September 29th, 2009, 11:11 pm PDT by Greg
We are prepping for our final bit of travel in a travel-filled year. (I can only really travel seriously when on study leave, for reasons that should be obvious.)
Tomorrow night, Kat and I are headed to Brian and Lisa’s wedding. Here’s the plan:
- Wednesday:
- Four hours of lectures;
Kat picks me up Daniela kindly picks me up immediately after lecture and we head to collect Kat and go to the airport. Red-eye to JFK in New York.
- Thursday:
- Get in to NY really early. Try to get to the hotel: hopefully check in and take a nap, at least drop off our luggage. Explore NYC for the day. Goal: limit ourselves to about two things and see them well; don’t run around like crazy people.
- Friday:
- Take the train to Poughkeepsie. Get rental car. Dinner at the CIA. [CMPT 165 lecture cancelled.]
- Saturday:
- There’s a “hike”. Comparing the elevation changes in Poughkeepsie to Vancouver, this can’t be too bad.
- Sunday:
- Wedded bliss.
- Monday:
- Train back to NYC and fly out, getting back to Vancouver super-late. [Anne covering CMPT 165 lecture.]
- Tuesday:
- Recovery.
- Wednesday
- Back to the grindstone with four hours of lecture.
With any luck there will be enough downtime around the edges to recover from the drag of overnight travel.
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August 2nd, 2009, 5:10 pm PDT by Kat
We’re in Toledo visiting Greg’s parents. I love it here. The air is clean, the view is beautiful, and there’s always fun things to do and family and friends to visit. We’re pretty tired as we red-eyed here, but we should be time shifted by tomorrow. Here’s the view from Greg’s bedroom window. Pretty, eh?
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June 2nd, 2009, 11:43 am PDT by Kat
By the sounds of Greg’s post, the cruise was a downer. Contrary to Scrougy-McScrougerson’s account, we had a fun (and relaxing) time.
During the week we saw a wolf (dark brown and kind of mangy. Just realized that this wolf was probably shedding it’s winter coat – hence it’s mangy look), a bear, a martin (Greg’s mom saw it at the dock at Juneau), black-legged kittiwakes and other gulls, pupping and diving harbour seals, and a pod of orca.
Holland America has what they call “dam dollarsâ€. They’re pretty much play money that you earn by participating in ship activities. Other cruise lines have similar things like Royal Caribbean’s “Ship-Shape dollarsâ€. Anyways, all week I dragged Greg to team trivia ($1 each for participation), name that tune ($3 each), Wii bowling ($1 each + $3/spare and $5/strike), and the most profitable, polar bear swim ($10 each! + a nice certificate!). In the end we’ve ended up with 59 dam dollars! We got a hat for Greg’s dad and two mugs for us and gave the rest of our dollars to a boy that was at all of the activities. While I did have to “drag” Greg to these events, he did have fun while we were there, honest!
After playing team trivia almost every day (and doing fairly mediocre at it the whole week) we finally won on the last day, and we weren’t even there to see the victory. We teamed up with a couple from Burnaby and another couple from Vancouver Island, and ended up in a quadruple tie at the end of what was possibly the toughest game during the week. We initially thought it was a 3-way tie not involving our team, so Greg and I left for our 5:30 dinner seating. However, after we left, our team found out that due to a miscalculation, it was actually a 4-way tie. The rest of the team won during the tie-breaker and our entire team won Holland America picture frames, which were the nicest trivia prize of the week. The two guys actually came and found us in the dining room and presented us with our frames! Yippee!! 😀
The views of the Margerie Glacier in Glacier Bay National Park were really stunning. If you’re ever in Skagway, I recommend the Skagway Brewing Company beer tasting which comes with a free hat! 🙂
Posted in Travel | Comments Off on Alaska – Kat’s perspective
June 1st, 2009, 11:43 pm PDT by Greg
We’re back from the Alaska cruise. We didn’t blog daily like China since it was a lot more sedate. Here’s the rundown:
I put pictures of the cruise up if you want to see it. There’s some good stuff in there. Again, many of the pictures are geotagged, so you can click the Google Earth/Maps link on the left of the gallery.
I wasn’t expecting wild excitement on an Alaska cruise with Holland America (which has an older demographic). But, I was looking forward to the downtime and being bored, so that was just fine with me.
That kind of worked out, but I spent a lot of time being dragged around by Kat to events on the boat. Kat decided to collect ship bucks that could later be redeemed for swag. That meant participating in (for example) several Name-That-Tune games which consisted entirely of music for the Holland America demographic which we didn’t know.
The shore days were a little depressing. The three cities we went to seemed to only exist for the purpose of providing cruise ships somewhere to dock and their passengers to buy crappy souvenirs. (That’s probably not entirely true, but from what a cruise ship passenger sees, that’s what it looks like.) Ketchikan was my favourite: it felt the least artificial.
That’s not much of a summary of a week of travel, but short of describing every day in excruciating detail, I’m going to stop. Kat probably has more highlights that she can blog about all by herself.
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May 19th, 2009, 9:46 pm PDT by Greg
Having comfortably adjusted to pacific time, Kat and I are headed out again. This time is much more low key: we leave for an Alaska cruise on Saturday.
My parents came along with this idea some time last year. They have done the Alaska cruise before and wanted to take us with them. Fine by me.
I guess I don’t have much to say about the cruise other than “we’re going”. With the China trip two three weeks ago, I haven’t had much mindshare for the cruise. Plus, there isn’t much to plan: get on the boat and figure it out from there.
I’m planning to rent a 70–200mm lens for the cruise (since I don’t have a decent long lens). That should keep me occupied for a while, and get some nice pictures of the glaciers, etc. That was lens #2 on my recent Lens Wish List. I already bought lens #1, the 4.5mm fisheye. This is my attempt to stop myself from actually buying the zoom: I can play and get it out of my system.
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May 2nd, 2009, 6:13 pm PDT by Greg
We have posted pictures from our trip! They are organized by city, which seemed to make the most sense to me.
Note that they are (almost) all geotagged, so you can click the left-side links “View Album on a Map” or “View in Google Earth” on the album (or any subalbum) to see the pictures geographically. This was done with a handheld GPS and some cleverness. The tags seem to generally be within about a few metres of the true location where the photo was taken.
I’ll explain all of the geotagging stuff in a later blog post.
Edit: By the way, I rolled over the odometer on my Rebel XT on the trip: I took img_9999.jpg, then img_0001.jpg in the mini-three gorges. Ten thousand pictures on that camera over its lifetime. It now officially owes me nothing.
Posted in Photos, Travel | 1 Comment »
May 1st, 2009, 8:35 am PDT by Greg
We got back to Vancouver yesterday afternoon, safe and sound. That is all.
I temporarily blocked access to our “china” gallery while we get the photos up. Don’t want anybody getting an incomplete experience. 🙂
Posted in Travel | Comments Off on We’re back!
April 29th, 2009, 6:02 am PDT by Greg
Today, we started with the Shaanxi History Museum.
I’m sure the museum was just fine but we (and the rest of our group) have pretty much lost the thread, and were too tired to give it much thought. It was a traditional “here are a bunch of old things” museum, and was just organized chronologically. That wasn’t enough to really keep our attention.
Compare the Shanghai museum: that collection was organized by topic (coins/money, ethnic minorities in China, …) so you could digest one part of the story at a time.
Then to a government jade store. The most interesting thing there was a realization that we all knew was coming: the older lady in our group had bought a jade pendant that she was very pleased with at the hotel store in Shanghai. Today she learned that she overpayed (or possibly that it was fake/crappy: we haven’t heard). She was pissy for the ride back to the hotel.
We had the afternoon off, so Kat and I explored the city a little. That was nice, but we were both eventually debilitated by allergies (first time on the trip, at least) and slunk back to the hotel.
Today, we take the long journey home to Vancouver and real life. Bugger… I have to finish the prep for the workshop I’m giving on Friday.
Posted in Travel | Comments Off on Xian Day 2
April 28th, 2009, 9:03 am PDT by Greg
Today, we started late and went to the Terracotta Army site.
I don’t have too much to report from there. They claim that the site (presumably the whole first emperor’s tomb complex) is the “8th world wonder”. If the scope of the thing is as they say (1/10th currently excavated), I could totally buy that.
This evening, we went to the local opera. Not as good as the Shanghai Acrobats; better than the Peking Opera.
In exchange for a short post, I have posted a bunch more pictures.
Posted in Travel | Comments Off on Xian Day 1
April 27th, 2009, 5:58 am PDT by Greg
On the 27th, we started with a side trip to see the Snow Jade Cave at Fengdu. Considering that pretty much every nightmare I have involves confined spaces, I enjoyed it. (I’m not actually claustrophobic, I just dream that I am.) The geology in the cave was really pretty cool: hopefully some of the pictures come out well.
In the afternoon, there was kite flying from the top deck of the boat. Watching 20 kites fly above a cruise ship is really quite pretty. Several kites were lost to overhead powerlines (by others) and one just got lost overboard (by Kat): I prefer to think of these as a free kite for some kids downstream somewhere.
On our last night on the boat, I slept badly, snored, and kept Kat up. Good times.
Today we disembarked, took a quick tour of Chongqing. Chongqing is the largest city in the world if you count like the Chinese government (or 5 million if you count the people that live in the “city” part of the city), and we had like two hours to look at it.
Then, to Xian where we are now. Tomorrow, we see the Terra Cotta Army.
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