunch of people were standing, and inched our way to the barrier. The barrier consisted of a four foot high concrete wall with chain link fence coming out of the top, with an additional finer chicken wire attached to the chain link to catch the rocks and mud. Well, as the trucks went by (850+ horsepower, at about 70 mph sliding through the turn), we were pummeled by dirt clots the consistency of wet play-doh. It was just the right texture where you were better off waiting for the stuff to dry so you could pick it off rather than smearing it around. Needless to say, my shirt, sunglasses, camera and even water bottle were caked in this fresh mud. What great way to start things off, it was awesome! The rest of the event was pretty neat, with some great racing in the pro-two wheel drive and the pro-four wheel drive truck divisions. On one of the jumps on the race track, some trucks were getting about 100 feet of airtime, it’s incredible to see a truck flying through the air like that. I really enjoyed the event, although it wasn’t quite as big as a regular Supercross dirt bike race, it was still a ton of fun.

I’ve stopped riding the weekly mountain bike rides because I haven’t gotten a light yet, but I do have other exciting news in the bike department. There are literally hundreds of cyclists out on the streets every day, it makes for an amazingly active vibe to see guys riding in cycling gear home from work. Well, I’ve had my eyes peeled for a good place to find a used bike in good condition, and I think I pretty much hit the jackpot. I was browsing on www.craigslist.com (which is like a nationwide classified site for just about anything, an informal EBAY kinda thing), and I saw a 2004 Bianchi road bike that retailed for $2300 new, only asking $1000. You can look at listings by area, and this one was under the San Diego tab, so I went to check it out this weekend, and I will soon be bringing home my new best friend. I couldn’t pass up such a high quality bike for so little money, I would probably get something half as good for the same money if I were to buy something brand new. It’s a 2004 Bianchi Reparto Corse SL3, and while I’m not huge on the colors, this thing rides better than anything I’ve sat on yet. Although I still need that headlight, it’s going to have to take the back seat while I get the finances covered for the new purchase. I’ll finally be finished with my big purchases for a while, hopefully starting to create a nest egg to do a little investing with. Turns out that the place I’m picking up the bike from is just down the street from Catherine’s college, how convenient! I’ll be heading that way on Thursday to pick up the bike, play tennis with Cath, her sister and her sister’s boyfriend, and then hang out for a while afterwards. I haven’t yet mentioned anything about our surf date this past Sunday…

This past week, I started playing in two soccer leagues with a few of the same guys. On Sunday mornings at 8:30am, I’m playing in an outdoor league with a few of the guys from the lunchtime soccer gathering. I’ve somehow been promoted to playing forward for this team, and I’m pretty happy about that. I also started playing in an indoor soccer league, which plays in a rink that has amazing turf (with rubber pellets simulating dirt) and regular indoor walls, but no roof. It never rains in San Diego, and it’s not too hot, so why make an indoor facility when it could be outdoors? What a great idea, I love that mentality. Those games are on Thursday nights at 6:30, just enough time to get off work, get changed, and head down there. Keeping up with the active trend, I found a place nearby to play racquetball – they have round robins for different level players on different days, it’s a great setup. I thought I’d be able to hang with some of the intermediate players, given my decent success in the league at GT back in the spring, but I had forgotten how quickly fine-tuned hand-eye coordination could deteriorate with time. You pay $8 for non members, and get to play six games against different people. I won my first and last, but got destroyed in the other four games, much to my frustration. I’m considering playing more once it starts getting dark early, but until then I think I’m going to enjoy the outside activities.

So yeah, about that surf date. Sunday morning, my game got out a bit late so I didn’t have time to make it to church directly following the game (which I expect to be doing in the weeks ahead). I explored a bit around the soccer field, then headed home to wash off in the Jacuzzi and make a few sandwiches before meeting Cath up I-5 about 20 minutes north to head to the beach. She was bringing some high quality longboards, along with some expert advice to lend to a novice. I’d only been on a longboard once before this outing, and that was in Waikiki for about 30 minutes, with 1-2 foot waves – a somewhat disappointing experience given the sea urchins that awaited my fall about four feet under the water. We were headed to Dougheny, a beach in Dana Point, CA, just north of the San Clemente area. We headed out to this uncrowded crescent beach where the longboarding waves were perfect. Nothing too big, but the waves would bow up and make themselves rideable before the break happened. Granted, I was on a boat of a board (9’4”) and longboarding in general is easy, but I was pleased to find out that I did know how to surf, I just needed the right setup! I think I only fell off three or four times during our five hour outing, it was surprisingly easy. I got a couple complements, had a blast, Cath is amazing! What could be better than getting to spend time with a really hot and amazingly nice surf chick who gives you pointers on how to actually Hang Ten! The funny part is, we had a conversation where she used Hang Ten as a surf term, and I hadn’t the foggiest idea of what that literally meant. For those of you who have never been on a board for more than 10 seconds or haven’t taken the Beach Boys lyrics to heart, Hang Ten is the longboarding term for a move where the surfer is standing on the very front of the board with all 10 toes hanging off the front while he’s (or she’s) riding the wave. Needless to say, I didn’t Hang Ten on my first outing, but I think it’s very doable. On a similar note, I was sending an email to friends yesterday joking about the California vocabulary (you know, the typical “stoked,” “gnarly” talk). An hour after I sent the email, the guy sitting next to me at lunch was describing some surf and these were his words: “Yeah, the break is really fast and they close out quick, but it’s totally tubular man.” Can you believe that? People actually use the word “tubular” on a daily basis, that’s incredible! Back to Sunday afternoon – after using a bit of Spanish to get a picture taken for us, we headed back out into the water to get a few more waves under our belt before grabbing some dinner. It’s really easy to conversate with Cath, she’s the kind of person you just feel comfortable talking to, it’s great! She said that it feels like we’ve known each other for much longer than we have, so I guess the feeling is mutual. Every time one of us would catch a wave (and sometimes we’d be riding side by side), there were nothing but cheek to cheek smiles when we’d catch eyes again. I’m looking forward to spending more time with her - she’ll be coming with my friends and I to the zoo on Saturday for our company outing.

It seems as though all I’ve been talking about is physical activity, but I guess that’s what keeps me going outside of work. I’ve been going running sporadically in the last couple weeks, and I had a humorous experience a couple weeks ago. I was marinating some chicken in this amazing glaze that Dad sent out, and I knew the chicken would need to cook for 45 minutes. I figured I could go for a run during that time, but I’d need to make sure to be back before the chicken roasted. So I hit ‘start’ on the timer, ran out, did a quick stretch, and off I went. I was going to run a new route, and I had a good idea of how long it was, but I wasn’t sure how long it would take me. So about halfway through, I checked my watch in the fading dusk. I hit the wrong button on my watch, so the split timer started my watch over back at zero, but just after I caught a glimpse of the time already passed. I had been running for about 20 minutes, and there was a monstrous hill ahead. It’s about ½ mile long, grade of about, oh let’s say…40 degrees…over the bluff nearest the sea to the valley on the other side where the Interstate runs and where we live (I-5 will from here on be referred to as ‘the 5’ because that’s what people say out here). Time was winding down for my chicken and I had to stay strong on the run if I intended to get back in time. So I powered home, ending the 5.5 mile run in just under 40 minutes, opening the door to the apartment with how many seconds left on the timer? 11! Woohoo! I beat the chicken! I was really jazzed, and called Dad to spread the excitement. Oh the joys in the life of a young single adult, it seems funny to talk about now, but it was very exiting at the time. I hope you share the smile I have writing about it now.

I will soon begin training for a half marathon that my sister and I will be running on Dec. 17 in Jacksonville, Florida in honor of my mom’s battle with breast cancer. By the way, she is doing absolutely wonderful. She has finished 4 of her 6 chemo treatments and recently returned from a two week stint in Italy with 16 girlfriends on a Walking Tour of Tuscany. I feel she may have enjoyed it a bit better if she had time to rest and take things a bit slower, as they rushed around cities and didn’t have time for a lot of exploring outside of the things listed on their schedule. She sure is a trooper, amazingly healthy and energetic between the short bouts of fatigue. I look forward to performing to my best ability in support of her! I’m waiting on my legs to stop their soreness…ever since racquetball I have keep a string of activities that have either strained or stressed my muscles such that I haven’t been without soreness somewhere for almost two weeks. It works out well though, because once I start an activity, the soreness goes away until I’m done.

So my friends are coming out on Friday – Keegan, Carina, Mark, Elicia, and Hallie – it’s going to be a blast! They got super lucky and decided to come on the weekend where we have a company outing to the San Diego Zoo (arguably one of the best in the nation). Not only do I get free entry to the zoo and other behind-the-scenes/meet-the-animals kind of activities, but I get to bring guests with me! That means that we are saving not only $55 per co-op, but also $55 for each of my friends coming ($660 savings!). How lucky! Their visit also falls on the same weekend as the Miramar Air show, apparently where they have the real “Top Gun” school. We’ll probably be exploring San Diego a bit, maybe head up to the LA area for Hollywood, Sunset Blvd, Malibu, Venice Beach, and the like. I also found out that two more people are coming to visit later in the fall: Erin Beasley will be coming out with April and Laura, and Hayley Rhodes is coming the first weekend of December. We’ll soon find out how good my mom’s ‘guest hosting’ genes have passed down through the generations (I did spend the better part of last Saturday cleaning the bathrooms, vacuuming, etc…how do you like that Mom?). I’m hoping to try my hand at some cheffery and cook for my guests, they’re in for a treat (I understand that cheffery is not a word, but I felt that it was fitting). Hopefully they’ll help with the dishes like my grandparents always do when they visit, that’d be really nice. If they don’t, I’ll understand, though, because they aren’t aged enough to have quality experience visiting friends on the other side of the country :) One thing I might try to get them to do is go salsa dancing. I went this past Sunday night, and returned drenched in sweat, even my jeans were wet! Although that sounds kind of unpleasant, it signifies a good time. I definitely lost a few steps in the four months since we danced the night away in Mexico. It didn’t help that I had sore legs and huge blisters, but it was good to break the ice again. The club we went to was called Hot Monkey Love Café, and although it was hot, there was no monkey love, as the place was filled with people of all ages. I know at least three of the five people coming out are seasoned salsa dancers, so hopefully they’ll take me up on the offer.

I just finished reading the book Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, the same author as the Divinci Code. This book was recommended to me by my good friend Keegan Dum who I traveled with this summer. He mentioned it because the story took place in nearly all of the locations that we visited in Rome, he wasn’t kidding! I think I have pictures of nearly all of the scenery described in the book, but I have yet to go back and check the small details that the author described. My reading started out with an interesting coincidence in relation to my job. I was reading the first hundred pages or so, and it mentioned that the main character was flown from Boston to Geneva, Switzerland in an hour. He describes the plane that they flew in as very futuristic, something he had never seen before, a Boeing X-33. I was curious to see if the author was using fully fictional subjects or not, so I planned on looking into Boeing planes and seeing if there was actually was an X-33. Before I had the chance to look it up, I was walking through one of the halls at work and saw that we have a poster up of some work that we did on the X-33, and it shows the plane just as he described it, but from a Finite Element Modeling perspective. Pretty coincidental! The book was strikingly addicting, I finished the near 600 page novel in a bit more than a week, having read about 175 pages last night in four hours. The action was so intense, I just had to finish it so I could move on to other things. If you’ve been to Rome, I strongly recommend it. Before Angels and Demons, I read the book Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer, about a kid who grew up in Washington DC, went to Emory in Atlanta in the late 80s, and then kind of disappeared from all who knew him on a multi-year road trip out west. He starts off hitch hiking around, then spends a couple months near Mt. McKinley before dying of the food he was eating. The story is told in an interesting manner, because it is written by gathering all of the artifacts, contacts, and brief stories from people around the nation. Ultimately, the book was about the roaming free spirit, but I was a bit annoyed by the unintelligence of a guy who hoped to live in the wild with very little preparedness. Even if he didn’t take much in the way of supplies, he should have at least thought about survival knowledge to give him a better chance. Interesting read nonetheless.

One last bit of humor to keep you smiling, or at least I hope so. I’ve had two conversations in the past two weeks about my hairstyle. It started with a guy at work who’s only a couple years older than me but is a full time engineer at ATA, he’s from Massachusetts. He told me that he’d been watching this show on MTV called “Two a days” about some high school kids in Alabama during their football season. He asked me “Do all guys in the south do this weird little brush your hair to the side thingy?” I responded, “I don’t know exactly what you are talking about, please explain.” He proceeded, “Well, I hadn’t ever seen a hairstyle like yours until you came here and I started watching this show. It seems that everyone in the south must wear their hair like this.” Of course, I couldn’t contain my laughter, I felt like I had a Mohawk and didn’t know it. I haven’t ever really thought about it, but I guess he was kind of right. I think the generalization is that guys in the south tend not to use “product” in their hair like all the pretty boys who have to use gel and a hair dryer around the rest of the country (the north and west, at least). I can honestly say that there were only a couple of guys from my high school who used gel regularly… But it gets better. So on our surf date, Catherine says to me, “Yeah, so I really like your hairstyle. My sister mentioned the fact that she liked it after she first met you. I’ve never really seen that style any where else except…” I butted in, “Let me guess, on some MTV show called Two-a-Days with kids from Alabama.” She stood somewhat surprised, “Yeah, how did you know?” Given that I have only briefly seen the show when flipping the channels, I think it is quite amusing that the rest of the country can be informed about culture from the south in the hairstyle from a few guys in a TV show.

And with that, I leave you until after some friends come to visit! Ciao!

Quarter of a semester gone!

2006-09-18T19:46:00.000-07:00

Four weeks of work already passed, wow that was quick! I’m settling in to the daily routine as I find things to busy myself with outside of work, extending my network and looking forward to the start of the school year at UCSD for the social life to pick up a bit (the quarter system doesn’t go back to school until September 21^st, how ridiculous is that!?!) This past week I started going on Tuesday and Thursday evening mountain bike rides with a group that I found through the San Diego Mountain Bike Club homepage. These people are pretty serious, have really expensive bikes, and are very nice. One thing I found out on my second ride was that when they suggest you bring a headlight, that means they won’t be coming back until after dark. I never even considered buying a headlight for riding on trails in the dark, but it’s no big deal out here. Looks like I’ll be investing in some equipment for the new bike not too long here. I’ve been taking my backpacking headlight and rigging it into my helmet, but it’s not nearly strong enough to ride at normal speed and still react to the rocks and ruts on the trail. The difference in terrain between the trails in Georgia and the trails in California has taken a bit of getting used to. At home, there are lots of roots and wet spots along the trail; out here, there is no water in the stream beds and all of the hills are dusty, rocky, and loose dirt. When you’re climbing a steep hill on your bike, you can’t stand up to pedal because your back tire will spin and you’ll end up having to walk up. I saw my first snake last week right at dusk – he was in the midst of making his way across the trail so his head and tail were concealed by the bushes at both ends and I was going fast enough that I didn’t have time to stop or swerve out of the way, so I just bunny hopped (jumped my bike) right over him. Looks like I’ll need to be brushing up on my snakebite first aid in the case that something bad happens when I’m out by myself.

Work is going well, it is amazing how convenient it is to live three stop lights away from where you work. Being the engineer that I am, I was interested in finding out exactly how long it takes to go from work to home, so Friday I timed it. From the apartment door to my cubicle, it takes approximately 5 ½ minutes on bike, with the time on the street only being about three of those five minutes because I’ve got to walk down some stairs in the apartment and up some stairs in the office building. As of tomorrow, I will be finished my third project of the semester. The first week of work I spent going through tutorials, learning one of the main programs that our company uses for its analysis, IDEAS. It’s proprietary software that is very deep and has many applications. Following my tutorial training, I was assigned to design and model a test setup for a payload adapter that we’ve contracted to test. The part itself is quite simple, basically just a connection between the electronics and the payload in a rocket. The problem was that I had to have certain clearances and tolerances, and attach a circular piece to a square T-slot table in our lab. I created three different designs and presented to them to my supervisors, who accepted a modified version of my second design. I then realized that I would be needed to create some draft files to be sent to the shop so I could have this design machined and put together, at which point I needed to switch to a different program. I spent quite a while learning this new program while re-modeling parts and transferring them to draft files. I learned a lot about designing with production in mind, basically making it easy on the guys in the shop for the sake of cost. After that, my next project was fairly small – digitizing some data from the Apollo space shuttle that we needed to compare to some of our recent designs. I am now just about finished with my third project, which involved altering the code of a number of .XML files so that the data from our physical stress and strain gauges would be input into tables and formatted correctly.

I’ve been playing soccer regularly on Wednesdays and Fridays with two other guys from the office. We drive about 15 minutes to a park where about 20 businessmen (mostly of foreign origin) meet to have a lunchtime match. Most of these guys are pretty talented, so it is definitely some good competition. I was invited to play on a couple teams in a league starting in the next few weeks by a couple of the best players out there, so I’m hoping to be able to get in on some real weekly soccer games. I have looked into the options to joining a tennis league, but the sign-ups for those leagues were over in August, so I missed out on that.

This weekend, one of the other co-ops, Eric, and I went to Irvine (near Laguna Beach just south of LA) for a free Lexus promotional driving event. We drove up Saturday morning went to see the sights at Laguna Beach, had lunch a little further north on Newport Beach watching some kiteboarders, then helped my friends Leyla and Neena that I met in Madrid move in to their new apartment not too far from the UC Irvine campus. We took a short driving tour of their campus and found that they have the most ridiculous mascot ever, the ANTEATER! Fortunately, they don’t have a football team so they aren’t humiliated too bad, but a drawing of an anteater is on every street sign, and they even have a bronzed statue of one on a street corner. I MUST get shirt that says anteaters on it, that’s just too funny. After laughing about that for a while, Eric and I put together some beds, a couch, and a desk or two for the girls and grabbed dinner at Fashion Island, a big outdoor mall area in Irvine. We were fortunate enough to get to crash on Leyla’s couches for the night, so we could get some good rest before burning some rubber on Sunday. The Lexus event is called Taste of Lexus and was held at an old air field called El Toro. We had a bit of trouble finding the place thanks to four different sets of bad directions. Talk about luxury, Lexus knows how to put on an event. From the point where we signed in, we were lead on a path of food through the tents. The first stop was a room where they had a car on display, with a table full of exotic appetizers for the passers-by. The next room had bowls of pasta with all kinds of toppings, drinks, and a section where you could sign up for a massage or a face lotion therapy session…absolutely ridiculous. This same room had a pseudo-waterfall and a tree in the hybrid section…I’m going to go out on a limb here and just say that I don’t think either of these aspects of the display are going to help me decide to buy a Lexus, but whatever. So after we fill ourselves to the brim with pasta, we go to the next room only to find out that the main dish was there! Four different types of shish-kebabs lure participants to bask in the luxury of a leather seat with a full stomach. The last room was a lounge type area with deserts, an automated grand piano, Xbox 360, etc. So then we exited the tents and began to have some fun with the cars. There were three different tent sections with four cars in each section, so we decided to go to the Luxury section first. These cars were too cushy for me, not enough punch when you push down the pedal. The SC430 was a total disappointment as a convertible two-seater; I hope no one ever refers to this convertible as a ‘sports car.’ One neat thing we saw while standing in line was the demonstration of the automated parallel parking feature on the LX460. Basically you pull up to the car in front of the spot where you want to park, mash the button, and it parks for you (with a bit of brake assist from the driver). Pretty incredible to actually see. The IS 350 was by far the fastest, most practical, coolest, and if I’m not mistaken, the cheapest car there. At $36,000, I was quite impressed by the speed and went back to drive it multiple times. My last lap around the coned course, I got Eric to ride with me and take video. I tried to push the car a little too hard, went into a couple corners a bit too fast, but managed to keep from taking any cones out. On the back straight away, a guy in a van in the infield was speeding next to us honking the horn and yelling at me to keep from flipping the car, but I hadn’t even taken any cones out! They pulled me aside and told me that my driving was irresponsible, but I rebutted by saying “How am I supposed to know if I want to autocross in this car if I don’t know what it can do?” Fortunately, they didn’t cause too much of a scene and I didn’t hurt anything, so no loss on my part! Check out the video here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3468570433118311458 (make sure to read the description on the side) Another exciting caveat about the event, I met a cute girl who, turns out, goes to school about 20 miles from where I live in Del Mar. I saw her and her mom glancing our way throughout the day and decided to say something to her next time she walked by. She’s a cute brunette who reminds me of a girl I used to play soccer with on the Patriots, Anne Pollard. She’s studying criminology at Cal State – San Marcos and was quite the driver. I got her phone number and am looking forward to following up with her. Needless to say, it was a blast and I am really looking forward to doing the Mazda version of this event in October at the California Motor Speedway in LA.

This past week I received confirmation that I will have 5 friends from Georgia Tech coming out to visit for their fall break in mid October. I’m looking forward to showing them around and getting to spend some time with friends from back home. It’s so nice to have friends who follow up on their word and actually come visit when they say that they’re going to! Laura Faires and April McNeely from back home are going to make a trip out the first weekend of November, I’m looking forward to that as well.

I’ve realized two somewhat humorous things over the past couple of weeks that I’d like to share. I work in an environment where it is ok to wear jeans and tennis shoes to work, yet we still have “casual day” on Friday, whodathunkit? All it really means is that you’re cleared to wear a t-shirt to work, in case you didn’t feel comfortable doing that the rest of the week. The other thing is my views on leftovers. I’m starting to like cooking, trying to get creative and faster with my cooking abilities. The catch is, under my parents' wings, I would denounce and almost declare a distaste for leftovers. Yet as my perspective begins to transform from customer to chef, I realize that leftovers save a lot of time and require very little effort with a substantially smaller loss in taste versus time saved. So be it mom and dad…sorry for the pain all of these years :) I never saw your side of the fence because all I knew at the time was that I was home from soccer practice and I was hungry.

That’s all I’ve got for now, y’all have a good week!

Getting Home, Cross Country Trip, and Settling in to SD

2006-09-04T22:49:00.000-07:00

Again, I apologize for the delayed posting, the speed of life just runs away with the time! Below you will find the accounts of my cross country trip with my dad, as well as my first few weeks in San Diego.

When I got to Atlanta from Madrid, I made for the bike shop to pick up a new bike to ride at home with Pete and on my cross country trip. I ended up getting a Gary Fisher Hoo Koo E Koo and had one day to ride with Pete at home. After 15 minutes during my first ride on the bike, I found myself with two flat tires…what luck! Fortunately, the following days’ experiences would make up for that disappointment.

We left Monday night around 12:15 am on our way to Houston because we had plans to meet up with my dad’s college roommate Jim Redmond and his family for dinner. We managed the straight drive with no problems, walked around downtown Houston for an hour, then met Jim at his sizable home across from Tracy McGrady’s (currently a famous NBA player)…needless to say it was quite the pad. I had met Jim and his wife Meg once before about 12 years ago, who were high school sweethearts along with my parents back in Michigan. We chatted the evening away, had some amazing prime rib, and I watched Shawshank Redemption in their theater. The most exciting part about their house aside from the sheer size was the machinery in the garage. In the three car garage sat a Ford GT, Mercedes CLS55 AMG, and a Porsche 911 Turbo (one of my dream cars). It was interesting that Jim had the same color scheme in the GT as my friend Tom from Georgia Tech, in which they only have produced 12 cars, and I’ve sat in two of them! Just a brief history on the Ford GT: it was originally created in the late 60s as a Ferrari killer in the world renowned Le Mans race. It destroyed the competition with its 40 inch low roof. They put it back into production as Ford’s most revered performance vehicle ($150,000), and Jim said that it would put my dream car Turbo to shame on the track – looks like I may have to start looking for a new dream car. Ok, so after we got some sleep, I was anxious to get up because we were scheduled to go to the track around 10. I still wasn’t quite sure at this point what that would include, but I was up for anything involving the word ‘track.’ So we get there and find out that the track has been sponsored by Mercedes, so the driving school cars were C 230s for the students and C 330s for the instructors. For the first hour, we did a mix of things including riding with instructors as they showed us the lines and techniques for this track, lead and follow, and then another short ride with the instructor for further pointers. I came out of the bathroom after a short break to find my instructor waving me on from about 100 yards away telling me to go have fun…uh can you say Kid in a Candy Store? Dad and I proceeded to do laps for another hour-hour and half, getting faster and more comfortable with each lap. There’s nothing like driving on the edge with somebody else’s car on somebody else’s rubber, it just doesn’t get better than that! During our driving, I waited for dad to come around the track so we could have a little fun together, obviously without getting too close. So after the first big turn, I saw him right in my rear view mirror and I knew that I messed up the turn, but not that bad. A little confused, I continued to lap barely inching away from him but nothing substantial. As our time came to a close, I met dad in the pits and switched cars because, as it turned out, he grabbed an instructor car that had 4 more cylinders than mine did, no wonder he was in my rear view mirror! He was very happy that I couldn’t leave him, even though he did have a completely different car, an automatic with another half of an engine, but it was all in good fun and thoroughly enjoyable for all. My dad was so full of adrenaline when we left that he couldn’t even take a picture of me by the front sign because his hands were still shaking. I can’t thank Jim enough for the experience of a lifetime. A note about his son: He’s on the Junior Amateur Golf Tour and is an amazing player, I’m probably going to get in touch with the Georgia Tech golf coach to make sure he checks this kid out.

Our next stop was Austin to see Heather Johns, a girl a met at a bike shop this past February. She was just getting moved into her new house and in the middle of the transition, so we got a hotel for our night there. We went to an authentically Austin restaurant for dinner with some Johnny Cash and Elvis covers. We checked out her new house afterwards with a few minutes of salsa and shag dancing on the open floor, the proceeded to what my dad refers to as the “most bizarre bar” he has ever been to. I’ll give it to him that there were some interestingly humorous people there, notably the only couple I’ve ever seen that actually represents true “funk.” Early the next morning, Heather and I put my new bike to test with a morning ride on some of her home trails. A very enjoyable ride with a dip in the river afterwards, followed by a Spanish breakfast. Heather is the most easy and enjoyable person to talk to I have ever met, she’s awesome! I wish her the best in her budding real estate career as well as breaking in the new house. We took a quick driving tour of UT Austin after leaving the hotel, the headed toward El Paso. I laughed when we entered Texas and saw the sign for El Paso that said “El Paso 858 miles,” but they weren’t kidding. The funny thing is that I don’t recall being bored at all by this drive; I’m not sure whether it was the scenery or the companionship, but I would do it again! I didn’t realize that Juarez is the Tijuana of Texas, and that the Rio Grande is the only thing that makes El Paso and Juarez different cities. The states of New Mexico and Arizona went fairly quickly as well, with a short stop at the University of Arizona to see an old friend Jake Lacey. Jake is doing well, training with the Navy ROTC getting ready for action, as well as honing his impressive photography skills. It’s been probably 8 years since I saw Jake, but he still seems the same as I remember him. We continued the drive until just after the California border, where we saw some amazing sand dunes. You know, when I think of desert, I think of cacti, but this was a different kind of desert. The funny thing was that it was only like 5 minutes of Arabian camel style sand, then it disappeared.

Not long after we passed the dunes, I found out from my future boss via phone that my apartment wasn’t going to be ready until at least Saturday morning (and it was Thursday afternoon). So my dad and I decided to get a hotel at the split off of a highway that would take us to a lake in the mountains called Big Bear Lake. Little did we know that Big Bear was at an elevation of around 6500 ft., making the low there about 46 degrees…slightly cooler than you would expect a southern California locale to be. Fortunately, we were able to utilize my backpacking gear in a luckily-found campsite at the base of a ski resort just outside of town. My new Gary Fisher mountain bike was calling “Riccola” at the sight of the 20 downhill trails as well as the chance to ride the lift up and test the hydraulic disc brakes on the way down. As coincidence would have it, I rode up the lift with an architect from San Diego who was up for the weekend, and not only showed me around the trails on the mountain, but offered his card for future rides in SD. Bears made their presence known in our campground later that night, not messing with anything of ours but waking up some of the neighbors, that’s what I’m talking about! When I heard a lady asking whether bears were the ones that you should run from or lay down and play dead, I thought she had been doing too much reading on the internet. The guy who ran the campground said this bear couple had been to the campground every night that week and were taking care of the leftovers that people had been foolish enough to leave out. Either way, this camping experience was a pleasant surprise to get some wilderness time with the Pa, something I hadn’t done alone since a fishing tournament when I was like 5.

Our next stop was a friend of my dad’s from his neighborhood in Farmington, Michigan during middle and high school. He had been out of touch with Adam Rollins for about 20 years, but Holly googled his name and came up with some encouraging results (fortunately he is a lawyer, so it made things a bit easier). Needless to say, old friendships rekindle brightly with lots of storytelling and revelry. It was fun to get to hear both sides of a few stories that I never had two perspectives of. Adam showed us around his side of Monrovia, just outside Pasadena, Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, Venice Beach, Santa Monica Pier, and a bit of Malibu. We had dinner at Neptune’s Net, a restaurant they ate at in “Too Fast, Too Furious.” After breakfast the following morning, dad and I made the journey to our final destination, Del Mar Ridge apartments about 20 miles north of the heart of downtown San Diego.

With some help from the roommates, we had my stuff up in no time. My dad was such a help during the first week there; taking care of groceries, chores, wash, things that needed to be fixed. You name it, he did it. As he was home during my time at work, I walked to work for this week, which only takes about 15 minutes – what a pleasure! I now ride my bike, but what more could you ask for. I don’t need more than a tank of gas every couple weeks because the only place I drive to is the beach (5 minutes away) and the grocery store. The rest of my dad’s stay consisted of some exploring around the area, a dinner in Old Town, a dinner in The Gaslamp Quarter (really expensive), and some beach time. He didn’t get to see any of the blonde California girls he has heard about, but I’ve done that for him since his departure. As his trip concluded on Thursday night, I could tell he was ready to get home and sleep in his own bed. We sure did have a good trip though, with no real disputes and a lot of fun experiences. Thanks for coming Dad! The generational differences were evident when he got out of the car, though, as I rolled down the windows and turned the music up. Time for a couple months of life on my own…off to a wonderful start thanks to dad.

The first week at work was interesting, with my days full of tutorials on the modeling and analysis program that our company uses as one of its moneymakers. I am experienced in 3-D modeling, but getting used to a different interface and much deeper program took quite a while. The coolest and most different thing about our office is that it is very laid back. I wore khaki dress pants, dress shoes, and a polo shirt the first day, and I was by far the most dressed up person there. Everyone wears jeans and whatever is comfortable; no t-shirts or flip flops but pretty close. The daily schedule is flexible with people able to start and finish when they choose, within reason. This means the guys from the office play ultimate Frisbee during lunch on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, while another couple play soccer on Wednesdays and Fridays. One of my roommates, Andrew, and I decided to play ultimate the first Tuesday, which turned out to be much more serious than the slow game with engineers that I expected. I can honestly say I was one of the worst players out there, and I felt out of place! Haha, funny to say that, but I have since taken up the soccer instead and it is much more enjoyable. The soccer game is a bit further away but takes place with around 20 other businessmen, mostly foreign of some sort, who come together for an hour and a half to play some pretty dang competitive soccer. The catch is, though, that they play with very little contact, no slide tackling, and a sense of politeness that my style had to get used to. Anyways, it’s nice to take a break in the middle of the day to get some exercise, I certainly like that mentality. I don’t think the businessmen in Atlanta would ever consider doing something like that in the middle of the work day, but maybe they should! One of the kids that works a couple cubicles down from me has gone surfing in the morning before work, and brings his board in with him. Some of the other guys go during lunch hour, I think I like this place J I got my first project this past week, and I am in charge of the design of the structure for our test, as well as getting it quoted and started for production, kinda cool to get to just get cut loose on a project right away.

All of the other co-ops are getting along pretty well, we all went to a fundraiser party for a local girls’ ultimate team raising money to go to the national championship as well as the world championship in Australia. We had an enjoyable time, with the chance to meet some of Eric’s ultimate friends. Matt and I are the only ones from Georgia Tech, while both my roommates Andrew and Jeff, as well as the other two from the other apartment Eric and Rick, are all Oilermakers from Purdue. I think I will get along with Eric the best, as I think we are two of the more social of the group, but still a good group nonetheless.

This Labor Day Weekend consisted of some fun in the apartments, a couple trips to the packed Pacific Beach, a quick trip to Tijuana on Saturday night, some surfing, and some good food. Pacific Beach, on Saturday, was my first taste of the Southern California that I expected to find when we arrived. This beach is covered with thousands of college age kids standing around drinking, playing horseshoes, bocce ball, Frisbee, smash ball, and people watching - tons of blondes and well crafted bodies running around. The funny part is that all of these people are on the beach, but only a fraction of that are in the water because it is around 66 degrees. Saturday, I went to a party with the guy, Adam, who goes to UCSD, and then to Tijuana later in the night. It was certainly an experience, as I expected it to be, but not anything like what I had seen the first time through Tijuana when I went whale watching in 8^th grade. Then, I only saw the hills around the border covered with cardboard boxes and people waiting to get across. It was a late night, I didn’t get back to my apartment until around 7 am, so needless to say I didn’t get up until early in the afternoon. Jeff and I went surfing after I grabbed lunch, and then Andrew and I watched the very interesting Discovery Channel special titled “Inside the Twin Towers.” This special was great because it gave first hand accounts from the survivors of the horrific event, making me think about things that I never considered before. Monday, with the rest of an entire day behind me, started at 7:15 and an omelet, an early morning mountain bike ride, then an afternoon on the beach. Capped by some grilled hamburgers, it was a wonderful holiday weekend.

I’ve got some friends already planning to visit, which I’m pretty excited about. I also have recently made plans to attend Mazda (ZoomZoomLive) and Lexus (Taste of Lexus) promotional events, in September, October, and November, which are going to be free and very fun. I’m having to make a conscious effort to go out of the daily routine of work to meet people my age, as our section of Del Mar doesn’t house too many people who are regularly out and about. I think I’m going to try to get involved with some kind of activity on the UCSD campus, as it is only one exit away on the highway and has a lot of potential for contacts. Whatever the next couple months have in store, I really want to make a few contacts that enable me to say that I know people in San Diego, because two of the three co-ops working with me now have 0 friends here from last session. I’m also making a conscious effort to learn a bit about cooking rather than having microwave meals and the easy stuff every night.

two week Eurotrip!

2006-08-11T08:53:00.000-07:00

Be prepared, you might have to read this one over a couple sittings, but it’s the last of my travels so read on!

Now that I’m back to my computer, I can taste the states they’re so close! I have thoroughly enjoyed my summer abroad, but considering what’s to come in the days ahead, I am quite anxious to be home for the four days that I get between arriving from this trip and departing on my next. One thing I would like to comment on before I begin my tales of travel is something that I really came to appreciate just this past evening when talking to a guy from Athens, Georgia in the airport. Whether by luck or blessing, the four of us traveling had absolutely no hassles with the thieves, pickpockets, and other dangers of life on the road. We never had any close calls, felt threatened, or came into contact with people we were wary of. It seems that the chances we would finish our trip unscathed would be fairly low, but we did it thank God! I also have been wondering, as a child of the 90s and growing up in the age of the internet, how you might go about communicating with travelmates or friends on a trip like this one without the use of internet or phones in decades past. We didn’t have cell phones, so that took us back in time about 10 years, but we still had cheap access to email in the case that we got separated. What would you do if you lost your partner in Rome, without knowing when that person would be at the train station or what hotel they were at, do you send them a letter through the mail, who do you call? I guess I’m a naïve kid from an age of technology, but I enjoy the convenience it brings.

I’d like to take a second to comment on the great group I traveled with over the last two weeks, those kids are awesome! They taught me how to be relaxed and open to changes, be more open with my stuff and the petty lessons in sharing, and how much more pleasant a trip can be with pleasant company. I also learned a lot about public transportation and how to set myself up for success and not failure (meaning keeping all of my stuff together as to not forget anything). Keegan, one of my best friends from before and during the trip, is kind of like my old roommate Stephen (Slam) in that we can finish each other’s sentences at times, with many of the same thoughts and sense of humor. Hayley, from Greenville, SC, has all of the training of a southern belle with her involvement with debutants as well as the uncommon talents and abilities to be a world traveler, backpacker, sorority girl, and engineer all at the same time. She’s the only girl I’ve met who can tell stories about going dove hunting, she’s a trooper! Mark, one of the calmest people I have ever met, is never moved to anything beyond an easy smile even at the most tense times. It was great for me to be in a setting where there were some close calls, but never was anyone worried or upset. Thanks guys!

So, to begin the review of our trip, we started with a flight from Venice to Rome on the night of July 26th from 12 to 3 am. We arrived and slept in the airport, as there weren’t too many other options available. I’d like to note that this flight was the only “reservation” that we had for the trip, besides an underground tour for St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Without any knowledge or planning for hostels, this made us waste a bit of time finding places to stay throughout the trip but certainly not enough to impede on our explorations. In Venice, though, we couldn’t find a place so we carried our stuff around all day long in the heat (probably not the best idea, but we learned new lessons every day so this was a first). The city has a very interesting setup, with no cars or roads just boats and canals. Almost none of the canals are straight, which causes you to have to spend more time getting where you’re going, if you aren’t fortunate enough to own a boat. The famous Plaza de San Marco was quite a sight with restaurants, live music, thousands of birds, a nice cathedral, and thousands of tourists. The only place we paid to get into was the Doge palace, which was definitely worth our six euros. To the side of the cathedral, this palace housed the man with the title of “doge,” which I read meant that this person was the pseudo-king of Venice, but had no powers and had to get permission to leave the city – a restriction you don’t normally hear of for the head of a city. Including an extensive armory, prison, and government meeting places, the palace was the most interesting thing in Venice, in my opinion, aside from the layout of the city. When admiring the weaponry of centuries past, I realized that I would’ve liked to be involved in designing new tools of war as many of them seem to be quite complicated in their production. The size of the swords there were impressive as well, I don’t believe I could have swung half of them because they were so long and heavy. After a long day of walking in the heat and humidity, we found a hostel near the train station for an easy departure in the following morning. I was told that Venice would smell bad, especially in the summer, but only caught one or two whiffs of anything foul the day and a half we were there. Also, they say that Venice is sinking and won’t be able to continue in the same manner in the next century, but it doesn’t appear to me that the city was ever built to be used with anything besides water canals. In the evening, we made our way to an ‘inexpensive’ restaurant listed in my Frommers book that was 20 euros for one dinner, so we ate at a nearby pizzeria. We learned a valuable lesson in how expensive Italy was after we asked for a coke and were charged 4 euros for a glass (that’s just under $6). After listening to some live orchestral quartet music in the plaza, we were rained on all the way home – 30 minutes away. Next stop…Rome.

Arriving in Rome, we had planned to make sure we booked train reservations to Florence before we left the train station, but got caught up by this Canadian girl who was advertising a hostel just outside town for 12 euros each person. I knew when she started talking that we should just get a price from her and look other places, but before we knew it, we had been shuffled onto the metro in the direction of her place. About 45 minutes later, via two trains and a bus, we arrived at this hippie camp no less than 20 kms outside the city, how convenient…or not. We dropped our stuff and headed back into town to check out the sights and grab dinner before it got too late. The Spanish Steps were our first stop – a neat lookout point but not much else there. Basically, this location is famous for connecting two hills with a large staircase... Anyways, we wondered around the city, and had the best Italian food I have ever had – bucatoni I think it was called. I don’t know whether it was the noodles or the sauce, but I couldn’t believe how good it was. Afterwards, we found Plaza Navona, the liveliest place we found in Rome for nightlife. Lots of street performers, a guy playing some of the lesser-known songs of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” lots of restaurants and people in general. Good times there, but the trek back to the hostel was a bit frustrating, as we had to walk across the city to get to the stop for the first of three buses that we had to take back to our place. We waited on the first bus for a good 30 minutes, which proceeded to drop us off at the stop for the next bus…which never came. There we were, not even knowing where we were in the city, with no bus to our place, and no taxis driving by to help us out. We waited a good hour here, at 2 am, hoping for some remedy to the situation. Fortunately, we found a taxi that took us right to our place, but it was frustrating to be stuck in unknown part of town with no way out, at least for a period of time.
The next morning, Mark, Keegan and I split from Hayley, as she wanted to shop and find a new hostel and we were going to stand in line at the Vatican, which she had done a month before. We had luck getting into the Vatican with the fast moving line, only 25 minutes before we were in. Vatican museum was ok, but St. Peter’s square was much cooler. Just the sheer size of the pillars around the square was quite impressive. We were right on time for our Scavi tour, a tour that my high school soccer coach’s younger brother helped to set me up with. This tour was 10 euros, but only allowed 200 people per day on private 12 person tours into the catacombs beneath the basilica floor. The tour felt very exclusive, like we had some special information that nobody else had because we were the ones going behind closed doors. The catacombs were something else…what we saw was actually a pagan ‘city of the dead,’ as she called it, where important pagans of the day were buried. The story of Saint Peter, as it was told to us, is as follows: A leader of the day in his community, he was persecuted and sentenced to death for his faith as a Christian, long before the first Christian emperor of Rome came with Constatine in 300 a.d. St. Peter was killed opposite of Jesus, hung by his feet. Because St. Peter was Christian, the people of the day could not build any sort of monument for him, but instead made secret pilgrimages to the site of his burial. As time went on and the leadership of Rome changed, the first basilica was built over the supposed site of his grave. Much much later, the present basilica was built over the top of the first basilica. The excavations that we saw were dug during the second world war in secret per request of the pope at the time. We saw what archeologists think are the bones of St. Peter, given the age and location of the bones, but obviously no one can be sure. Two things that intrigue me about history – how wrong we could be with our assumptions of what really happened, and also, how things get so far underground after 1000 year’s time. Do people import dirt and things just happen to get buried, then one day people get curious about the things they’ve been burying? I haven’t figured that one out yet. Thanks to Coach Killips for helping us out, we are very grateful for your connections! The basilica itself was monstrous, hard to imagine what would go into the construction of something that size. Following these visits, we met back up with Hayley and went to see the Pantheon, another large building with a church feel to it, but with a huge hole built into the top that let the rain in while we were there. Later that night, we had dinner about 200 yards away from the Coliseum, an amazing background for an evening meal. The next day we toured the Coliseum, the Roman Forum, and the rest of that area of town. The movie Gladiator really did a lot for my imagination as far as being able to picture the kind of activities that went on inside the coliseum, but to be honest I thought it was more impressive from the outside. The Roman Forum was neat because of the city center that it represents, the cultural history there. What I find amazing is the actual features of the buildings that are still standing. First, I can’t imagine how they would have built structures so large and tall with such limited power available, and also how these structures could have been destroyed by later rulers who wanted these structures destroyed. It seems to me that the only real things still standing are those that would’ve been too hard to knock down. Also, it was neat to see, from the top of the hill, the fault line on which an earthquake had destroyed part of a church and the coliseum in the same path. Also, in this same area, was the site where Julius Caesar was burned after being killed by the leaders of the government. I am still in awe of how much history there is in Rome; around every corner there is something that is significant in some way. The outskirts of Rome, where we stayed the first night, were quite ghetto – a bit surprising to me. Mark and I rode the train to Florence the next morning while Hayley and Keegan stayed in Rome for another day to see a free Bryan Adams/Billy Joel concert outside the coliseum. They said it was an amazing show, the best they had ever seen, with over 500,000 people in attendance and they were 2nd row. I would’ve liked to stay and seen the concert but I didn’t want to cut too much time out of Florence because I was told that Florence was a city worthy of a good bit of time on the schedule.

Mark and I spent our day in Florence walking around, seeing the free things in the city. My Frommers book had tons of recommendations, but all of them cost more than 5 euros a piece and I was realizing that I was getting a little worn out on museums. We rested quite a bit at the hostel, catching up on some much needed sleep.

The following day, Mark and I took a train to Chiusi, a town halfway between Florence and Rome which was the closest stop to my cousin’s town of Citta della Pieve. Keegan and Hayley didn’t make it there due to a misunderstanding, so Mark and I went ahead without them. We had no idea how to navigate the city where we were headed, nor did we have a meeting point for my cousin, just the general directions he sent us via email. Fortunately, when we arrived, we went to a sandwich shop that happened to be in the middle of this 1000 population town on top of a hill, and we ran into Troy! I just realized that there are probably many of you who know nothing of why I would have the opportunity to run into my cousin in Italy, so I’ll give you a brief update:

My cousin Troy graduated from Temple University in Philadelphia last spring with a degree in music composition, and he was offered a voluntary position as the composer of an opera in a small town in Italy. Seeing a good opportunity to have a great credential to put on his resume, he decided to write it with the help of some stipends from school as he would not be paid for his time spent writing nor his time in Italy. So last year’s opera was a success, and they asked him to do it again this year, but he wasn’t so interested as he was now a full blown adult and needed to worry a bit more about the finances. They offered to pay him for his work this time, so he won himself a free month’s stay in Italy for the following summer. He also met his current girlfriend, Liz, in last year’s opera and are still going strong. She’s a world traveling singer/dancer who seemed extremely nice. Mark and I were privileged enough to get to see some rehearsals, as well as have Liz and Troy take requests on a spare piano before dinner (always my favorite part of seeing my cousin). While he was busy doing composer things, I took the opportunity to explore the city and sit on a wall at the edge of town with a view of the valley below, with no pressing responsibilities…what relaxation! We also watched the sunset over the valley that was very peaceful; I think I’ve seen/appreciated more sunsets on this trip than I can remember ever seeing at home, I need to make it a habit. I just told Keegan yesterday that I think it is humorous that, although we are traveling on an open schedule and are relaxing as much as we can, just the act of traveling can wear you out and you even need to take special relaxation time on a vacation, doesn’t that seem odd? Anyways, back to the story…

We had dinner at this cozily set restaurant in a garden with some of the actors and singers from the opera, how different it was from hanging around my technical school friends! Mark and I stayed at the only non-hotel option in town, which was an Italian convent where we had no means to communicate with the nuns until we found out that one was from El Salvador just before we went to bed at our curfew. We woke up early the next morning and headed back to Florence, where we met up with Hayley and Keegan to tour the Duomo and Accademia. While in line for the Accademia, we spotted some friends from Georgia Tech who had been studying in France all summer. It was so odd to run into friends from school in Florence, especially in a part of town that we only went to once. I feel like Georgia Tech is one of the few schools where enough kids study abroad that you can accidentally meet up across the world. The downtown area of Florence was quite a bit smaller than I had imagined. We hiked up the hill to the Piazza de Michaelangelo which provided a wonderful view of the city and another beautiful sunset. If you are interested in buying anything leather, Florence is the place to do it, the markets are quite good. That evening, there was a David Gilmour concert (guitarist and singer for my all-time favorite Pink Floyd) at one of the squares in the city, but unfortunately, the cheapest ticket was 50 euros. So we went and sat in a street leading to the stage and listened to the really chill sounds of the greatest band of the late 60s and 70s. I’m positive that I enjoyed it more than any of the other three, because most of the songs he played were from the less popular albums but still good hits. It was quite the treat to attend/listen a David Gilmour concert in Florence, certainly something I didn’t expect to do in Italy.

The following day, the other three decided to take a day trip to Pisa to see the leaning tower, but I heard that Sienna was the better option so I decided to go there. Unfortunately, I made some sort of mistake and ended up going through Pisa and stopping a Livorno, a city I had never hear of but was on the western coast. I decided to check out the water and got a surprise with the amount of wind. I had to stand at an angle to battle the fierce howl but at the same time was kept cool by it. I also got to see some tug boats at work in a tough setting while eating my lunch on the boardwalk. I walked back to the station and caught the train to Pisa, walked across town to get a shot of the tower and ran into the other half of my group. Pisa is definitely not worth your time, in my opinion, so just look at a postcard if you’re interested in seeing the tower. Our overnight train left from Florence for Spiez, Switzerland at 11:30 pm, I couldn’t have been looking more forward to some cool weather.

After some tricky moves on the train to Switzerland with Hayley’s eurail pass (I bought a reservation for her for 25 euros without knowing that her eurail wasn’t valid for Switzerland, but they didn’t notice J ), we arrived in Interlaken to clouds and rain, but more importantly, huge Swiss Alps. We survived in Switzerland of more grocery food, as I realized I would be needing to ration to make sure I could make it back to Spain with enough to spare (not that I was completely out of money, but unfortunately I was unable to transfer money from one bank account to another via the internet so I was out in the one I had access to). It cleared up the first afternoon for about four hours, enough to catch some glimpses of snow covered mountains not too far away. The first afternoon, we also went Canyoning, which is the name for the activity of walking down a river and jumping into rapids and pools along the way. We suited up with farmer john wetsuits, wetsuit jackets, dry tops, booties, helmets and lifejackets. They were obviously preparing us for some cold water, ice/snow runoff in fact. The trip down the river lasted about an hour and a half, with the four of us, one guy from San Francisco, and eight South Koreans. For some reason unbeknownst to us, about 70% of the tourism in Interlaken is that of Asians – I don’t know whether they come to see the mountains, a climate they don’t have, or what, but nevertheless very interesting to see tons of Asians in Switzerland. They canyoning was a lot of fun, much like what I did on my excursion in the Dominican Republic for spring break except much colder and not quite as pretty of a river.

Our second day in Switzerland, Mark and Hayley were scheduled to go Ice Climbing (apparently Interlaken is the base for tons of adrenaline and extreme sports) and Keegan and I were going to go mountain biking, but it was raining hard enough that neither of those plans worked out. So we took a train further up the valley to Lauderbrannen, which put us in walking distance of some amazing waterfalls. A number of waterfalls run off the sheer 600 foot cliffs that enclose the city, which makes for even better scenery. We paid to get into an attraction called Tremmalbach Falls, the main outlet for all the melted ice from the three glaciers in the region. These falls flow up to 20,000 liters a minute, and have carved their falls actually inside the mountain. Such power and noise in the waterfalls, I can’t imagine how much force the falls produce - definitely worth our 11 swiss francs a piece.

Also, in both Interlaken and Lauderbrannen interestingly enough, they had Trek bike dealerships, which is the company that I had decided to buy my bike from after about six months of shopping. I didn’t want to buy the bike (I’m getting kind of serious, it’s a $1000 bike) before my eurotrip because I didn’t want to cut myself short on money. So a couple days before we flew to Venice, I sent my mom an email with instructions on who to call and what I wanted so that I would have my new bike to pick up when I got back to Atlanta. Sadly enough, the people at the bike shop lied to me and it turns out that I can’t order the bike I want because there are no more 2006 models left and I have to wait until September for the 2007 model if I really want that bike. What a bummer, I’ve been able to hold myself off for 6 months and now I can’t get what I want. On my way home, I’m going to testride a very similar bike by Gary Fisher, which is under the company umbrella of Trek, but it’s not quite the same. Hopefully I’ll have the patience to wait to get exactly what I want since this $1000 is going to be powered by me and not a motor. I was bummed to hear the news, but I was fortunate enough to get to drool over the bike I wanted in Switzerland, where they had multiple of the model I wanted, as well as many more. Unfortunately, the cost for importing an American brand jacks the price up a good $600 so there was no option for me to bring it home. The second night, we stayed at a world-renowned hostel called Balmers, that has everything a hostel could need, even a night club underneath the kitchen that was one of the liveliest I’ve been to on the trip. We were lucky enough to spot one beautiful Swiss blonde that I was very happy about, she was just like I imagined!

After parting with the beautiful country of Switzerland (to which I will have to return), Mark and Hayley split of to go to Munich, while Keegan I were going to head somewhere in France. We went to Lyon, then Marseille because we figured a good size city on the coast would surely have something to offer. Unfortunately, we were wrong where there wasn’t much of a beach, a nice port area, but no real other attractions at least that we knew of. We slept outside the train station with about 30 other people, because it was too late to waste any money on a hostel and we didn’t really want to stay there anyways. We then went to Montpellier, walked around the city, took a nap on a bench in the historic center and then back to the train station. Montpellier was much more enjoyable and quaint than Marseille, a much more pretty city. The next stop on the train was Port Bou for a short layover before the two more hours to Barcelona. Fortunately, the hour and 15 minute layover was just long enough to have time to run down to the rock beach and take a 30 minute swim before grabbing lunch and heading back to the train station.

Arriving in Barcelona in the afternoon, we spent a couple hours searching for a decently priced hostel. We found a place called Hostel Eden, where they said the only room left was a matrimonial suite on the top floor with a big window, for 15 euros each. Sounded like a deal to us, so we agreed to stay there. The hike up to the room was brutal, and the odd part was that we went past all of the regular-hostel-looking floors to the floor that appeared to be where people lived, with just one “matrimonial suite” up there. The room was closed by an external locker-style padlock with no handle on the door, a double bed that fit in the room with about four inches of space between the sides of the mattress and the walls. The bathroom door didn’t shut all the way, with no lock, and no shower curtain…really sketchy. The floor didn’t look clean enough to be able to walk around with only bare feet, and that’s after two days of no showering. Needless to say, it was an experience, probably one that I don’t care to repeat. Truthfully, though, all I was interested in was a place to lay down on clean sheets as sleeping outside train stations gets old quite quickly. We put our stuff down, and walked to see Park Guell and La Sagrada Familia, both works by the famous Antoni Gaudi. I wondered if the English word “gaudy” meaning tacky and too many colors came from this architect, which indeed it does. I think it’s an unfair description though, as Gaudi had some ideas that still look futuristic even though his creations were built before 1920. La Sagrada Familia is the monstrous, almost gothic looking church that is the symbol of Barcelona that is still under construction after 80 years of work according to Gaudi’s plans. I finally found the souvenir I had been searching for the previous six weeks to take back as a cultural piece for our house, I am very pleased with the smooth plaster representation of bull and matador that is the symbol of Spain. We moved the second night to a hostel that was on the complete opposite end of the spectrum of hostels, for not too much more than any of the other hostels we had stayed at. This one had a cute Ecuadorian receptionist, a guest kitchen with a refrigerator, cooking supplies, air conditioning, balcony, and super clean rooms. What a change and nice way to end our tour, unfortunately I didn’t get to sleep very much in the comfortable bed. We met two Finnish guys who were on holiday as well and decided to go out to La Rambla with them as it was one of the guys’ birthdays. La Rambla is a must for anyone who wants to see nightlife in Madrid, with tons of street performers and people until the wee hours just before sunrise. Keegan and I put the finnish guys and a german girl who was also staying at our hostel in a taxi (they wouldn’t let all five of us in the car, and the other kids had absolutely no idea how to get back to the hostel) and walked home. Wednesday morning, Keegan and I woke up a bit late for our meeting with Mark where he was meeting us on his way back from Munich, so we decided to run to the train station. We made it there in about 15 minutes although we were about 15-20 minutes late, but we could not have run more directly there. It is amazing how you can navigate sometimes with a bit of luck, logic, and sense of direction. I have surprised myself many times during this trip with limited knowledge of location and managed to get places with little trouble. Unfortunately, we miscommunicated with Mark and he was at a different station than we thought. So we went about our touring, seeing Casa Mila and a couple other Gaudi buildings and also the beach and the Olympic area created for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. The city is just big enough that you probably shouldn’t walk everywhere because it takes so long and our legs were already quite tired. Anyways, we made a quick run back up to Park Guell, because Keegan has been reluctant to buy any gifts for his girlfriend (who is an architecture major at Tech) because he didn’t know what he wanted to get her. Unfortunately, I took us longer than expected to get to the shops we were trying to go to, and he couldn’t make any decisions on gifts in the last few minutes we had to buy things in Spain, so he decided just not to bring anything home besides some Swiss chocolate...she said that she didn’t want anything but I hope he doesn’t receive any long term injuries from the harsh realization of what that statement means in female language…

We made our way back to Madrid, got our luggage from the dorm, showered, then checked the internet for a couple hours. Without wanting to spend money due to the low amount of euros left in our pockets, we just decided to take a taxi to the airport and sleep there to avoid any more expenses. Shaving after two weeks without a razor makes you feel like you have a new face, especially when you can’t grow any substantial facial hair that would make it look ok.

I am just about finished my book that I started on the flight to Madrid, “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman, given to me by my Grandpa Hess. It has been an interesting read, much more informative than enjoyable, but helpful in the beginning of my business education. I mentioned that I think that I have a better chance of running into a fellow student on the other side of the world because of the international influence of Georgia Tech’s academics. Well, Friedman also mentions this same ideology in reference to our president Wayne Clough and his influences in the rising importance of international education. I looking forward to being able to discuss some of the larger topics of the book with my grandpa, as he has been to China multiple times, and has quite a worldly view of culture and politics. One of the most notable subjects Friedman mentions is one that I think more people should be aware of – the legality of providing password protected accounts to beneficiaries after someone’s death. He briefly mentions a story of a family whose son was killed in Iraq, and due to the terms that the son agreed to at the creation of the account, Yahoo was legally bound to destroy the account after 90 days of inactivity. This meant that his family could not recoup the ‘living thoughts’ of their son in his last written memoirs. Thus, it seems to me that we should be including the rights to accounts of significance in wills and the like. That is something that strikes me as surprising because, as a kid who has grown up with the popularity of the internet, I’m sure that I have at least 10 times more passwords to regular accounts and websites than say my mom, just due to the amount of activity in online shopping and school related activities.

I’m so ready to be home in my bed for a few days, I hope that I can resist sleeping the days away so I can enjoy the things I love to do there before I take off for the next 5 months. I’m looking forward to eating my dad’s cooking, seeing mom, dad, Lucky and Holly, fishing, hopefully mountain biking, seeing my friends still in Augusta, and making calls to catch up with the people I’ve been out of contact with for so long. My dad and I are planning to leave on our cross country road trip on Monday morning, heading for Houston to arrive at his college roommate’s house in Sugarland for dinner. I’m really looking forward to that because, not only is he a millionare, but he’s a recent investor in something called Motorsports Ranch, which is kind of like a country club for car enthusiasts normally with top dollar cars that they would like to take on a track but not have too much other traffic to compete with. In the words of my dad, Jim is going to show me how to go fast on a private track…whether this means I’m just a passenger or I’ll get some track time, I don’t know, but either way, I’m sure it will be amazing. Also, we’re planning on seeing Heather Johns, an amazingly cool and beautiful friend I met this past spring who lives in Austin. We might see two other families in Arizona depending on our time schedule as well as their availability (being some old neighbors, the Laceys and family friends the Bakers). My dad wants to skip the Grand Canyon on this trip so we can make it a family outing next summer when they all come out. Dad is a trooper, he doesn’t like traveling and he’s going to drive cross country with me, I look forward to some quality time with him. As for my mom, she had her first chemo session on August 4th and seems to be feeling fine, her voice sounds great. I can’t wait to see her, it’s been tough being away during the hardest times in this process. Holly is joint enrolling this year, taking two classes at Augusta State, I can’t believe my sister is starting college! This is going to be an exciting year for her, I’m hoping that I can take her to some Latin American destination (maybe take her to my family in Mexico City) but I’ll have to find time in her busy schedule. I’m also looking forward to a new job, San Diego beaches, and new friends. I’ve made a list of activities and places that I might meet new people, if you have any ideas on how or where or what type of things I should do to start fitting in to a new city, please let me know! I’m going to be continuing this blog to cover my experiences in San Diego, so if you can make it through this one, please keep reading in the future. Soon enough, I’ll be back in Augusta and I’ll be able to answer the phone, so please call if I don’t call you first, I look forward to catching up with everone!

I'm leaving on a jetplane

2006-07-25T17:05:00.000-07:00

Wednesday is here, and the real adventure begins. We spent a good portion of last evening deciding what we wanted/could do in the 13 days between now and our flight back to Atlanta on August 10, and it looks like we're headed to Venice first. So here's the schedule:

7/26 night flight Madrid - Venice
7/27 Venice
7/28 afternoon train Venice - Rome
7/29 Rome
7/30 Rome
7/31 afternoon train Rome - Florence
8/1 Florence
8/2 Hopefully time with my cousin Troy outisde of Florence (he's conducting an opera there)
8/3 Arrive from overnight train Florence - Bern, Switzerland make connecting train to Interlaken
8/4 Interlaken - canyoning, mountain biking
8/5 Floating day(could be spent either in Interlaken or add an extra day to Florence area stay)
8/6 Interlaken - Perpignan french mediterranean beach town, stopping place in middle of 12 hour ride to Barcelona
8/7 morning train Perpignan - Barcelona
8/8 Barcelona
8/9 Barcelona night train to Madrid
8/10 Fly home to Atlanta arriving at 3:30pm

I have no idea how readily I will be available to give updates, but I will try to keep in contact so that everyone knows we're alive. I'm all packed and ready to go, just have one more test and paper to do and I'll be done with my spanish minor! I just commented to my roomates that my pack for the next two weeks is smaller than that I took this past weekend to Tarifa (only because I don't need my beach towels and camping hammocks), so I've obviously tried to be as prepared as possible without any excess.

My mom had her port for chemo installed today, she's feeling pretty sore and unable to lay and sleep confortably because of the soreness. Her voice sounded great though, she sure is a strong woman. Holly just had her one year anniversary with her boyfriend Tim, it was enjoyable to hear about some romance too. I told Dad and Holly that I'm having trouble packing all of my stuff up because I have so many gifts for Mom and Holly; one of the girls on the trip said that she wishes I were her brother because I'm always looking for neat stuff for my sister.

The picture is of me poking my head out of the tent after our night on the beach. We had a guy open up the door of our tent around 5 am asking if we had any hashish...fortunately after we said No he didn't have any further interest.

Tarifa...aka relaxing

2006-07-24T07:55:00.000-07:00

All week I had been longing for a few relaxing hours on the beach somewhere. What resulted was more than I could have asked for, with two full days on the southernmost point in Spain in a town called Tarifa. The trip started off a bit hectically; our group of five mistimed our arrival to the bus station because we didn’t realize before we got on the metro that the station we needed to go to was different than the one we had used before. After running for a good 10 minutes to make it to the bus station, Keegan made it onto the bus and the four of us who didn’t have our tickets printed out were left to figure out something else. After everything came to pass, we ended up arriving in Tarifa only 30 euros poorer and an hour and 45 minutes later than we had planned. The beach was very wide, like Hilton Head, with mountains a couple miles behind us and supposedly Morocco 15 kms across the ocean. The city is located at the southernmost tip of Spain, where the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Ocean meet. The water was surprisingly cold; colder than the water in San Sebastian, which is about a 15 hour drive north…interesting…but oh so refreshing. The town is known as the birthplace of the sport of Kite Surfing – a relatively new watersport utilizing a 12 ft. long kite, a waterski-type handle, and a pseudo wakeboard. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see much of the kite surfing because they were doing it about 5 miles down the shore in the mouth of a river near a large sand dune. The first day, it was too hazy to see Morocco and there was an almost painful amount of wind. My intents were not to sunbathe all day in the sand, so I was not affected too much by the torrents of sand near the beach surface. The second day, Saturday, was beautiful with the wind blowing in the opposite direction…weird huh? I suppose this was because we were on a point, and the wind could be blowing inshore on one side and out to sea on the other and vice versa. The haze lifted and it was ridiculously obvious where Morocco was and unbelievable that we couldn’t see the Moroccan mountains the day before. Two of the girls in our group took an afternoon trip there, but were victims of high prices and a very touristy Morocco experience, with no real chance to see anything outside of the planned route. We met two groups of madrileñas, some girls from Madrid. The first group were a bit younger than us and incited my attention by making jokes thinking that we couldn’t understand what they were saying. On that note, Americans are almost unmistakable in most situations, but I can’t figure out why. It’s not really the clothes, the hair, or any one specific thing, but you can pick out the American kids from the others by some aspect…albeit a subtle one. Anyways, I started talking to these girls, two of which were twins, who didn’t really like Americans and weren’t very talkative. They asked us to “hacer botellon” with them later that night (Friday), which I will explain the significance of this phrase in just a moment. The second group we met were a few years older than us, and much more fun to talk to. We also were asked to “hacer botellon” with them (Saturday). Hacer botellon in Spain signifies an event where kids from age 15 to 25 buy their own drinks and go to some area of town to hang out for a couple hours before going to the discoteca (it’s necessary to say discotec here because ‘club’ means that for guys only…) So the first night we went, we went to a castle in the city and there were only 10 people there at 11:55 pm. An hour later, there were hundreds of kids, music, and drinking. The event was quite a sight, I wish we could have something like this in the US to unite the young people. The legal implications of this type of event are close to none in cities outside of Madrid, where it IS illegal to hacer botellon. I think the only real down side to this activity is the mess that’s left behind afterward, but I think the Spaniards have figured out how to take care of that (after seeing the cleanup crew go to work in Pamplona).

We’re planning to meet up with a couple of the girls here in Madrid on Thursday night this week to show us a good time for our last night in Madrid. We haven’t really had the time or the right guides to take us out for the nightlife here in Madrid because we’ve been traveling so much, so I’m looking forward to Thursday.

Today, we visited “el Corte Ingles,” which literally means “the English cut,” which is a monstrous store like Macy’s on crack. We actually got on the metro that was adjacent to one Corte Ingles and got off the metro at another Corte Ingles, they’re everywhere! You can do just about anything you could ever need to at this store: furnish a house, get a loan, plan a vacation, buy clothes, get prescription glasses, take cash out, buy books and CDs, grocery shop, virtually limitless possibilities. It is no Walmart though; this is high quality (and expensive) stuff. The speaker told us that cities take pride in having a Corte Ingles, as this establishes the fact that the city is substantial enough to need such a monster of a store. It was a very informative visit, probably the best of Spain because of the speaker.

Tomorrow, I have to turn in a couple papers and make a presentation, and Wednesday we have our last test. Time is running out in Madrid and I will be taking care of some of the things on my to-do list in the next couple days. I think Friday night or Saturday, we will be leaving for Rome – it will be here soon enough!

Week and a half catchup

2006-07-24T07:42:00.000-07:00

It’s been a while since the last update, I apologize for the delay. I may have lost a few readers, and I think it may get a little more difficult as time goes on to be up to date, with my Eurotrip quickly approaching. We started our second course on July 13 with a trip to Andalusia, the southern region of Spain. We were gone Thursday through Sunday with pseudo-class during the visits. We first visited Grenada where we saw a flamenco show and La Alhambra. Unfortunately, we only had one afternoon there, and we were so tired that everyone slept the afternoon away. I was mad at myself because I didn’t get to see much of Grenada; I suppose my body appreciated the rest, though. That evening, we went to a restaurant that was specifically set up for flamenco shows. It was quite a spectacle, it is certainly a must for anyone who comes to Spain. My favorite part of the show was the amazing guitar and singing that set the stage for the interesting form of dance. It appeared to be mostly improve, just the dancer and the guitarist working together to demonstrate a feeling. In Sevilla, we had the first day to ourselves to explore and shop in the narrow streets. Saturday, we explored La Giralda, which is the second largest cathedral in the world, second only to that of St. Peter’s in Rome. It has a huge tower that is 29 stories high that allowed for a wonderful view of the city. The heat here was punishingly hot, called el sol de justicia (the sun of justice). In the evening time, three other friends and I rented bikes and went on a three hour ride around the city. Although the bikes weren’t that great, the tour was amazing. We got to see all of the highlights and more. Margaret felt the consequences of the heat, though, and had some effects of heat exhaustion for the next 24 hours. On Sunday, we visited La Mezquita in Cordoba, a really big palace that had a cathedral incorporated into it, neat building but not my kind of architecture.

Last Monday, I went to the Reigna Sofia where Picasso’s Guernica is on display. I went with a girl that I met here at the residence; she studies in London but is originally from Nairobi where her parents live. I knew nothing of this painting before seeing it, aside from the fact that everyone wanted to see it because it was famous. They have on display there many of his practice drawings of the different sections of the large painting (probably 15 feet high and 30 feet long). This museum reaffirmed my perplexity at who decides what good art is and what’s not. Personally, I enjoyed the paintings in Bellas Artes in Mexico City more so than anything I saw here, but hopefully the Prado can change that thought later this week. I am unhappy to say that I will not get to go to an actual bull fight here in Madrid, due to our absence in all of our weekends in Spain aside from our first. I have heard stories, seen pictures, but will not get to experience it myself. Apparently after the 3^rd or 4^th bull that is killed, the fights get kind of boring but I would still enjoy the experience.

The crazy weekend of no sleep

2006-07-11T06:22:00.000-07:00

Ah...after the necessary nap to recoup from the long weekend, I now have the time and energy to attempt to convey to you the once-in-a-lifetime experiences of this weekend passed.

Friday morning, our group of 8 arrived in San Sebastian to a morning drizzle after no sleep for the night. As it was 6:30 am when we arrived, the city was just starting to wake, so four of us decided to explore a bit by foot on the way to the other four’s hotel. The touristy part of the town is set around a crescent shaped beach called “La Concha,” which means shell in Spanish. Keegan, Cameron, and I spent a couple hours in the morning rock crawling along the coast where I thought we might find a neat place to set the hammocks up for the night. Fortunately, we didn’t find a place because on the way back to the regular beach, we spoke with an old man who was collecting snails for his granddaughter and he said that the tide rose like 12 feet in the afternoon which meant we wouldn’t have been able to get back to the regular part of town for quite a while. We then found a tranquil park where we set up the hammocks to take a nap. We hid our packs in the bushes and dozed for an hour. Before we went to sleep, I asked Keegan how long he wanted to sleep, and after no response, I said that we should just wake up when it became beautiful out. An hour later, we awoke to completely different weather - my prediction: no clouds, wind, and an 85 degree perfect-for-sun-bathing air temperature. We made our way down to the beach where we ran into some people from our group and enjoyed the better part of the afternoon. There was a street that bordered the water on the bottom part of the crescent, and after the tide came in, it was deep enough to jump 15 feet from the wall into the ocean. We ran into a girl who was wearing a UCONN sweatshirt and one of the guys from our group said something to them because he hates UCONN for basketball reasons. We ended up in a conversation with them; they turned out to be from Arkansas and knew a couple people that Keegan knew. We ended up meeting up with them later that night to walk around the city together. We set up the hammocks around 8 pm, just in time to watch a beautiful sunset. We met up with the girls, had dinner, and walked around with some of their friends from their five week program in San Sebastian. The streets were filled with Americans, I could not believe the ridiculously large amount of English being spoken. I then realized why Americans have the stereotype that we do, as there were hundreds of loud, drunken American kids running around in the street.

The next day we spent on the beach, and preparing for a night without sleep. The beach on the other side of the river had some nice waves where a bunch of people were surfing and boogie boarding. They had some stands set up on the beach for what would appear to be seating for a surfing competition, but the waves certainly weren’t that nice. One of the guys in our group said that he had seen surf competitions on TV in San Sebastian, but it must have been a different time of year or something. Nevertheless, it was a good chance for me to observe some of the techniques that I will be needing in the coming weeks when I begin to learn out in San Diego. Unfortunately, Keegan must have gotten a bit of food poisoning from his steak the night before because he was sick for a good 24 hours with nausiousness and vomiting. Following a short ride to Pamplona at 9:15 pm, we arrived just in time for the best fireworks show I have ever seen. They have one every night, and I’m sure it is a very expensive show to put on, as the finale lasted a good 3 minutes of pure firepower; my shorts were literally shaking from the waves in the air. I spent my night in Pamplona exploring and taking in the festivities, without a drop of alcohol. They say it rains calimocho (wine and coke mixed) in Pamplona, but somehow I managed to survive the night with not a drop on me. Our professor was a bit off on the numbers in Pamplona, as there were two million people in the city on Saturday night. I expected a little pueblo with dirt streets for the running, but it was much more modern than that. The streets that we ran on were indeed cobblestone, and were quite slippery from all of the drinks spilled on it during the night/week. You could tell the people who had been there the previous nights because of the large purple stains on their white outfits from the calimocho. It was a great feeling to know that we were at a party that people come to from around the world to participate in the festivities. I came up with a drunk-proof solution for keeping our stuff safe – I climbed a tree and Hayley handed up our bags so that I could hang them 25 feet above the ground, high enough to be out of reach of any lazy thieves. It was also neat to see everyone there in white outfits with a red bandana around the neck and a red sash, so that everyone looked nearly the same. As 5:30 am approached, I roused those who were lying down to make sure they could get there in time to see the course and to pick out the spot they wanted to watch from. By this time, I had already walked the course a couple times and had a good idea of what I thought would be the ideal route. Unfortunately for the girls with us, they found a fence to sit on but had to move just before the running. There are two sets of fences surrounding parts of the running, one to hold the crowd back and another to keep the bulls in line (and for the runners to jump over for protection). Keegan and I positioned ourselves at the top of a slight hill where we could see the bulls coming from about 100 yards away, so we’d have some fair warning. We actually met one of the most famous rugby players in the world beforehand when we were talking with some Englishmen, that was pretty neat. When we saw the bulls round the corner, chaos broke loose and it was a mad dash to see how far you could get before the bulls caught up to you. We made it about 80 yards down the course before the bulls caught up to us and we had to bail out on a fence. I could have touched the bulls as they passed, but I was concerned about a horn snagging my leg, so I didn’t push my luck. After the bulls passed, I sprinted to keep up with them until we entered the Plaza de Toros, where all the runners who make it in time gather to have some more fun with the bulls. They let four bulls out of their pens, one by one (only one at a time though), and the bull just runs rampant in the ring where crazy people dodge the bull as he comes charging past. The second bull that they let out was a jumper; he jumped clear over the wall surrounding the plaza only 10 feet away from me into the area between the wall and the stands. He then turned towards us and made his way around the outside of the ring forcing people to jump back into the ring. There were quite a few people who were gored by the bulls, but only resulted in some ripped clothes and I’m sure some pretty nasty bruises. One guy, who looked like a rugby player with soccer shorts and green and black striped soccer socks on, decided to go head to head with the bull when it ran at him. He grabbed the bull by the horns, literally, and tried to take him down. After he got thrown off, about 30 of the guys in the ring started beating the crap out of this guy riot-style. They calmed down after about a minute, but he was rudely informed of the rule that you’re not supposed to touch the bulls. The last bull came over right in front of us and ran his horns across the wall trying to push everyone over the wall. So I was busy catching the people around me who were frantically jumping over the six foot tall wall, it was incredible. I’m really glad that we got to participate in this because the running only lasted about five minutes, but in the ring, we spent 45 minutes. If anyone is to go to the running of the bulls in the future, my advice to you is this: If you just want to watch, that’s fine, but pretend like you are going to run, and right when the first firework goes off signaling that the gates are open, hop over the fence and then you have the best seat in the house, versus trying to see from the crowd. If you want to run, make sure you don’t run too early, because the people in our group who went the night before us made it to the plaza before the bulls got there, so they technically didn’t even get to run with the bulls. All in all, my conclusion is that the running of the bulls is not as dangerous as it is made out to be, but the drunk/stupid people who get hurt every day usually aren’t those who are taking any precaution and who are getting close to the bulls for a rush. This danger is quite manageable in my opinion.

Now that we’re back at the residence, I had a chance to catch up on two of the three nights of sleep that I missed from the weekend. Tonight, we have flamenco lessons from one of our professors at the school, I’m sure it will be interesting. I bought tickets this afternoon for a Bela Fleck and the Flecktones concert for next Wednesday night, I’m pumped about that. Last night, I was searching for the location of the Bela Fleck concert and I discovered that a Pink Floyd cover band was opening for Alan Parsons Project a block away, but it started an hour before I discovered this. I decided to go see if I could hear anything from outside the plaza. We missed the Pink Floyd cover band, and we could hear Alan Parsons Project playing outside the entrance. I wasn’t willing to pay 20 euros, so we stuck around for Psychobabble, then took off.

Thursday morning, we are leaving for a weekend tour of the south province of Spain, called Andalucia, which will include Sevilla, Cordoba, and Grenada. I’m looking forward to getting to see some of the muslim influence in Spain, but not so much about the 110 degree heat that we will be suffering through meanwhile. We have a free weekend next weekend, and I’m trying to decided where we should go, maybe to Valencia, the south coast of Spain like Cadiz or Tarifa, or Portugal. Everyone else is planning to go to Barcelona, but we will be coming back through that city on the last stop of our Eurotrip post-programa. Any suggestions?

San Sebastian

2006-07-10T15:06:00.000-07:00

A couple pictures to keep you interested until I finish this next blog that covers probably the most exciting time of my travels yet...it will be up by the end of tomorrow. The first picture is of me in the Plaza de Toros after the running, the second is of one of the beaches in San Sebastian, and the third is of Keegan next to the bull who jumped over the wall right next to us, it was nuts! Hasta manana!

weekend at the beach/bulls

2006-07-06T06:59:00.000-07:00

We’ve been meeting more and more people from the school, it is neat to have such a collection of people from all over the world. There is a group of Italian girls here vacationing, two Russian girls, a group from Mexico, a group of Americans from all over the US, some French guys…the list goes on and on. I kind of wish that I had done something like this in high school, but I guess the chances for funding assistance would have been a little more scarce back then.

Yesterday was very entertaining. We didn’t have class because we had two company visits, one with the national institute for foreign promotion and the other was Coca Cola. The first was just a presentation informed us of ICEX’s role as a national institution to aid Spanish companies with foreign advertising and entrance into foreign markets. I thought that it was interesting that the government provides free help to Spanish international companies. I was interested in finding out how certain companies receive this “free help,” because I’m sure that there are some sort of strings attached. Second, we took a bus to the outskirts of the city where we didn’t see a Coca Cola factory, but actually a separate production facility that had contract with Coca Cola to do the bottling for the Madrid and surrounding areas. The most interesting part of this visit was the explanation of how the plastic bottles are formed. They start with a test tube looking plastic piece that has the top of the bottle formed at the head of the tube. They proceed to heat the tube up and inflate it with a certain gas in a mold…very clever. The afternoon consisted of lunch and shoe shopping. Around 11 pm, Keeque y yo went to a park nearby with three people from a Mexican group that is here studying. After being enveloped by English within the group and in many dealings in Madrid, it was great to get some straight Spanish practice, even if we had to revert to the ever-kind Mexicans. We played a bit in one of the playgrounds at the park, then laid under the stars while two guys who were sitting nearby played beautiful flute music. The music was something like I would image a snake charmer would play, amazingly relaxing. It was a great way to spend an evening learning more vocabulary and learning why a Mexican would want to come to Madrid to participate in some mechantronics classes.

Today, we will be leaving for San Sebastian which is on the north coast of Spain. Keegan and I are planning to forego hotel plans since I brought my camping hammocks and there appears to be an ample amount of trees nearby the beach…it will be interesting. Don’t worry -- we have friends who are staying in a hotel, so we’ll have a place to store our things so that nothing will be stolen. The plan for the weekend is this: tonight we will take a bus from 12:30 am to 6:30 am from Madrid to San Sebastian (by the way, you should look it up on google and check out the images J) We’ll stay there all of tomorrow, sleep in the hammocks tomorrow night, stay there for most of Saturday and then take a bus to Pamplona Saturday evening. Whether or not we will sleep at all Saturday night, I do not know, but we’ll have the hammocks in case there’s any question. Apparently, most people just stay up in the streets all night, and then participate in the running at 8 am the following morning. I’ve heard that the city officially only has 10,000 residents, but over the course of the week, there is an average of over 1 million people there for the festivities. We watched a couple videos about the running in class today, I’m really excited. The streets are wider than you would think, so I’m not too worried about the actual danger of it because the people who don’t really want to run can just stand on the side of the street and be in a relatively low level of danger. I will take precaution, though, to make sure that I can safely and painlessly enjoy the rest of my stay in Europe. So we will participate in the running on Sunday morning, then take a bus back to Madrid, hopefully in time to see the World Cup game on the tele.

Update on the news from my mom: She’s doing well, she had her mastectomy yesterday and seemed upbeat afterwards. Unfortunately, they found traces of cancer in one of her lymph nodes, so there is a good possibility of chemotherapy in the future, which I’m not too comfortable with. Everyone has been very supportive from what I hear, which I’m sure is reassuring to her. Love you mom!

First weekend in Madrid

2006-07-03T10:45:00.000-07:00

The first four days in Madrid have proven the large difference in the Mexico and Spain parts of the LBAT program. We have had basically four days of free time, with one being a day trip to Toledo. I have been utterly amazed at the amount of English that I have been hearing in the streets here. I am not sure if it is because of the surprisingly large number of tourists or just the invasion of English as an international language, but it seems that I could get by without knowing any Spanish without too much of a problem. The residence that we are staying at is not just for our school, but houses many international student who are hear anywhere from one week to one year, any nationality. We’ve met Mexicans, Romanians, Italians, Frenchmen, and many Americans. We actually ran into some girls last night in the Puerta del Sol who were from Auburn but one lives in Atlanta.

The first two days, our entire group crashed hard to try to sleep off the jet lag. It really took me two six hour naps to get it out of me, but the fact that the good night life doesn’t start until like 3 in the morning didn’t help my body’s clock. Friday night, a small group of us decided to go out with a few Middle Eastern girls from California to this club called Kapital, which had six floors and hundreds of people. If this club could be transported to any large city in the US, there would be no need for any other clubs in that city. The top floor consisted of about 30 couches under an open sky with a blue fountain in the middle, a place for people to cool off and unwind away from the loud music. Unfortunately, the “salsa” floor wasn’t very salsa-ey and so we had to deal with the hip hop floor for most of the night. I thought it was humorous that we got there so late that we would have to stay until 6 in the morning to wait for the metro to open to take us back. I can honestly say this was my first taste of night life where you come home when the sun is coming up. Saturday, we went to Toledo, which is about an hour east of Madrid. This town sprang up in the path that was created when the other Europeans were traveling across Spain to Africa, and turned into a lookout point to be able to see who was coming. In this very hot and aged city, there were many tourists and many streets that were obviously made for no more than a horse and cart to pass through. As we walked with our guide and one of our professors, I learned the necessary Spanish words for sky diving (paracaidismo) and bungee jumping (hacer puenting). The second is funny because it is an English version of a Spanish word – the base of the phrase comes from the word ‘puente’ which means bridge, thus the phrase literally means ‘to go bridge jumping.’ Saturday night was quite interesting, as it was the end of a festival of gay pride in a section of town near by called Chueca. The group wanted to go check it out, so I had no option but to follow along. The first streets we went down were so packed that everyone was shoulder to shoulder, but not with an excessive amount of gays – it appeared that straight people had just come for the festivities. Then we proceeded to head into the heart of things where we passed a stage that men dressed as women were dancing for the crowd, something I was definitely not interested in seeing. After having a dude feel my chest as I shuffled by, Keegan and I decided to leave everyone else because we were ready to get away from this ungodliness. Little did we know that the side street we took away from the concert was leading us to an even larger place with even more gay people. After being on a street with Bon Jovi blearing and lots of rainbow fags, I mean flags, we made it back to the main strip called Gran Via. We later met some girls from Ohio University but nothing else too crazy happened. The down side of such late nights means that waking up at 2:45 pm shouldn’t be that surprising, but it seemed like it should be. I spent a couple hours in the afternoon getting some sun in one of the nearby parks with another girl from the group.

I was telling someone today that all of this free time in Madrid is a bit of a double-edged sword for some people. Those who don’t have the initiative or desire to find things to do on their own will find these four weeks boring, others will have plenty of time to accomplish their goals, whatever they may be. As for me, I want to get some shopping in, see the Prado, visit some bike shops, attend a few concerts (by the way, I realized when I got here that I missed Xavier Rudd by one night, and Bela Fleck is playing here on July 19…woohoo!), get some running in, and plan the rest of my Eurotrip. If there is anything else that you think is a must for some free time in Madrid, please leave a comment!

A glorious week at home

2006-07-03T02:04:00.000-07:00

Ok, so let’s recap the eight great days at home. Tuesday was my dad’s 48^th birthday, which I think I enjoyed more thoroughly than he. I started the day off with some mountain biking with Pete, one of my best friends/neighbors, followed the ride up with a short lunch then Disc Golf with Stephen Goldman, aka Slam (my former two year long roommate). I then attended one of my sister’s church softball games, and went out to eat to none other but a Mexican restaurant for my dad’s birthday. Wednesday, I went to the lake with the fam and enjoyed some quality wakeboarding and sunbathing time. I was surprised at how much hotter it was in Augusta compared to Mexico City, I guess I took the altitude in Mexico City for granted. Wednesday night, I convened with some friends for a quality game of Cranium – very mentally stimulating. Thursday, I participated in a game of softball that appeared to result from my original attempts to get a softball game up before I left for Mexico, but with a much better turnout. Unfortunately there wasn’t much wind during the time I was home, so I didn’t get to spend any quality Hobie-time with the padre, but I’m hoping the four days that I’m home in August will bring some breeze. I did enjoy my two days on the lake though - quite relaxing. Not too much else exciting happened, I spent quite a bit of time taking care of things on the To-do list that couldn’t be done from outside the country. Also, trying to plan a 13-day trip for Italy, Switzerland, France and Spain has proven to be a bit challenging, but I’m looking forward to the spontaneity of the trip. Unfortunately, none of my friends where reliable enough to go with me on a backpacking trip for the weekend, so I’m hoping to get some hiking/camping in the schedule for the Swiss Alps (I brought the camping hammocks!) On Monday afternoon, I went to take my last mountain bike ride for the next six weeks, only to bend my front forks straight outward during the first five minutes of the ride. This marks the end of three pairs of front forks on my dad’s old mountain bike, I guess it’s karma. I went to the bike shop that I’m probably going to buy my new bike from in Atlanta today, and I really enjoyed my time in the saddle of a future ride. I just hope that either I can learn to be smoother on the trail, or the engineers making the bikes can make them stronger because I really don’t want to have to fix a new $1000 mountain bike. I also bought my Eurail pass at the student center before leaving, which made the start of my expenses in Europe already more than I spent in four weeks in Mexico. I’ve been saving for this occasion for quite a while, and with some help from the grandparents, I think I’ll be fine. Off to Spain I go, I am really excited about my first Eurotrip (hopefully of many).

One serious note: while I was home, my parents informed me of some recent test results from my mom’s doctors. She found a small lump in her breast and discovered she has early stages of breast cancer. Fortunately, she found it early enough that it doesn’t appear that it will be too difficult to combat. She is having selected lymph nodes taken out this Thursday for further testing, then a mastectomy on July 5. Please pray for her health and quick recovery, as I expect such an otherwise extremely healthy woman should have. Drop her a note if you would, to let her know how much we all care about her! (Chris at cehess1@comcast.net) Love you mom!