Cross-Country: Days 4 & 5

Well, my web site is finally back up, so I can publish my last tracks from the journey. The detour to see Ham the Astrochimp's grave allowed me to avoid having the GPS route me through El Paso. Instead, I saw parts of southern New Mexico that I had never been through. It was really pretty -- sort of like Arizona, but greener.

Connecting up with I-10, I tried to stop at a cafe in Las Cruces I had picked out. Apparently the recommendations I had read had some basis -- the place was packed at 1:30. Too packed to leave Teddy in the hot car while I got some takeout. Instead, I continued on to Deming, NM where I search the GPS for "taco" and ended up at Tacos Mirasol. Tasty.

Then I continued on to my parents', where I had dinner and spent a nice Father's Day. Sunday, I headed out again. I was sick of being on the road, so I didn't plan any stops. So now I've got the summer in La Jolla. Less travel, more relaxation, hopefully.

Testing phone blogging

Let's see if this works.

Ham

Greetings from Alamogordo, NM, where I just paid my respects to the world's first astrochimp.

Faces in the Crowd

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I enjoy visiting the web sites of conferences I've been to in order to see if I've been captured in photographs during the conference. Since I'm rarely aware of the pictures being taken, I'm always amused to see what I'm actually doing.

The organizers of last month's conference in Finland have posted some pictures. Since they haven't posted them publicly, I won't link to them here. Rather, I've cropped out the other conference-goers.

You can see me reading news taking careful notes during a lecture and sitting by the window at the conference dinner.

Cross-Country: Day 3

Here's the map from Day 3. "Giant Head" on the map is the aforementioned Giant Bo Pilgrim Head. The little check mark at the end of the day was my Escape from Texas. The second time I drove across the country, it took 2 or 3 days to get through Texas. (OK, the fact that Ben and I went to two amusement parks and a preseason football game probably had something to do with it.) Texas seems to go on forever, so anything I could do to cut some of it off made sense. The last little bit was actually fairly pleasant, as I got off the Interstate and into the lonely, desolate territory that I enjoy in the West. A little less desolate is Carlsbad, NM, from which I write this.

Cross-Country: Day 2

On the second day of my trip, I made it from Knoxville, TN almost all the way to Texas...in fact, all the way to Texarkana, AR.

My one stop of the day was, appropriately enough, the "One Stop Cafe" in Franklin, TN. I had two delicious pork bbq sandwiches from there.

Big Goofy Head

Big Goofy Head
Originally uploaded by jongrantham

In a special sequel to last year's Big Head Trilogy, here's a picture of me next to the Giant Bo Pilgrim Head in Pittsburg, Texas this morning.

Jeep liberty

23.27 mpg...much better than I expected.

Al Gore invented the interstate?!

(For what it's worth, his son never claimed to invent the Internet.)

Back In

That was quick. The desk clerk got "instructions" on how to get the door to work. Now I just have to see if I can carry all the stuff down in one go.

Locked Out

Greetings from the Super 8 Knoxville, where I'm locked out of my room. I got up, took a shower, and was enjoying a Vanilla Coke Zero while transferring some music from Christina's computer to mine when Teddy started to stir. I took him out, moved the car closer to the room, and tried to go back in. My card key didn't work.

At this point, I had to put Teddy back in the car. He was getting sick of the stairs, so I decided to get a new card key, pack up, and go. Unfortunately, the new card key didn't work. Neither did the desk clerk's master key. She's been very nice about all this, but I'm starting to get antsy. Teddy is in the car in a shady spot with plenty of water, and someone is supposed to be here in 5 minutes...

Cross-Country: Day 1

Greetings from Knoxville, TN. I'm too tired to post the pictures from today's trip, but here's the path I took. "Anawalt" is a town in West Virginia, named for my great-grandmother's cousin (or possibly uncle). I figured I wouldn't be within 200 miles of it again any time soon, so I drove through. I forgot how much I hate mountain driving.

Time to Make the Cava

Today's conference excurstion was to Codorníu Winery. Below you can see a video I took of the machinery being operated.



Here is another one.

La Sagrada Familia

When I was growing up, the Alan Parsons Project was one of my favorite music groups. I think anybody willing to do concept albums about Edgar Allan Poe or robots appealed to the nascent egghead in me. Their last album was Gaudi, which included songs about Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi. One of these songs was "La Sagrada Familia", about the cathedral that Gaudi worked on for over 40 years prior to his death in 1926. The cathedral today is incomplete and still an active construction site.

I got into Barcelona yesterday, and the cathedral was my first stop. The jaded traveler through Europe can experience cathedral fatigue, where one cathedral looks a lot like the previous one. La Sagrada Familia is different. It looks unlike anything else on the planet. One factor is that it is newer than most European cathedrals. In particular, it is part of the Catalan "Modernisme" architecture movement (apparently equivalent to "Art Noveau") rather than the standard Gothic or Neoclassical cathderal. The architecture is much more influenced by the natural world than any other church I've seen.

I got there just in time to take the guided tour in English, which was a fairly interesting overview. The highlight, however was the elevator ride to the top of one of the towers and the subsequent walk down, which gave close-up views of the amazing detail on the cathedral facades. In fact, my only regret is that I didn't end up going up the other tower right after that. I blame jetlag for the error in judgement.

Enjoy the photo album below.

La Sagrada Familia

Places Visited

Now that I've been to Estonia and Spain, it's time to update my map of places visited. Previously, I had only been considering places visited as places where I had spent the night. That seemed a little ridiculous when I had a quite substantial day trip to Estonia. Would it have been more substantial if I had just gone overnight and not done any sightseeing? So I'm revising my criterion to an overnight stay or a significant travel experience. Here's the resulting Europe map:



Map generated by World66.com

Based on my new criterion, I'm counting New Hampshire as a visited state, since Christina and I went skiing there with my cousin Ian. Here's the new US map:


Map generated by World66.com

40 down...10 to go. I think I'll make it to 43 by the end of the summer. At that point I might have to consider trips specifically to fill out the map...

And, just for completeness, here's my world map...


Map generated by World66.com

Estonia

Greetings from Spain. The previous weekend, I took a day trip from Helsinki to Tallinn, Estonia. It was a lot of fun...Tallinn is set up very well for such day trips. Enjoy the photo album below; I have integrated my description of the trip as photo captions.

Click here for photo album

business class

You have a Picture Mail from jongrantham

Naantali

Click here to view album

I've been trying to figure out the best way to blog pictures. Flickr, which I used for the previous post, seems to be good for individual pictures. I didn't like the way it worked for sets of pictures, though (especially since free accounts are limited to 3 sets). So I switched to Picasaweb (by Google). If you click on the album above, my comments about yesterday's conference excursion to Naantali are included in the picture album.

Finland Has It All

Pizza Menu (red ovals added by me)

Christina has observed that every country besides the US offers tuna pizza. Finland is no exception.

I don't like the idea of tuna on pizza, but I did eat at this place yesterday. Turku, for whatever reason, is lousy with kebab/pizza places. It seems like an odd combination to me, but I'm sure there's a reason for it.

I used to observe, while driving around rural America, that there always seemed to be combination video stores and tanning salons. I never knew why until later, when I read an article in the Washington Post. It turns out that several years earlier, at a convention of independent video store owners, someone made a presentation about ways to expand video businesses to include tanning salons. The idea caught on like wildfire.

Perhaps years ago there was a similar event at a Finnish kebab convention...

PS I had the falafel, which was drenched in the kind of red sauce I've come to recognize as the Hallmark of bad food across Europe. Same with my burrito today.

I'm crazy for these cupcakes, cousin

Last Saturday night, I headed back into New York City. This time, I thought I'd spare myself the long subway ride, so I headed for Greenwich Village and the East Village.



My first stop was "Alamo", the evil twin of "The Cube", one of my favorite locations in Ann Arbor. They say the University President spins the cube each morning to start up the University. Here, the cube was harder to spin, what with all the people loitering underneath it. Still, as I was leaving the area, a group of people got it started.






Next, it was off to Veselka, a Ukrainian restaurant. I had last enjoyed Ukranian food in 1999 in Winnipeg. I sat at the counter and had some delicious pirogies. I was thinking of buying a t-shirt to commemorate the visit, but the t-shirts read "Challah-leujah!" and "Beet me", neither of which seemed interesting enough to wear.



After dinner, it was back to Greenwich Village to Magnolia Bakery. I've read that this store was made famous by "Sex in the City", but I know it from the Saturday Night Live sketch "Lazy Sunday":

But first my hunger pains are stickin’ like duct tape.
Let’s hit up Magnolia and mack on some cupcakes.
No doubt that bakery’s got all da bomb frostings.
I love those cupcakes like McAdams loves Gosling.
Two, no six, no twelve, BAKERS DOZEN.
I told you that I’m crazy for these cupcakes, cousin.

I got there, and the line ran down the block. After 20 or so minutes waiting, I was allowed entrance to the store. I was allowed to approach the cupcakes and buy no more than a dozen. Since I had to transport these home via subway and Amtrak, I stuck to one box. Five seemed about the limit without overly squishing the frosting.



I brought them home to Christina, and we enjoyed them over the next few days. I don't know what I was thinking considering getting a dozen -- one cupcake per day is probably about 1/2 a cupcake more than necessary. Still, they were really good, and I hope to go back the next time I'm in Manhattan.