To California

California is like a mythical destination after leaving the East Coast, but I finally made it. My last few days were interesting, certainly more so than Missouri. I stopped at Meteorite Crater, which was impressive both at the crater, and the museum. The crater didn't seem too big until I looked for the 6 foot cut-out of an astronaut in the bottom of the crater, and realized the only way I could see it was through a telescope. The scale is amazing.

Hoover Dam was impressive, and I took a few photos at night, playing with my new mini-tripod, and getting a few 15-second exposure shots.

I made it to Las Vegas just before midnight, and spent a day wandering around the strip. I spent more money on the buffet than I did on the slots, which I was happy with. The Casinos were stunning and beautiful.

Driving across the country you also read great names. I drove through "Deaf Smith County" in Texas, passed "Zzyzx Road" and also "Dead Dog Road" (though the last one might be sleep deprived hallucination).

I've been bumming around San Francisco, which is a lovely place, with great beer and food, and a welcoming city. Can see why so many people like to call it home.

Accross America to Oklahoma City

I left NJ on Saturday the 15th. I woke up late, after a rather smashing time in the city with friends, packed, and after buying groceries to take me through 2 days of driving (yes, I am a food snob) and stopping off to see my Dad in his nursing home, I was finally on the road at 4 PM.

Starting a cross country road trip at 4 is a bit silly, but I drove off anyway, making it to somewhere in Ohio by midnight, staying at Motel 8. When I began the next morning, my GPS said 997 miles to my destination. Ouch. In one day.

I didn't stop, except to fill up my tank, and empty my own tank. It got rough about 450 miles to go, but the last 200 went pretty quickly, all things considered. Note to self and everybody else - don't ever drive 1000 miles in a day.

Oklahoma had just been hit by ice storms, but my friends place had power. I collapsed, slept late, and toured the Oklahoma City bombing memorial and museum the next day, which was well worth it. I also stopped by the OKC boathouse, which was a beautifully built new boathouse. It was bittersweet seeing it, after Rutgers just lost its men's team. structure. I felt happy for them, but awful since Rutgers crew has just been eviscerated by the Administration.

The whole area is a bit limited, culinary, but amazingly OKC is chock full of Vietnamese restaurants. I ate at Lido, a well known one, and was so hungry I took home an extra order - Vietnamese Curried Frog Legs, and watched Eraserhead alone in an eerie apartment. Strangest evening.

Local, but Funny

So I'm at a health food store with my mom, she's buying something and I'm walking the aisles, making a nuisance of myself when I come across the Neti Pot section. Neti Pots, for the unitiated, are vessels to help you get water into your nose, allowing you to clean your sinuses. Great if you have a cold and green things come out of your nose, or if you are into new age cleansing and want to keep it real.

In any case, they had lots of different packaging from the various retailers, but one caught my eye. For the adult Neti Pot, the picture was a sepia toned image of a well-featured women's face, though fairly unrelated to sticking warm saline up your nose.

Not the packaging for the kid's Neti Pot. Same brand, same product, different audiance, so different marketing. Gotta love this. Click on the image to see the kid smile as he really jams it up there.

The Highlands, the Lowlands (of NJ)

I didn't put much effort into Halloween this year, though I did go to the Rutgers Graduate Student Association and danced with a cute Argentinian (who I don't think is that interested in me, oh well). I put on one of my favorite hats from my collection, the ever useful "See You Jimmy" hat. Not a condom, but a hat that can transform anybody into an authentic Scot. You can see images of the hat or a picture of myself with cute but uninterested Argentinian wearing said hat.

Princeton - New Brunswick Tow Path

Only a decade before Railroad transportation took off, canals were at their peak, ferrying cargo between American cities. The boats were pulled, oddly enough, by horses, who would walk along the shore some distance ahead, pulling the boats in almost a straight line down the canal. There is such a canal between Trenton and New Brunswick, and running alongside it the entire way is a tow path created just for the horses that would tow the boats.

Once the railroad cost less than the towpath, they were abandoned as commercial roads, and at some point turned into a park and enjoyed by those wanting a slice of quiet nature, even in the middle of the bustle of NJ. The tow path is wide enough for two bikes abreast. Joggers, walkers, and bikers love it because you can travel 25 miles and cross less than a dozen roads, while passing quiet communities bypassed by the Parkway or Turnpike, almost forgotten in time.

Jordan Katz, a spry and mischievous guy (though you might never know it) took the train to Princeton from New Brunswick with me, hauling our aging Mountain Bikes with us. After asking directions from a Princetonian so daft I finally felt proud to graduate from Rutgers, we made it to Lake Carnegie, watched Rutgers crew race, spoke to a few friends, and began our long ride, imperceptibly sloping 50 feet over 24.9 miles downhill.

Jordan is such a funny guy he can get drunk at a wedding, take a few embarrassing pictures with the disposable cameras, and make the bride's mother laugh the whole time. After I dropped out of college the first time, he used to come into my room and ask me if I had 'found myself'.

As a lover of practical jokes, I had always wanted to sneak into Jordan's house when he and everyone else thought I was out of the country, and defecate in his cat's litter box. I desperately wanted to hear him explain how he dutifully took the cat and the cat litter box containing a man sized turd down to the veterinarian's office, where they both stared it at, pondering exactly how a small cat could have pooped out such an enormous, incomprehensible hunk of scat. I didn't, but I was always tempted.

We organized the trip weeks in advance, and had up to 6 people at one moment, but drunkenness and other excuses dwindled our numbers down to two. It was beautiful, and riding through towns that had neither fallen into ruin or gentrified or become developments I felt like this was the NJ that you can occasionally glimpse but seem never to know, driving 80 miles an hour around a state with the busiest road AND intersection in the world, with the highest population density of any state in the US.

I can't really point to anything special, other than the beautiful water, the occasional fisherman looking like an extra from a depression-era movie, and quiet. The leaves were supposed to be peaking that weekend or next, but due to the amazingly warm weather they didn't turn into brilliant colors for over a month. So we rode under trees waving their green branches in the wind.

I'm overjoyed I did it, and very sad for those who were slated to go but didn't, because while it was no singularly spectacular, it was one of those things in life where you don't think you'll ever have the chance to go again. At least not with the guy called the 'Kung-Fu Jew' throughout grade school.

Blabbering

I'm blabbering on about All Quiet on the Western Front and how to craft a well-written essay. I'm not too sure if the students are listening to me, or why they would even want to, but I'm standing in front of them making noises, so one can only presume teaching. The kids are a lot of fun, but they don't want to be in school, which makes me not want to be there either. 7 weeks to go, and then my cross country trip!

Awake

Where am I? I'm awake, that's where. I started teaching at a local public high school as part of my teacher training (I'm in a Masters of Education through Rutgers), and every day now I get up at 6:30 AM. Generally, I prefer to go to sleep around 2 AM and get up at 11 AM, but not this year. It's painful.

It also means I won't be taking many trips December 14th, my last day of school. Not even if Vermont gets dumped with fresh powder. After the 14th my teacher training is over and I'm a free man. But until then, if you wonder where I am, I'm awake and standing in front of 26 disgruntled students. And, as this is part of my education, I'm getting paid bipkiss, zip, zero, nought, for all this.

South-West Adventure

I had a few weeks between spring and summer classes at Rutgers, and after an exhausting semester, I wanted to cram in as much as I possible could.

I flew to San Diego, where I hung out with Geetesh and the occasional seal on the shores of San Diego! Geetesh also lent me his car for three days so I headed up to Santa Barbara to play with my 10-year old cousins, and had fun cracking open a coconut to eat.

I then headed down to Mexico. Lacking a passport, I could only travel within a 25-mile strip adjacent to the US border, which is the mostly touristy, so I too a 2-hour bus ride to the pretty port of Ensenada, and ate as many fish tacos as I could fit in my belly (a fair number). The picture below shows my neighboring table being serenaded by a few friendly mariachis.

After Mexico, I joined Geetesh, Saqib, Sonal and Warisha for the 10 hour drive through the barren landscape of Southern California and Arizona to arrive at the Grand Canyon. Throwing caution to the wind, and strapping on several liters of water, I embarked on the Rim to River back to Rim hike--almost 20 miles, and a 5000 foot descent/ascent.

The views were simply stunning. At the rim, around 7000 feet altitude, the canyon spread out like a giant crinkled table cloth, 10 miles across as the crow flies, and with occasional glimpses of the muddy Colorado winding its way through the bottom.

The hike down was easy--7 miles of track switching back on itself, hugging a ridge line and cutting through millions of years of evolution. Mules shared the trail, toting lazier (wiser!) tourists up and down, as well as supplies for the facilities below. The sun bore down as I approached the river, which I crossed on a small footbridge to arrive at the Ranger station. There I took a nap and drank a blissfully cold beer, which I would have paid $20 dollars for, but it was kindly priced at $3.75.

The hike back up was equally stunning, but as it was up, it was a lot, lot tougher. The 12 mile return trip followed Bright Angel Creek, so rather than having a ridge-line panorama, I was nestled in deep, high canyons, and was grateful every time I could hike a few feet in the shade of the cliff walls. I passed ancient (American) Indian settlements, and an unfortunate (South Asian) Indian man recovering from sun-stroke, who probably arrived at the top well after midnight, if not the next morning.

Sunset brought more stunning views, and the last 2-3 miles were hiked in cool, pleasant darkness, with my headlamp illuminating the path. I finally arrived back, ate a miserable meal (Governments should never run restaurants), and fell deeply asleep.

The following day we returned to San Diego, I met up with old crew friends that night and the next day on the beach, and caught a flight home, so tired I was unable to keep my eyes open long enough for the distribution of peanuts. What a great two weeks.

A few more photos can be found here.

Vernal Pools

Rutgers Naturalists offered a trip to visit vernal pools this spring. Vernal pools (I learned on my trip) are bodies of water that are dry at some point in the year, and/or have no fish. Amphibians use them to reproduce, and if you trudge around in them during the spring and summer, you'll find frogs and salamanders. We visited some pools before sunset, and while there were no visible amphibians, wading through the water we found mucus-like sacs containing 50+ eggs of frogs and salamanders. We went to another pool, and found it full of frogs so intent on mating they barely jumped out of our way as we walked in. The smallest frog (not captured in photos) was the loudest. See all the photos, including me holding a partial deer skeleton.

Berlin, and Snowboarding in Austria

I was able to spend four days snowboarding in Austria with friends, and flew into Germany a week early to see other friends in Berlin and Cologne.

We stayed at snobby St. Anton in Austria, where our waiter insulted us for drinking 'rain-water' at the dinner table, despite the mineral water for sale was bottled only 20-odd miles away. Offended by our awful customer service, we showed our colors and moved to a cheaper and nicer guest house. I showed Jordy and Mark how to make sandwiches in the morning and then hide them in the snow at the bottom of the lift, so you can eat throughout the day.

The snow was decent, though began to melt as temperatures soared, and the risks of global warming became tangible in the form of mushy snow. We went to Ischgl for two days, which quickly became my favorite resort with only one vowel in its name. It was so large we skied from Austria into Switzerland, and back. Photos of the trip.

I loved Berlin, especially the privately-owned, rather odd (and occasionally cheesy) Museum of the Berlin Wall., which displayed the zip-wire system used by one family to flee from a tall building, pictures of tunnels dug 20 feet under the ground, and children's artwork you might see displayed on a fridge. We also went to the movies in Berlin, and I laughed upon seeing the two 'courting' seats in every row, where the dividers were removed so the couples could, presumably, snuggle.

I had my picture taken in front of what is left of the Berlin Wall, and also standing before the Reichstag wearing the warmest hat I've ever owned - a Soviet Tank Helmet lined with sheep's wool and padded to prevent injuries. I bought the hat in a market selling old postcards, random housewares, and all manner of surplus Soviet military garments.

Near Munich (Munchen) we ate at a local beer hall prominently displaying its logo everywhere it could--a fat Bavarian whistling for his dog, who he couldn't see because the dog was hidden by his monstrous belly.