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This past weekend Sarah, Garrison, and I flew out to Massachusetts to see some old friends. Some of Sarah’s friends from college were throwing a baby shower for one of their number, and we decided to go out as a family for a mini-vacation.

We stayed with my friend Mike and his wife Michele at their place in Winthrop. It is almost impossible to overstate how much more convenient it is to stay at someone’s house than a hotel when you’re traveling with an infant. Mike borrowed a pack’n'play from a co-worker so that we didn’t have to bring ours with us or rent one once we got there. We were able to put Garrison to bed in our bedroom on the third floor of the house, and stay awake with Mike and Michele on the first floor. If we had a hotel room, we likely would have been stuck sitting quietly in a dimly lit room once he went to bed since we probably would have had just one room. Mike’s place had a fridge where we could keep Garrison’s medicine, a comfy sofa on which we could sit, a sink in which we could wash the boy’s dishes, and numerous other little perks. Thanks again, Mike and Michele, for having the three of us.

We spent most of Saturday at the baby shower, where the new mom-to-be was showered with all manner of baby gifts. On our way back to Mike’s we stopped at Nick’s House of Pizza, and brought back a pizza and a pair of calzones for dinner at Mike’s. Nick’s was among our favorite pizza places when we were in school, so we always like to stop in and avail ourselves of their mouthwatering calzones whenever we have the chance.

On Sunday, we helped Mike and Michele install a new chandelier in their dining room, since the previous one was broken. In the middle of that process, we decamped to Plymouth, MA for a mouthwatering lunch at the legendary Lobster Hut. I ate both a fried scallop roll and a fried clam roll. It has been a long time since I’ve eaten at Lobster Hut, and will probably be even longer until the next time, so I had no shame about ordering two sandwiches absolutely overflowing with fresh, fried seafood. Mike and Sarah showed a bit more restraint, but everyone (with the exception of Garrison) left the lunch table stuffed full of fried seafood.

After lunch, we took a long walk on Plymouth’s Long Beach. Sarah and I enjoyed walking on the beach when we lived in Plymouth, and we still like to take walks on it whenever we get back to Massachusetts.

Some people might be wondering how Garrison did on the airplane flights. I would say that he earned a B, overall. He is just too independent-minded at the moment to enjoy being cooped up on our laps for long periods of time. He won’t nap when he’s put in stimulating environments like an airport and a plane. He often won’t eat when placed in those same environments. That meant that he was extremely fussy on that last flight home. Would we fly with him again? At this point, we wouldn’t consent to take him on a flight that lasted over two hours. That’s about his time limit. After that, he starts to meltdown and everyone on the flight suffers.

For interested parties, there are photos from the trip in the Photo Gallery.

Two days in Cleveland is not to be confused with One Night in Bangkok, by any means. Two weeks ago we traveled east to visit Cleveland.We decided to take a trip east because I hadn’t been to Cleveland since May, 2007, and Sarah hadn’t been there since December, 2007. In addition, Sarah’s parents recently purchased a different house and we wanted to see what it was like.

As usual, the drive there and back was epic in length. There is simply no good time to drive through or around Chicago. We hit the metro area around noon while traveling eastbound and around 13:00 while westbound but had to suffer through traffic both times. I guess the only consolation is that we didn’t expose ourselves to full-on rush hour traffic. At least the electronic tolling that Illinois installed over the last couple of years has made the payment of tolls less of a headache.

Dalla came with us, as you might expect. She’s not much for staying at other people’s houses, but she likes visiting the Cleveland Metro Parks and running through the woods.

The Cleveland metro area is about like I remember it. More real estate signs than I’ve seen there in the past as their housing market is suffering a fair amount, but that’s probably the biggest visible change. The Ohio GOP is using many of the same tactics that the Wisconsin GOP currently employs to discourage people from voting, which I guess isn’t surprising. Skullduggery doesn’t seem to be limited by state lines.

As mentioned in the post below, Sarah and I got back last weekend from a trip to New Orleans.
We left on Saturday, 13 Sep 2008, and got back on 20 Sep, 2008. The idea was to take one more big trip before the baby’s arrival in January. Admittedly, New Orleans during hurricane season wouldn’t be most people’s first idea of a vacation destination, but I guess that we’ve always been contrarian like that. Our motivations for choosing New Orleans were twofold. Sarah wanted to see how it was recovering from Katrina so that she could compare it with what she saw when she did relief work for the Red Cross there. I’ve always wanted to go there and it seemed that I should get there before another hurricane takes a stab at wiping the place out.

There is no doubt that we benefited in some ways from the recent passage of Hurricane Gustav through the area and the threat that Hurricane Ike posed until it deviated towards Texas. Until the Friday before we left, we encountered very few tourists and could do just about anything we wanted without fear of crowds. It was only at the very end of our trip that tourists started to come back and venues started to fill up.

New Orleans proper (roughly 200,000 people) actually has a smaller population than Madison (roughly 225,000) now. The NOLA metro area is still much larger than Madison’s, but you can see what happens when a city loses half of its population without looking very far. The central business district and many of the larger streets still boast plenty of boarded up and abandoned buildings. We saw people living in FEMA trailers and houses that still had the search and rescue paint on the outside. There are vast swathes of the city that have almost no one living in them, while other parts of town have recovered quite well. I hesitate to say that anywhere has recovered 100%, but certainly areas like the French Quarter are nearly there.

Our original itinerary called for us to spend three nights in New Orleans, and then travel east and west of the city to spend a few more nights before coming back to spend one last night in NOLA. However, due to Gustav and Ike, we spent all seven nights in NOLA. You couldn’t get a hotel room west of the city for love or money as numerous evacuees from coastal LA and TX were occupying the hotel rooms in towns like Lafayette. East of the city, there were rooms to be had, but there wasn’t much reason to stay out there since most of what we wanted to do could be done as day trips.

So what did we do for seven days? We ate. Lots and lots of calories. Probably 3000 at every meal. As one person we met there said, “If it ain’t fried, it ain’t cooked.” Cajun cooking is good, but the first ingredient in most recipes is butter and the last instruction is “deep fry until golden brown”. In addition, all the portions are huge. At the end, we were ordering one entree and a salad, splitting them, and still coming away from the table quite full.

In addition to eating we took the “tour” of the Tabasco factory. Unless you’re already in Lafayette, that’s a factory tour worth skipping. I like Tabasco more than most people, but even I thought the tour wasn’t worth the drive 2.5 hours each way from our hotel. In New Iberia, just north of the Tabasco factory, we had gumbo that was so bad we didn’t eat more than a couple of spoonfuls. The day was saved, however, when we visited Lake Martin and saw alligators and numerous interesting birds.

Another day trip took us east of the city for a swamp boat tour. That was an OK tour, but nothing special. After the tour, Sarah was giving me directions to go somewhere and she said, “if you get to Mississippi, you’ve gone too far.” When I asked how far away it was, and she said, “Five miles”, I replied that we were going to Mississippi. It was one of the states I’d never visited (current count of unvisited states: and Sarah wanted to visit the Gulf Coast, so we went. The beaches were in pretty bad shape due to Gustav, so we drove around looking at the damage, ate dinner at a beachfront restaurant that had recently re-opened, and went back to our hotel.

In New Orleans itself we ate beignets at Cafe du Monde numerous times. They were just too good to miss. In addition, we visited the Insectarium, which is a museum/zoo devoted to insects. One of the exhibits involved local chefs integrating bugs into food and then serving it to customers. We both tried beignets with crickets in them. They go down easy enough, but there definitely is a mental block associated with eating bugs that makes it difficult to ignore the fact that you just ate several crickets. That same day we took in an IMAX film; there were maybe thirty people in the whole theater.

We listened to plenty of jazz, including two shows at Preservation Hall. The first time we went there was no crowd and no waiting. We got right in, got good seats right in front and heard some good jazz. The second time was the night right before we left when all the other tourists came back. There was standing room only and some people had to listen from the hall. We saw Irvin Mayfield and the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra (NOJO) play at a show at a club named The Snug Harbor, as well. We had seen Mayfield and NOJO play a show at Madison’s Overture Center and that was a fairly formal show with the band on stage in suits. This was much more casual, with the band members switching out on a small stage and everyone dressed very casually. Finally, we took in a jazz show at a local bar that was pretty good.

We didn’t rent a car for our whole trip there, as the streetcars would take us from our hotel to downtown and back without much fuss. However, we had a rental car for three days so that we could get out of the city proper. Or, more precisely, we had a different rental car every day for three days. The first car we got had tire problems, so we swapped it out for another one. That one developed tire problems, so we swapped it out for a third. The tires on that one held up just long enough for us to turn it back in on the third day. Apparently, that’s a common problem post-hurricane, if the local residents and rental car folks can be believed.

Now we’re back in Madison and trying to work off some of those NOLA calories. We had a good time on the trip, the weather was generally quite cooperative, and we will likely go back for another visit some day in the future.

Last Friday, I drove up to Oshkosh for the 2008 EAA AirVenture air show.As you may or may not remember, I was on my way up to Oshkosh for the 2007 AirVenture when the Avalon was rear-ended, so just getting there was an accomplishment this year.

Once I got there, it was the usual drill of dealing with the crowds, unrelenting sun, and the heat. I usually travel up there on a weekday, which keeps the crowds a bit more manageable, and this year I got lucky because much of the day was overcast which helped with the heat.

Unlike previous years, I tried to spend more time attending forums this year, and spent less time wandering among the aircraft. The forums give you a chance to hear interesting and notable speakers (Burt Rutan, for instance) in a small and relatively intimate gathering. By far the best forum I attended was given by a pair of veteran air traffic controllers who had worked several AirVentures. They were full of interesting insights and funny stories.

Even though I enjoyed the forums, the air show and the airplanes are a big reason to attend. The highlights of the air show this year were the V-22 Osprey and the F-22 Raptor.

The V-22 Osprey is the new tilt-rotor aircraft used by the Marines and Air Force. I had never seen one in person, much less in flight, so it was really fascinating to watch the plane come in with its gigantic propellors turning before rotating its engines and landing on the runway much like a helicopter would.

The V-22 Osprey was whisper quiet compared to the F-22 Raptor. That plane is an absolute screamer, even when it isn’t really trying. The F-22 flew over the pair of parallel runways for roughly ten minutes and the crowd loved every minute of it. Easily its most impressive maneuver was when it demonstrated its incredibly (almost unbelievably) tight turn radius. In the end, however, it was rather like watching an extremely high performance automobile being driven around a parking lot or a cheetah in a zoo. You just knew that it was capable of so much more than was on display and it was rather sad to watch it in such constrained circumstances.

There were some other interesting planes on hand this year. I enjoyed a tour of a Wisconsin Air National Guard KC-135. I didn’t realize that there were a large number of seats and cargo space on top of the fuel tanks in the plane’s cargo area. A KC-10 also made an appearance. A Navy SH-60 Sea Hawk was an interesting counterpoint to all the jets and planes on hand and its crew worked the crowd quite intensely.

Will I go back next year? Almost every year I say that I’m going take a year off and then the next year rolls around and I get the urge to go again. So, I’m thinking that next year I’ll take a year off. We’ll just have to see what happens when July rolls around again.

In the interim, there are some photos of the air show in the photo gallery.

Sarah, Dalla, and I recently returned from a weeklong trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula where we met her parents, sister-in-law, and her sister-in-law’s mother.
We started off from Madison and headed to Mackinac Island where we met the rest of the group for a two night stay. For those who aren’t familiar with Mackinac Island, one of the big draws is the almost complete lack of motor vehicles on the island. If you want to get around, your options basically are: horse taxi, bicycle, or your feet. After parking our car in St. Ignace, a ferry took us across the water to the docks on Mackinac. There, the three of us boarded a horse taxi for the ride up to the condo where we were all staying.

A horse taxi is, generally, two horses hooked up to a wagon that has three or four rows of bench seating, a driver, and a battery driven radio that is used to dispatch the drivers to locations around the island. Depending on the driver, the load in the wagon, and the horses, the speed of the taxi ranges from “slower than I can walk” to “much slower than I can ride a bike”. As a longtime Mackinac resident/visitor advised us, “If you expect to get anywhere here in a hurry, you’re going to be disappointed.”

We spent the next day in downtown Mackinac exploring the historic fort, fudge shops (Mackinac is famous for its fudge), and generally seeing the sights. Dalla wasn’t always welcome in all those places, but she was welcome in the fort so she and I explored that in depth while others were shopping and eating fudge. Interestingly, the general verdict was the Mackinac fudge didn’t live up to the hype. I’m not a fan of fudge usually, so I trust to the judgement of others on that issue.

We left the next day after another, um, relaxed ride on a horse taxi down to the ferry. Once back in St. Ignace we packed up the car and headed to our next destination, Munising, MI. On our way out of St. Ignace, we were traveling westbound on US Route 2 when some large wooden signs blew out of the back of a trailer in the lane next to us. The signs, of course, flew into our lane, and despite my efforts to dodge them, one smashed into the front of the car. So, we had an opportunity to meet one of the local politicos (it was a campaign sign that hit our car), the state patrol, the city police (there was a jurisdictional dispute), and some other folks who knew the politician. He was a nice enough guy, and he clued us in to a good pasty joint, but that doesn’t excuse his failure to properly secure the load he was towing. Fortunately, the damage was mostly cosmetic, and the car was still fully functional, so we were able to drive on after a delay of an hour or so.

As I mentioned above, we stopped at a local pasty joint, Lehto’s, on our way to Munising. Pasties (pronounced: pass-tees) are something of an Upper Peninsula tradition. They were brought there by Cornish miners in the days of yore and they continue to be baked and served by mom-and-pop joints all over the place. A pasty is basically meat, potato, onions, and rutabagas wrapped up in dough and baked. It doesn’t sound that good, but it is actually fairly tasty when done correctly. We ate several pasties during our travels.

We eventually caught up with our fellow travelers at the Seney National Wildlife Refuge where we joined them for some birdwatching. The big highlights of the bird watching were loons, trumpeter swans, sandhill cranes, and all the mosquitoes in the world.

Rather than continuously harp on the mosquitoes, I’ll dedicate this paragraph to them and you can safely assume from here on out that if something happened outdoors it was under the nearly constant onslaught of mosquitoes. The only exceptions are anything that happened within spitting distance of Lake Superior. The backcountry campsites on Bowman Lake in Glacier National park and the backcountry trails at Effigy Mounds National Monument are the only other places that I’ve been where the mosquitoes were as bad as they were in the UP. We kept trying to figure out how the denizens of the area were able to go outside without being driven absolutely crazy by the bugs and we never did come up with an answer. Sarah and I would go out to walk the dog in the morning and as long as we were walking, the bugs were manageable. However, as soon as we stopped they would pounce and we’d have to start walking again or risk losing several pints of blood. Neither Sarah or I brought our headnets with us so we bought them in Munising. The fact that a garden variety hardware store had a selection of six different types right near the cash registers is probably a sign of just how bad things can get there, especially once the black flies come out.

Anyway, after our stop in Seney we headed to our rented cabin on Powell Lake in the Hiawatha National Forest, which is just a few miles south of Munising. The cabin was advertised as pet-friendly, but when we got there, signs said that pets had to remain in the laundry room. We decided to ignore those signs because we didn’t rent a pet-friendly laundry room, we rented a pet-friendly cabin, so Dalla had free run of the place. The cabin was OK, but it had some warts. The basement, where two of the bedrooms were located, was partially unfinished. Tina and Mike’s room, for instance, had a bare concrete floor. One wall of the basement was just panels of solid Styrofoam insulation on top of the concrete foundation. The basement shower was easily the highest-tech shower that I’ve ever encountered. It had two heads; multiple knobs; some undecipherable temperature scale; and a mysterious, unlabeled red button. The upstairs bathroom had, mysteriously enough, a ceiling fan. Don’t confuse that with an exhaust fan mounted in the ceiling. When I say ceiling fan, I mean a ceiling fan like you’d put in your living room. There was also the spiral staircase of death down, which several people nearly tripped, that led to a loft bedroom appropriate for people of the same stature as the Seven Dwarves. If it hadn’t been for the mosquitoes, the fire pit along the lake might have been a nice place to sit.

While we were there, one of the neighbor dogs (all of the dogs we met there ran free without their owner’s supervision, for some reason) took a shine to Dalla, probably because they looked so much alike. He was a puppy, but larger than her. She didn’t hesitate to put him into his place, however, so they generally got along. Since he would constantly come by the cabin to see if she was available to play with him, and would tag along on our walks (driving Dalla crazy since she was on a leash) we decided to call him Cling. That’s cling as in clingy.

The reason we were in Munising to begin with was the presence of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. It was the first designated national lakeshore and the best way to see it is from the lake, so we took a boat tour. It was a fairly cold and windy day on Lake Superior, but the scenery was worth it. Pictured Rocks is a series of multi-hued sandstone cliffs along the lake, some of which are over 200 feet tall. Even though the park has hiking trails, the best way to see the cliffs is from the water. So, once you’ve done that, you’ve basically seen the park.

We spent the next morning hiking in the national forest which meant tromping around in our long sleeves, long pants, and headnets, even though it wasn’t that chilly. In the afternoon Sarah and I relaxed for a bit while the others hit a few gift shops in Munising or went hiking along the Lakeshore. We didn’t go on that hike because the Lakeshore, for some really mysterious reason, flat-out bans dogs from the park. Eventually, we got together with a couple of other party members to try our hands at mini-golf. That idea went over the boards when we found the mini-golf course closed due to a death in the family, so we drove out of Munising to see what we could find on the other side of town. What we found was Christmas, Michigan, a small town that basically consists of a few houses, a casino, and a store that sells Christmas stuff, year round. Woo, hoo, I guess. As the only guy along on that part of the expedition (Mike was hiking along the lake), I got one of my two “Yays!” from the girls on the trip by suggesting that we stop there to see what the gift shop sold. That wasn’t enough to hold our attention for too long, so we spent the next hour plus wandering on a Lake Superior beach skipping stones and collecting attractive rocks for our rock garden at home.

We left the next day for the final stop on our tour of the UP. We spent part of the day driving to Paradise, Michigan, with a stop at Tahquamenon Falls State Park to see the Upper Falls along the way. The Upper Falls are OK; the best part is the presence of a small, but high-quality, brew pub near the Upper Falls.

We were out in a fairly remote part of the UP to visit the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, which is truly worth the trip. It’s not the biggest museum you’ll ever visit, but it is certainly one of the highest quality. The exhibits are full of interesting information and extremely unique items. The staff is helpful, but generally not intrusive. You can see it all in one day and not feel like you were rushed or might have missed anything of value. If nothing else, seeing a second order Fresnell Lens is worth the price of admission.

The biggest downside to the area where we stayed was the lack of amenities other than the museum or the lake. We ended up driving twenty or so miles back to the brew pub at the Falls for dinner because it was widely acknowledged by locals as the place to eat dinner.

After a one night stay in the area, we jumped back in our car and headed back to Madison. Fortunately, that was a long, but uneventful denouement.

There are a few pictures in the gallery if you’re interested.

There are certain items that are worth their weight in gold if you are traveling internationally and many of them are likely not the first ones that come to mind.When you’re getting on a plane to cross an international border, the first thing you should put in your pocket is a ballpoint pen. Almost invariably, unless you’re traveling within the EU, immigration and customs paperwork will demand your attention during the flight. To fill out said paperwork, that ballpoint pen in your pocket will come in handy. Note that I write that the pen should be in your pocket, and not your carry-on luggage. If your pen is not in your pocket, it’s likely that your carry-on luggage will be stowed, you’ll be seated in a middle or window seat, and the aircraft will be pitching up and down due to turbulence, all of which will prevent you from getting at your pen until well after you’ve landed. If you’re planning on filling out your paperwork after you reach the airport terminal, I hope you enjoy long waits in line because you’ll be at the back of a four-hundred eleven person queue as the 747 empties out and all the other passengers proceed directly to immigration.

The next items to slip into your pocket are earplugs. Until you’ve used earplugs on a flight you probably don’t realize just how loud an airliner is. The engines certainly make plenty of noise, but so does the air conditioning system and the air rushing by the fuselage. In addition, earplugs are reasonably effective at drowning out the noise of crying babies and small children. And don’t worry about missing out on any of those supposedly important announcements from the cockpit or the stewards. The PA system on an airliner is turned up quite loud so that it can be heard over all the rushing air and engine noises; you won’t have trouble hearing it with earplugs in. Finally, if you’re flying on a military transport, earplugs are standard issue as those planes have no sound insulation. I recommend Howard Leight LaserLite earplugs, though others work nearly as well. Again, earplugs go in your pocket, not your carry-on luggage.

A Sharpie marker should also accompany you on your travel. This can travel in your carry-on. I don’t recommend the ultra-fine point; the fine point is probably what you want. At worst, it can serve as a backup for your ballpoint pen in note-taking situations. At best, you’ll find it invaluable for writing on packages you send back home through the mail or for writing your name on food that goes in a communal fridge if you stay at a hostel or backpackers.

By now, everyone knows about the useless but inflexible security rule that all liquids larger than three ounces are banned from carry-on luggage. This presents a problem if you want to bring home some olive oil or a small bottle of spirits from the country you are visiting. Hence, I like to carry a gallon-sized Ziploc or Glad plastic bag in my luggage. That way you can seal the bottle of liquid in the bag and place it in your checked luggage for the trip home. The gallon bags also come in handy if you find yourself with some leftovers you want to save from a meal you cooked in a hostel or backpackers.

Sleeping on an airliner is difficult at best due to the fact that you’re forced to sleep in an upright position. Airlines used to routinely provide pillows and blankets to ease the discomfort somewhat, but now they don’t bother (generally due to cost cutting). So, you’re best off bringing your own pillow. I recommend an inflatable neck pillow (Eagle Creek makes a couple, as do others). The neck pillow fits around your neck and supports your head and neck no matter which way your head flops during flight. The advantage to an inflatable model over buckwheat or another pillow filling is that it can also be deflated make storage and transportation easier. I’ll often see people with other travel pillows lugging them around the airport and it never looks fun. Meanwhile, an inflatable pillow is conveniently stored in my backpack and then transferred to the seatback pocket when I board the plane until I need it.

If you’re easily bothered by ambient light while sleeping, a sleeping mask will make your life easier. Again, Eagle Creek and others make and sell these. You can use the mask both on the flight and while sleeping in foreign lands while trying to overcome jet lag. Some airlines will provide these on long overseas flights but the one you bring will be more comfortable and durable.

A small notebook often comes in handy for jotting down random bits of information that you don’t want to lose. I prefer the 3″x5″ spiral bound size but whatever is small enough to easily carry works well.

If you’re purchasing a digital camera for travel, I suggest buying one that runs on AA batteries. You can use rechargeables to save money and the environment most of the time, but if they run out at an inopportune moment, you can always get a set of AAs from a corner store and get up and running again.

If you want to be easily identified at 100 yards as an American tourist, bring a baseball cap, preferably one that is well used. If you want to keep sunburn to a minimum and travel a bit more low-key at the same time, I suggest a hat with a brim that runs around the entire hat. This will keep your ears and, hopefully, your neck from suffering from the sun’s rays.

These are all small items that will make your life a bit easier as you travel. You may not use every item every trip but if you need one and you already have it in your hands you’ll likely never travel without it again.

This morning I woke up in Christchurch. A five hour flight in a C-17 brought me back to birds, bugs, flowers, fresh fruit, and green trees yesterday evening. I’ll write more about my final days on the ice in a couple of weeks, but for now I’m going to enjoy a vacation on the sunny south island of New Zealand.

Those were the first words I said to the lady sitting next to me as I sat down for the Los Angeles to Auckland, New Zealand leg of my flight to the South Pole.Friday, I left Madison to start the five day journey to the Pole. The journey begins with a series of commercial flights to Christchurch, New Zealand. In my case, the first flight (2.5 hours in duration) took me from Madison to Dallas. Once there, I boarded a 3.5 hour flight to LAX.

At LAX I had nearly three hours to kill and a wicked hunger so I decided to seek out dinner rather than simply eating a snack and hoping for the best with dinner on the plane. The last two times I went through LAX I ate at one of the restaurants in the international terminal. The food there isn’t going to kill you, but it isn’t memorable either so I decided to seek calories a bit further afield.

It’s worth noting here that LAX is something of a dump. The vast majority of the buildings are gently described as architectural mistakes while the others make parking garage architecture look progressive. After walking past seemingly innumerable gates and ticket counters I finally reached the LAX Theme Building. It’s a building that you’ve likely all seen in movies. Inside that building is Encounter Restaurant. Seeing as how I had some time to kill, a belly to fill, and no other interesting prospects in sight, I made my way up to the restaurant for a meal.

Normally, I’m not a salad guy, but I decided to go out on a limb and try a garden salad with my meal because it sounded good to me as I read the menu. The Toy Box tomatoes that were in the salad were possibly the best tomatoes I’ve ever eaten. They were so sweet that it was more like eating grapes than tomatoes. The rest of the meal was certainly edible, but not in the same league as those tomatoes.

After filling my belly, I wandered back to my flight and settled in for the nearly thirteen hour flight to Auckland. It is worth noting that a flight of that duration is a strong disincentive for people to visit New Zealand. It’s really a wonderful country filled with fantastic scenery and friendly people but it is so damn far away! Of course, it if was closer the country would likely be overrun with yahoos and that would likely destroy much of its charm so perhaps I shouldn’t complain too much.

The lady sitting next to me was initially skeptical when I told her that the flight we were embarking upon was seemingly interminable. After ten hours of flight time, however, she was singing a different tune and pledging never to attempt such a long flight again without going first class.

We did eventually arive in Auckland, and after waiting almost one and one-half hours, I made it through passport control, customs, and biosecurity. That left me just enough time to hustle over to the domestic terminal to make my flight to Christchurch (1.5 hours in duration).

Finally, after thirty hours of travel, I arrived at my hotel, where I was able to shower, change clothes, and start the process of unwinding both physically and mentally from that much air travel.

The first priority was to get some lunch, so I bought a (very good) spicy brautwurst from a street vendor near an art fair and an English-style bitter from a local brewer. I ate both of those while listening to Christmas carols sung by a local group.

Once I had taken the edge off my initial hunger, it was time to seek out additional calories. Gelato was the next to find its way into my stomach. I bought a couple of local brews from a bottle shop, a pesto/tomato/brie bagel from a cafe, and made my way into the Botanical Gardens.

If there is one thing I like about New Zealand in general, and Christchurch in particular, it is their ability to grow some incredibly impressive trees. There are several trees that I remembered quite vividly from my last trip here and I made it a point of visiting them again today. Taking pictures of the trees hardly does them justice. It’s rather like trying to photograph a very tall skyscraper or a very wide river. You have to get so far away to get the object in the frame that it loose much of its impressive size.

Eventually, I found my way to a pair of absolutely gigantic eucalyptus trees and sat down to continue my repast. As I sat under the canopy of that massive tree, drinking a couple of beers, eating a hot sandwich, and reading a good book, my muscles finally started to unknot. All that flying simply isn’t good for the human body. It was a delight to enjoy the simple pleasures of food, drink, a book, and a gorgeous day before continuing my trip to the Pole.

Sarah and I flew out to Massachusetts over Labor Day weekend to see one my friends from college get married and to see some old friends.Earlier this year, my friend from Tufts, Mike, invited me to be part of his wedding party, and I was honored to accept. So it wasn’t any sort of impulse trip that we were on. There were only two time periods that we had wedding obligations, so that left us plenty of time to see old friends and haunt some of our old stomping grounds.

After a reasonably pleasant (for air travel) flight from Madison (via Milwaukee) we landed in Boston on Thursday night. Almost as soon as we landed and the skyline of downtown Boston came into view, it occurred to me how much both Boston and myself had changed. Sarah and I have been back to Boston several times since we left there in October, 1998, but I’d never felt so strongly before that the phase of my life where I called Boston home is so completely in the past. If I were ever to move back there again (an extremely unlikely scenario), it would be a new experience, and not merely a continuation of my past times there.

We made our way by public transit to Cambridge where we stowed our luggage at the home of a friend of Sarah’s. Then we were off to find dinner. We ended up in Harvard Square (which has gone a long way in the wrong direction and is no longer a place worth visiting) where we had a passable meal at John Harvard’s.

Friday morning we arose, picked up a rental car from an off-airport location, and then drove to scenic Chelsea to pick up a rented blazer that I needed to fit in to the wedding party scenery. After that, we drove to Somerville where we parked at Tufts and walked around for a while. The campus has changed quite a bit in the eleven years since we graduated. There are several new buildings and the students all seem very young. While we were touring the library, a librarian came out of a room and asked me, with all honesty, if I was ready for school to start on Tuesday. I explained that I had graduated ten years earlier and was just touring the old alma mater. Sarah, of course, got a big kick out that as she thinks that I’ve got a baby face and the librarian’s actions just confirmed her suspicions.

After a walk around campus, we ate lunch at Nick’s House of Pizza. Their calzones are still fabulous, even if they cost roughly 29% more than they did while we attended school there.

Because it was the Friday before Labor Day, we decided to head for our accommodations on the South Shore after lunch. It was likely that scads of commuters would take off from work early and head for the Cape, so it might take longer than usual to reach Plymouth, where we had a hotel room booked for the night.

After a relatively uneventful, and sometimes slow, drive to Plymouth we found our hotel, the Blue Spruce Motel. The Blue Spruce’s primary drawing card is its price. It isn’t in a scenic location (unless you consider a strip mall parking lot scenic) nor is it conveniently located. It was not unpleasantly dirty and the folks running the front desk were nice. We didn’t have long to enjoy listening to the state highway a hundred from our front door, however, as we needed to get back north to the wedding rehearsal dinner, which we thought started at 17:00.

We left ourselves plenty of time and arrived at 16:30. Oops. Not only were we early, but we had the time wrong. The rehearsal didn’t actually start until 17:30. So, we chatted with a guy mowing the church’s lawn, and then we went for a sort of scenic drive in Scituate and Humarock where we saw all sorts of architectural atrocities: nice beachside places had been torn down and replaced with three story monsters.

Eventually, the rehearsal started. I’ll save you the details except to say that we practiced the ceremony one way, promptly changed everything, and then walked out the door. It didn’t really matter, though. No one really cares how the wedding party processes, or doesn’t, as long as a couple get hitched somewhere during the whole affair.

Rather than participate in a cocktail hour that neither of us needed, Sarah and I drove back to Scituate and had fried clams at the Sands End Cafe before heading to the rehearsal dinner. Even the unfortunate music being made by a guy with a guitar couldn’t mask how delicious those clams were. They were sweet and savory; hot and crispy; and served with a tasty tartar sauce. They were spectacular.

The next day we spent the morning walking around Plymouth. I like Plymouth and it is one of the few areas that I used to live in Massachusetts that I could see myself living again. We walked down Main/Court St. and found that our favorite Irish bar closed and that a rib joint now occupies that space. Meanwhile, a Mexican-themed place (note that I don’t actually call it Mexican; that would be an insult to our neighbors to the south) that should have gone out of business looong ago remains open. The British groceries store remains mystifyingly open, with the same lack of customers and sales. The brewpub we liked is closed; the diner we liked is still open. After that it was time for a walk on the water front. Plymouth Rock is still there. One of our favorite moments of the morning was watching a man take extensive video footage of Plymouth Rock.

For lunch on Saturday we drove out to Massasoit State Park where we met some friends who live in Vermont. We met them when they lived in Madison, but after graduating from UW-Madison they moved out to Vermont where he is taking part in a family business. Her parents live in Rhode Island and they were down to visit her parents for the weekend so they agreed to meet us halfway between Plymouth and her parents’ place. We had a good time reminiscing for a couple hours over food and (illicit) wine before they had to get back and we needed to start on our journey to the Cape.

We had plans to meet up with a former co-worker of Sarah’s for dinner at his house on the Cape, but she wanted to see some of her old work sites on the Cape so we started a bit earlier than we needed. Along the way, we stopped at a house where Sarah rented a room while she lived on the Cape. The woman with whom she used to live was at home and we spent more than an hour catching up with her and her significant other. They have done extensive work to the house, both enlarging and renovating it, so it was fun to see the changed house.

The last time I saw the kids of Sarah’s former co-worker, they were something like 7 and 5 years old. That was how I pictured them in my mind until I met a pair of teenagers when we walked in the door. The old kid is now seventeen, a senior in high school, and trying to decide where to go to college. The girl, now fifteen, baby sits and helps to run a dance school. When Sarah still worked there she used to watch the Teletubbies with the girl. Once we got over how much the kids had grown we had a very pleasant evening eating, drinking, and catching up with the whole family.

Sunday morning we took a long walk on Plymouth’s Long Beach, which is one of our favorite things to do in Plymouth. It’s a narrow spit of land extends two miles into the ocean with a sandy beach on one side. We walked almost all the way out to the end before time pressures forced to us to turn around and head for our car. After all, we had to leave plenty of time for lunch because we had Lobster Hut on the brain.

If ever travel to Plymouth and fail to eat at Lobster hut, you’ve truly missed out on the of the area’s gems. We never fail to eat there if there is even a remote possibility of doing so. It’s one of those rare restaurants that’s so good it stays open even in the winter when the nearest tourist is three hundred miles away. If you’re only going to eat one meal there, I recommend the fried scallops, the fried clams, and the lobster, in that order. We ordered fried scallops and a lobster on this trip. The scallops were heaven-sent. The lobster was so naturally buttery-tasting that we didn’t even need to dip it in the melted butter vat that came with the meal. It wasn’t a cheap meal, but we enjoyed it immensely.

The wedding was scheduled for 15:00 in the afternoon on Sunday so after lunch we headed north to check into our hotel room in Cohasset, where the reception would be held. We stayed at the Red Lion Inn, which had a veneer of classiness and prices designed to pinch wedding attendees. We changed into our wedding clothes, hopped in the car again, and drove off to the wedding.

At this point, I’m going to address our rental car. We put over 400 miles on that car over the course of the weekend, so we got to know it fairly well. It was a Chevy Cobalt, rented from Enterprise, that came with an option package I like to call Electric Nothing. No power door locks, no power windows, no cruise. It wasn’t terribly spacious or comfortable nor was it fun to drive or pleasing to the eye. It automatically turned on the parking lights (not daytime running lights) when the car was started and those lights stayed on unless or until the driver turned them off. It had a four cylinder engine that got roughly the same gas mileage as our six cylinder Toyota Avalon does. It’s no wonder that GM can’t compete with the Civic and the Corolla if this is its weapon of choice. I wanted to hang a sign in the window that read “It’s not mine; it’s a rental” so that people wouldn’t think I was one oar short of a pair and try to take advantage of me after seeing my ride.

The wedding was a wedding. It was Catholic, so we all got plenty of exercise going up, down, up, down, up down. In the end, a couple got hitched at the altar, so everyone went home happy.

Monday morning, in Sarah’s words, I needed to be “dried out” so we packed up our stuff, hit Dunkin’ Donuts for the sixtieth time on the trip, and headed for the beach.

Let me digress again to address our frequent Dunkin’ Donuts stops. I don’t remember exactly how many times we stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts, but even before we left home I planned to stop there often enough that I brought a reusable Dunkin’ Donuts travel mug with me from Madison. We always enjoy mingling with the locals at Dunkins (as they are sometimes known) and the coffee is good, too.

We went back to Scituate/Humarock (another twenty or thirty miles on the car, of course), found a one hour parking spot (that we occupied for hours), and proceeded to soak up the sun on the beach. Rather, I soaked up the sun on the beach while Sarah froze various parts of her anatomy in the icy cold waters. Normally, I’m ready to leave the beach after ten or fifteen minutes, but that day I would have stayed for hours. We had been go-go-going for days so it was nice to take a couple of hours and just relax in the sun. We had lunch at the Sands End Cafe again (seafood, of course), before heading back out to the beach for some more relaxation. In a complete reversal of normality, Sarah was ready to leave the beach before I was, but we eventually packed up our stuff and headed back north in the Precambrian Chevy Cobalt.

We spent Monday night at Sarah’s friend’s house in Cambridge again. After dropping off the car early Tuesday morning, we caught the T back to the airport and several hours later we were back in Madison.

Last weekend, Sarah and I made the decision to pack up the car and the dog for a trip to visit Sarah’s grandmother in Pennsylvania.This trip had been scheduled for later in the week, but due to her grandmother’s failing health, we decided to accelerate our departure date to Monday morning. That meant dropping Ira off with my sister, Amy, for the week, arranging to stop our mail and newspapers, and other various and sundry things.

Monday morning, we drove east with a very full car for the 700+ mile trip to southeastern Pennsylvania. The first day, we made it to Ohio where we spent the night at Sarah’s brother’s house. That went well except that Dalla and the Zee, the house’s resident blue heeler, do not agree on which of them is the dominant dog. It always ends up with a big fight and dogs being hauled off to opposite ends of the house and this visit wasn’t much different. Unlike our last visit there, Dalla established the upper-hand this time. Of course, since she spent most of the visit on the leash, her victory was largely symbolic.

Tuesday morning, we put our gear back in the car, and headed east, but in two cars. Sarah was driving her mother’s car to Pennsylvania so that her parents would have another vehicle for their use if they needed it.

After an uneventful five hour trip, we arrived at her grandmother’s house.

At this point, I should mention that Ohio and Pennsylvania really throw an inhospitable spring. Both states were cold, rainy, and gray. While we were driving from Ohio to eastern Pennsylvania, we drove through mountains still covered in snow with temperatures in the thirties. Wisconsin is no garden of Eden, but we generally have better weather.

As you can see, Sarah’s grandmother lives in a modest brick house that isn’t any bigger than ours, and since all the bedrooms were occupied, we needed to sleep somewhere outside of the house. We’ve tried sleeping in hotels with Dalla before, and it is hard to label such an experience “sleeping” without stretching the traditional definition of that word beyond all recognition. Dalla spends all night barking at slamming car doors, conversation in the hallway, and people coming and going from surrounding rooms. Since we weren’t eager to repeat such an experience, and we had all the gear, we decided to give camping a go.

Caledonia State Park was open and accepting campers, so we targeted the campground for at least a night or two of camping. If it turned out to be too cold and uncomfortable, we would try to find a hotel, but our goal was to spend as many nights as possible in our tent.

As it turned out, we had a very pleasant camping experience. The nights were definitely cold with temperatures in the lower forties and upper thirties (we got snow the first night, that melted when it hit the ground), but if you’re tucked into a down sleeping bag with a stocking cap on your head, you don’t even notice the cold. In fact, I woke up one night because I was actually too warm and was sweating in my bag. Dalla sleeps quite well in a tent for some reason, so we didn’t have to worry about her making a big fuss every night. In fact, the only downside to having her in the tent was that she kept trying to steal my sleeping bag. Apparently, a down bag is better for sleep than her expansive, comfortable dog bed that took up a disproportionate share of the tent.

In addition to being cheap ($16/night), the campground was quiet and nearly deserted. All of your disruptive, loud-music-playing, late-night-car-door-slamming, bathroom-destroying yahoos are still at home and most other campers have a very narrow season (read: summer) in which camping seems like a good idea. There was one woman besides Sarah in the camp, and maybe seven or eight guys besides myself. That meant no problems getting in the shower or letting Dalla wander freely around the campsite.

We really enjoyed our stint at the campground though certain members of our families definitely thought we were insane for camping in mid-April and they tried several times to tell us just how insane we were (though to their credit, they never used the word insane or any of its synonyms). Yeah, there isn’t much vegetation to offer shade and there certainly any campground programs put on by rangers, but there also aren’t any bugs and you’re not likely to be camping next to the entire cast of Animal House.

Thursday afternoon, we started our journey back to Madison. We drove to Cleveland and spent the night at Sarah’s parents’ house to avoid further dog drama between Dalla and Zee. The next morning, we set out for the eight-plus hour drive back to Madison. We finally arrived in town about 19:00 on Friday evening.

Some thoughts that don’t fit the above narrative.

• Ohio and Indiana: Welcome to the twentieth century. Care to join the rest of us in the twenty-first? Electronic tolling is the future in those states. Too bad that Illinois, Massachusetts, California, Pennsylvania, New York, and other states with toll roads beat you to it. Tickets are archaic and outdated but that hasn’t stopped either state from handing them out by the millions. Once you go electronic, you never go back. If you’ve gotta pay a toll, being able to roll right through the toll plaza without stopping (or even slowing down in some cases), is slick. It doesn’t matter if the weather is cold and rainy, because you don’t have to stop, roll down your window, and carefully hand over some bills and change; money is simply deducted from an account that you maintain. I was initially skeptical of electronic tolling, but this trip really cemented its utility and convenience in my mind.
• When ordering decaf coffee, you cannot exercise too much vigilance to make sure that you actually get decaf.
• Pennsylvania: Why are seemingly all the service plazas on your toll road closed simultaneously? What genius came up with that bright idea? Quite frankly, they don’t provide much in the way of service when they’re closed.
• Illinois: As if I needed one more reason to avoid living there, the traffic around Chicago is it. The state’s open road tolling deserves commendation and their service plazas are open (take note, Pennsylvania), clean, and modern. None of that offsets the miles of stopped traffic that we saw while driving through the area. It was merely good luck on our part that all of that stopped traffic was trying to go the other way and that we weren’t caught up in it.

A partial journal for our trip to Arizona in 2006.Wednesday
==========

Arrive in PHX. Rent Dodge Stratus and head south on I-10. Stop for lunch at
Lucy’s Cafe. David: Pepperoni and Sausage pizza and Widmer Hefeweizen;
Sarah: Chicken Ceasar salad (and wine?). Purchase bottle of Encore 2001
blended red for Tina and Mike. Start heading south again. Trash along
Interstate. Rooster Cogburn’s ostrich ranch. Arrive in Tucson. Meet Mike
and Tina at condo. Geoff and Colleen arrive later in rented HHR. Head out
on hike up Ventana Canyon trail from back of development. Geoff searches
for bighorn sheep. After hike, a swim in (warm) development pool and some
soaking in (hot!) spa. Dinner at Gaazi’s Italian restaurant. Decent, but
not spectacular. Huge servings. Dessert at Cold Stone Creamery. Not worth
the money. Sarah and Geoff drive to Tucson airport to get Geoff put on
Stratus’ allowed drivers list. David nods off while they are gone. When
they return, David and Sarah push aside sofas, strip them of cushions, and
make bed on floor.

Thursday
==========

Sarah and Dave walk over to nearby resort to purchase newspaper. Geoff and
Colleen pack up their stuff and say their goodbyes. Off to Pima Air and
Space Museum for AMARC tour. While on grounds, see Sikorsky Skycrane, Super
Guppy, Vomit Comet, variety of unique and not-so-unique aircraft. Use the
walkie-talkies that came with the condo to communicate while at Pima Air and
Space. AMARC tour is on an air-conditioned bus. See numerous aircraft,
including many B-52s and Titan missiles. F-4’s are being turned into target
drones. Numerous A-10’s soar overheard during our time on the base and at
the Museum. Dinner at El Charro. David has draught Dos Equis Amber and
Carne Seca: dry meat; house specialty; it’s okay. Sarah has fish tacos;
they were good. Back to the condo to watch the Olympics. Sarah and David
go for late night swim and quick soak in hot tub before bed.

Friday
==========

David and Sarah start morning with 1 hour hike on Ventana Canyon trail.
Find a better path to resort to buy newspaper. After breakfast, drive to
west side of Tucson and visit Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. Watch Raptor
Free Flight demonstration with Harris’ hawks. See pumas, gray wolf, other
desert cats, no desert tortoise (hibernation), no desert reptiles or lizards
(probably hibernating), javelinas, cacti too numerous to count. Eat lunch
at picnic area. More Desert Museum after lunch. Cloudy day, so Kitt Peak
observatory night viewing canceled. Stop at Wild Oats Market and buy
catfish, eggs, yams, and whatnot for dinner. No decaf coffee, so buy coffee
from Ike’s Coffee instead. Next to Basha’s for mangoes.
David and Sarah make corn-meal encrusted catfish fillets, yam fries, and
mango beverage for dinner. Also serve bottle of Encore wine. After dinner,
Sarah has dark chocolate bar while everyone else eats frosted brownies.
Watch Olympics after dinner.

Saturday
==========

Up early. David finds new newspaper dispenser in condo development.
Because condo only has place settings for four, dishes are an issue.
Dishwasher soap dispenser failed to open the previous night, so David washes
all dishes by hand before others awake and while Sarah runs on Ventana
Canyon trail. After breakfast (including strawberries from previous day’s
shopping trips), off to Rincon Farmer’s Market (Sarah’s pick). David buys
five AZ-grown grapefruit. Sarah buys dog treats for Dalla and Maya.
Discover that morning that Sarah’s sunglasses are broken. David and Sarah
share tomale and chile relleno. Tina shares her egg and chorizo burrito
with Sarah and David. All browse the cactus dealer behind the market. The
market was held in a large white barn that has a green roof. David and
Sarah are sorely tempted to purchase some nice furniture but lack a good way
to get it back to Wisconsin, so pass. Meet a Rottweiller-Mix named Milton.
His person sells supposedly hollistic dog food and treats. After Farmer’s
Market, visit Colossal Cave. Nobody is keen to pay for the cave tour (it is
relatively expensive), drive deeper into the park and spend some time
visiting the historic ranch. Visit an original CCC structure which is now a
museum. Take picture of fabulous painted French doors. Pile back in car to
seek lunch. Have lunch at bar along Old Spanish Trail (road). David and
Sarah both have a mesquite-smoked chicken breast which is really good. It
actually tastes like it was smoked with mesquite. After lunch, drive to
Tucson Electric Park to see if we can see any of MLB spring training
(pitchers and catchers had reported). Nothing is going on, so we head
South to visit the Titan Missile Museum.
Sunday
==========

Monday
==========

Despite the best efforts of American Airlines, Sarah and I arrived back in Madison late last night. Perhaps the most frustrating part of the thirty-three hour return journey was when the last flight of our travels was delayed by a half-hour on the tarmac in Dallas while the crew struggled to fix a piece of critical safety equipment: a broken tray table.

In the next day or so I’m hoping to have some pictures from the trip up in the photo gallery.

It’s been a long journey, but Sarah and I are together again and currently exploring New Zealand.
My last day at the Pole was relatively uneventful. I had breakfast, said goodbye to a few folks, took a few last pictures, cleaned my room, and headed for the plane. While we were waiting for the plane to finish off-loading fuel (they fly full to the Pole and use much of the plane’s fuel capacity to help keep tanks at the Pole full), I said my goodbyes to several others who were either wintering over or simply departing after me.

Eventually we got the go ahead to board the plane and after a three hour flight, we landed in McMurdo. One of the dumpy and more unfortunate shuttle vehicles was dispatched to take our crew of eleven to the Base from Williams Field, which is on the permanent ice shelf a few miles away. After a reasonably slow and unpleasant ride to the base, we unloaded from the transport and got our room assignments. After dumping my stuff in the room, I headed down the halls to see when we would Bag Drag for our flight to CHC the next morning. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that we wouldn’t Bag Drag until the next evening for a flight the day after the next. When I told my roommates, all of whom had flown in with me from the Pole, about the Bag Drag and delayed flight, they all thought I was joking because it was such bad news.

Once you’ve been to the Pole, you realize what a dump McMurdo is. It’s like a mining town without the mining. The people aren’t very friendly; the food isn’t very good; the base itself is fairly ugly. Spending any more time at McMurdo than absolutely necessary is truly a form of torture for a Polie.

That night we all made some sort of half-hearted plans for the next day. I decided to hike in the morning and in the afternoon.

That done, it was time to call Sarah and tell her the bad news. Originally, I planned on meeting her at the Christchurch airport (CHC) on 05 Jan 07. The flight delay meant that I wouldn’t get to town until the 6th, at the earliest. She decided to book herself a hotel room in town and we arranged a method for meeting once I was in town.

After breakfast the next morning, and another check of the Bag Drag list, I headed out on the Observation Hill loop. It was an incredibly windy hike with 25-30 knot winds, and of course, no shelter. Regardless, the exercise improved my spirits and I took some interesting photos.

On my way back to the dorm, I decided to stop by the MCC to see if I could discover why the C-17 flight off the continent had been delayed. Once I was there, I took another look at the Bag Drag list and discovered that the flight had been delayed for at least another day. In talking with the woman working there, I found out that a part was needed from the States before the C-17 could fly, that the part hadn’t arrived yet, and it might not arrive for two or three more days. But, there was an LC-130 Hercules leaving that evening for a medevac mission and I had been lucky enough to make the initial passenger manifest. They had been trying to find me, but since I’d been out hiking, they hadn’t had any luck. The only stipulation was that I had to Bag Drag, right now. I rushed down the hill, got all my stuff together, and rushed back up the hill to the MCC. If I could get off the barren rock known as McMurdo in five to seven hours, I would do it, even it meant a Herc flight to CHC.

A C-17 flight from CHC to McMurdo or back takes about five hours. A Herc flight takes at least seven and one-half hours. But, it wouldn’t be just me and the medevac on that flight, it would be me, thirty five of my closest friends, the medevac, her nurse, another sick lady, her caretaker, and a handful of Air Force crew members. In short, it was going to be a very intimate seven and one-half hour experience.

I’m going to gloss over some details here for the sake of brevity, but that seven and one-half hour flight beat me up in more ways than the rest of the trip combined. We arrived in CHC at 03:30 on 05 Jan 07. Of course, we then had to be subjected to NZ Customs and passport exams (Why? Your guess is as good as mine.) After that, we walked over to the CDC to doff our ECW gear for the last time. By the time a shuttle dropped me off at my hotel in CHC, it was 04:45. In fact, the night desk clerk was convinced I was trying to check-out of the hotel, because no one checks-in at that hour. After finally getting the message, he asked me, “Was your flight delayed?” The best I could manage was, “In a matter of speaking, yes.”

In the very late morning I got up, found a cup of decent decaf coffee (my first cup of coffee since heading down to the ice), grabbed a scone and a local newspaper, and headed out to Cathedral Square where I ate the scone, drank the coffee, and got a great sunburn on my ears and neck while I watched the people and enjoyed the warmth.

As I sat in the Square and watched the people, one of the differences between the two continents couldn’t have been more starkly defined. Many of the people in the Square clearly gave more thought to personal grooming every day than they did to the Pole. When you’ve been surrounded by the Pole for weeks, it’s night to see so many people with such a trivial set of problems.

Anyway, I randomly met up with one of my fellow IceCubers from the flight the night before, and we had a drink before I headed out to the airport to pick-up Sarah. Since she wasn’t expecting to see me at the airport, she was quite surprised when I met her there. After collecting her luggage, we headed back to the hotel where we cleared her reservation, dropped her luggage, and headed out to enjoy the remainder of the afternoon.

That night for dinner, we met up with five other IceCubers: two had come in with me the night before and three who were waiting for their flight to the ice to depart. We had drinks, dinner, and drinks while telling stories and sharing laughs.

The next morning we got up late since both of us seemed to need more sleep than usual. Sarah is adjusting to the time change and I’m still bouncing back from my disrupted sleep patterns at the Pole. After a late breakfast we made our way to the Botanical Gardens. I’d visited the Gardens before heading south, but Sarah had never seen them and I wanted her to see some of the truly impressive trees and flowers there.

After strolling around the Gardens for a while, we ate lunch at the Dux de Lux, a local brewpub.

That night we had dinner at Cookin’ with Gas, the restaurant that supposedly has the best food in town. It was good, but was it the best? That’s debatable. Regardless, I got to try some of the more difficult to acquire local brews, so I thought the experience was worth it.

This morning, we decided to live on the edge and pick up the rental car Sarah had reserved before leaving the States. We walked a couple of blocks down the street and got a silverish-blue Toyota Corolla hatchback. After that, it was off to Akaroa.

For those who don’t remember, New Zealand is a drive-on-the-left country. That’s not necessarily easy to quickly get used to. Perhaps the most difficult part is that the turn signal is on the right side of the steering wheel, while the wiper stalk is on the left, where the blinker stalk is located in American cars. As such, whenever we forget about that, and we try to actuate a blinker, one of two possible events takes place. If we’re trying to signal a left, the wipers wipe quickly across the windscreen two or three times before we can correct our error. If we’re trying to signal a right, we get one wipe and then the wipers return to their resting location. I’m fairly certain that local drivers have learned to watch the wipers of other cars to discover the intentions of foreign drivers.

It took about 1.25 hours to reach Akaroa, probably 1.5 by the time we stopped at a cheese factory on the way to pick up some cheese. We bought some edam, and some aged cheddar soaking in port wine at Barrys Bay Cheese, along with one of the local Rose wines. We had decided to have a light lunch of cheese, bread, salami, and wine once we reached Akaroa.

Akaroa is a small town located in the crater of a volcano that is long inactive. It’s something of a vacation destination for vacationing Kiwis. We picked up a hiking map, some bread, and found a pleasant place to eat our lunch in Akaroa Domain (something of a wild tree garden which overlooks the Akaroa harbor).

After lunch, we visited the local lighthouse and then started on our multi-hour hike up the hills to Heritage Park. The hike was a tough, steady climb, but we did eventually reach the top of the hill where the park was located. The picture at the right is a picture of Sarah with the Maori wind god, Teko Teko.

On our way back down to the car, we stopped at Tree Crop Farm, which was this gorgeous little place on the side of the hill. We had fancy berry drinks and some chocolate and fruit snacks while admiring their extensive and impressive gardens. If you’re in the area, I would recommend a stop.

After that, it was back in the car for a return trip to Christchurch.

It’s hard to overstate the dramatic difference between the landscape New Zealand in the summer and Antarctica. Let me show you two pictures to see if you can see it for yourself.

It will most likely be a few days before I post again. We’re heading west across the country tomorrow into smaller towns with few amenities so Internet access may be harder to find.

Today felt like the first day that I started making progress towards the Pole again.
Last night, I explored the Botanic Gardens in Christchurch before dinner. The sun sets quite late here (well after 21:00) and since the Gardens don’t close until an hour before sunset, I had plenty of time to explore. Sections of the Gardens smelled fantastic as there are numerous flowers and trees in bloom. It was odd to see a giant California Redwood here in New Zealand, but they have a nice specimen, in addition to numerous other California plants. They also have one of the most spectacular eucalyptus trees that you’re ever likely to see. It’s absolutely massive.

In addition to looking at all the greenery (quite a change from Wisconsin this time of year), I found several species of birds that are unique to New Zealand. Earlier in the day, I had purchased a book on New Zealand birds, so I put it right to work helping me to identify the birds I was seeing. Disappointingly enough, European settlers introduced many common species of birds here, including house sparrows, starlings, blackbirds, and mallards. So, while there are some unique species, they are often individuals in a crowd of the mundane.

For dinner, I biked over to a restaurant named Two Fat Indians. It wasn’t until I was eating the food (lamb vindaloo) that I realized that this wasn’t the ordinary Indian food that I’m accustomed to getting. This was actually good Indian food. I can’t say what tipped me off to that fact, but I can best describe it as the difference between a Hershey’s chocolate bar and a bar of good, dark European chocolate. On the downside, their wines were awful, especially the Riesling I had. They were also touting a one-year old Gewurtztraminer as a fine wine. So, if you’re at Two Fat Indians, stick to the beer list.

This morning it rained, and I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to stick to my original plan of biking out to the CDC for my ECW issuance session. However, the day cleared up just enough that I was able to bike out there and back without any real problems.

At the CDC I was issued two bags full of ECW. Some of it I have to take. Other bits I could take or leave at my whim. In the end, I returned the vast majority of the optional gear and even some of the required gear since I brought much of my own that is either nicer or better fitting.

The big shock of the ECW session was learning that we need to report to the CDC at 04:00 local time tomorrow. That’s right, 04:00. We’re flying a military transport to McMurdo and I’ve been wondering if they folks making up the flight schedule haven’t confused this with a Navy Seal drop in the heart of night over enemy territory. Regardless, I’ve arranged for my 03:30(!) shuttle to the CDC, and my 03:00(!!) wake-up call. Both the front-desk and the shuttle dispatcher seemed incredulous when I told them what time I needed their services, but I don’t have much choice in the matter.

Tonight, I met up with a couple of other IceCube folks and we went out for drinks and dinner at the Brewers Arms. That particular restaurant’s schtick is that they heat a slab of stone up to 400 or so degrees. Then they plop a raw slab of meat of your choice on the stone and bring the whole mess to the table. Then, the meat cooks right in front of you and you can remove it from the stone whenever it is done to your satisfaction. It was unique, but not particularly compelling.

Anyway, it’s off to bed for me. Maybe I can get five hours before my crack-of-dawn wake-up call. I’ve added a handful of photos to the Photo Gallery. If all goes according to plan, I’ll be writing in this space tomorrow from McMurdo base on Antarctica. If the plane is force to return to New Zealand, I’ll be writing once again from Christchurch, so keep your fingers crossed for gentle winds and clear skies over the Antarctic coast.

More news and information from your faithful correspondent in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Last night, I ventured over to Cathedral Square to take in The Cathedral Grammar School’s Christmas Festival of Carols and Lessons. Despite the promises of the school’s Dean, the night was not particularly fun for either the kids or the adults who came to hear them. I was one of a very few people in the audience who did not have a rooting interest in the choir (i.e., I wasn’t related to any of the participants).

Leaving aside many questions or religion and ethics, you’ve got to hand to the Catholics that they build some interesting buildings. The Christchurch Cathedral is nothing like any of the great European Cathedrals, nor is it particularly old (it’s celebrating its 125th birthday this year which makes it younger than the City of Madison). However, the New Zealanders opt to fill their cathedral with music which makes all the difference. There’s just something about choral music filling a large space that creates a particularly satisfying experience.

During the course of the performance, I learned that just because the words are the same, you can’t count on Christmas carols being sung to the same tune. For instance, the New Zealand version of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” is nothing like the version we sing in the US. Normally, that wouldn’t be a problem, but because portions of the show included audience participation, I often had to sit out a verse or two until I could pick up the tune and stumble through the remaining verses.

After the chorus concert, I sought out dinner and ended up with another lesson in globalization. I found myself sitting in an English bar (The Bard of Avon), drinking New Zealand (Monteith’s Pilsner) and German (Erdinger Weissbeer) beers, listening to an expatriate Canadian (Eric Simon), sing American pop and rock songs (John Denver, CCR, Neil Young, etc.) to an audience of people that included people from Israel, Taiwan, the US, and England.

This morning, I rented a bicycle and set out to get outside of the city center. Christchurch has a reasonably solid network of bicycle friendly streets, so getting about on the bike isn’t too much work. However, for those were not previously aware of the fact, they drive on the left here. That means that bicyclists ride on the left as well, which is not an easy adjustment. Everything feels backwards when you’re riding on the left. You make left turns on red; right turns are more difficult than lefts; pulling out of a driveway always is done with a left turn; etc. The easiest way to function that I’ve found so far is to listen to your instincts. If they are all telling you that you’re doing something wrong, chances are that you’re right in the left-driving world of New Zealand.

After a while, I found myself at Sumner Beach, south and a bit east of Christchurch. There were people out running their dogs in the surf, and a group of people getting instruction in surfing.

A bit further down the road, I stopped at Scarborough Beach and rested for a while near a cafe ever-so-cleverly named Scarborough Fare. Har, har. After some time spent messing around with the various modes on my camera, I tackled the steep and winding Whitewash Road up to the top of Scarborough Head. Fortunately, the bicycle rental folks dropped off a mountain bike with a fairly low gear. Even so, I had to abandon the bike three-quarters of the way up the hill as the trail just got too steep.

Once I was at the top, I took a few photos, watched the gulls for a while, and contemplated just how much sunburn I was getting and just how little I could do about it. After a walk into Nicholson’s Park to refill my water bottle, it was back down the hill to find some grub.

For lunch, I ate at a little seafood shack in Sumner and had the Gurnard Burger. On the menu, this was listed as: “Crumbled Gurnard, egg, cheese, and tartare sauce.” I thought this might be two sorts of cheese (Gurnard and some unnamed cheese), with an egg and some tartar sauce (what for?) on a hamburger. What I got was a deep-fried fish fillet on a toasted bun with some melted cheese, a fried egg, a couple of tomato slices, some lettuce, and a generous serving of tartar sauce. So, apparently, Gurnard is a white fish something like cod. I chose the Gurnard burger because I just couldn’t think about having fish and chips, which is definitely the national dish here. I got chips with my sandwich last night, and it doesn’t seem like I’ll have any shortage of opportunities to have chips again if the urge arises.

After the burger, I stopped at The Thirsty Marriner (spelling deliberate; it’s on Marriner Rd), to rest and refuel with a Tiger Beer (from Singapore) before biking into the teeth of a stiff wind back to Christchurch.

On the way back, I stopped to buy strawberries and gooseberries from a guy selling them out of the back of his station wagon on the side of the road. The strawberries are good, but I may have to pitch the gooseberries. They’re quite sour and I just don’t see myself finishing them.

Now, I’m sheltering from the midday sun and the wind in my hotel room for a couple of hours before heading out again. The last thing I need before heading for Antarctica in a couple of days is an even worse sunburn than I’ve already got.

I’ve added some photos to the Photo Gallery that show some of what I saw and did so far today.

The first leg of my travel to Antarctica is complete. A hotel in Christchurch, New Zealand is the current domicile of your faithful correspondent.

Let me start by saying that, all things considered, my flights from Madison to Christchurch (CHC) were actually quite smooth. On all of the flights I had more room than regulations require as I was able to either snag empty rows, or drew some sort of lucky cosmic straw that put me in an empty row on an otherwise full plane. My luggage even made the journey seemingly unmolested (except by the seemingly obligatory TSA ransacking at some point in the journey) and was available for pick-up (or uplift, as they say here) each time I needed it.

Having said that, the journey is a major test of one’s patience. The flight over the Pacific is seemingly interminable, even though it is only twelve and one-half hours. Fortunately, I did the over-the-counter equivalent of dropping an anvil on my head by taking a Benedryl (an antihistimine) shortly after take off. It took the better part of an hour to kick in, but once it was flowing through my veins I was out for six hours of restless sleep. There’s no way I could have slept that long without the drug in my system. Even so, I still woke up at 01:30 local time and never went back to sleep, so I’m looking at an early night tonight.

Door to door, the journey from Madison to CHC took about thirty hours. That’s a long time to spend in the same set of clothes.

Here in CHC I’m staying at the Copthorne Central. It’s a relatively nice place, but it suffers from street noise like most hotels in larger cities. There’s a nice park across the street through which the Avon River flows and I spent some time there this afternoon.

I’ve got tomorrow off so I’ll have to keep myself busy sightseeing and the like. On Wednesday (New Zealand time), I’m scheduled to report to the United States Antarctic Program (USAP) Clothing Distribution Center (CDC) where I’ll be issued my Extreme Cold Weather (ECW) gear. That’s around 13:30 local time; my day before and after that is pretty much open. However, I depart early the next morning for McMurdo, so I’ll spend part of the day, I’m sure, getting ready to depart.

What else might you want to know? There are some really big trees here in Christchurch. And when I say big, I mean big. These trees aren’t big like we think of big trees in America. That is to say that the trees aren’t real tall. Instead they’re really, really wide with huge spreading canopies.

I tried the beer at one of the local brew pubs with my lunch. I was disappointed, but not because the beer was bad, but rather because of the style of beer. It was a Raspberry Summer Wheat and I was expecting something more like a Bavarian-style wheat, instead I got an American-style wheat. Next time, I’ll probably try the ginger beer as that’s more a local specialty.

There some a handful of photos from my journey so far in the Photo Gallery.

Last night, we returned to Wisconsin after spending six days in Arizona. By the time we got home, it was nearly 2:30 in the morning. When I have some time, I’ll write more about our trip. The short version is that we saw and did a great number of things and a good time was had by all.

Sarah and I spent part of the weekend visiting friends and family in the Twin Cities.Friday afternoon, we packed up the car, bid Dalla adieu, and headed northwest towards the Twins Cities: Minneapolis and St. Paul.

We got to St. Paul in the early evening. Sarah has to conduct another coring operation for her master’s thesis, and some of the equipment she needs had been recently built in Minneapolis. Part of our mission was to pick up that equipment. Our first stop was at a house in St. Paul to pick up 150 lbs. of aluminum coring rods (all about eight feet long), several eight-foot lengths of plastic tubing, the coring device itself, numerous four-foot lengths of PVC piping split in half, a bundle of foor-foot lenths of plastic tubing, and various other coring essentials. With the car now stuffed to the brim with coring equipment, we headed for the house of our friends, Josh and Sarah Ann.

We unloaded all of the coring gear into their garage and spent the night relaxing in their house with them. Their cats have a history of pulling evil tricks on me in the middle of the night, so it was a bit of an anomaly when the cats merely settled for walking across my head several times during the night.

In the morning, we all piled into the car and headed for Hell’s Kitchen in downtown Minneapolis. Hell’s Kitchen makes some of the most fantastic breakfast food on the planet, and I make a point of eating there at least once every time I spend a night in the Cities. We were not disappointed this trip as the food was spectacular, once again.

Sarah Ann had a pile of work she needed to finish over the weekend, so she and Josh headed back to St. Paul while Sarah and I strolled the downtown streets. Our destination? The fabled, Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.

My parents and their friends met us at the Metrodome for a (meaningless) baseball game between the Minnesota Twins and the Chicago White Sox. Before the season began and Minnesota’s season headed south, it looked like that three game series would have serious playoff implications. As it turned out, the Twins were essentially playing for nothing other than pride. They called up and played several players from their minor leage team and filled the infield with some of their bench players. However, they did trot out Johan Santana to pitch, which meant that something good was likely to happen for the home team.

Something great happened for the home team, for a change. The Twins not only scored runs (a rarity worthy of mention this year), but the White Sox hitters may have been better served to stay home that day. Santana had overwhelming stuff and he struck out thirteen batters. He didn’t allow a hit or walk until the fifth inning. Santana pitched into the ninth inning when he just ran out of gas. He had two men on base, with nobody out, and at that point, he had given all he had. He walked the next man and several of his pitches didn’t even make it to home plate.

Twins manager, Ron Gardenhire, trotted out to the mound and Santana left the game to a standing ovation. In came the Twins’ All-Star closer, Joe Nathan. Nathan faced an unenviable position: three men on base; nobody out; the heart of the White Sox order coming to the plate; and a shutout pitched by a man who gave everything he had on the field.

But, All-Stars are supposed to emerge victorious from situations like that and Nathan was equal to the moniker. Fourteen pitches and three strike-outs later, the White Sox were walking dejectedly back to their dugout while the Twins were celebrating a great win. It would have meant even more to the Twins and their fans if the game hadn’t been meaningless, but I think that all the fans in the stands left happy that day. Even White Sox fans had to be happy that they witnessed such a dominating pitching performance.

After the game, it was time for lunch, and we all headed over to The Local for brews and food. We ate outside and everyone seemed to enjoy sitting around with beer and pub food after a good game.

After lunch, my parents and their friends headed back to their hotel while we shopped for a few gifts Downtown. Eventually, we called Josh and he picked us up and brought us back to their house.

We sat around the house for a while, chatting, until our stomachs signaled it was dinner time. Josh and Sarah Ann took us to Pad Thai, a Thai restaurant located in St. Paul. We loaded ourselves down with a variety of Thai food before heading out to tackle one of the Twin Cities’ numerous miniature golf courses.

We ended up at Burnsville Mini Golf. If you’ve ever wondered what miniature golf will be like after nuclear war, Burnsville Mini Golf is probably a good approximation. It was clearly built many years ago, and not a cent of the profits has been sunk back into the business. The sign isn’t lit, which makes finding the little business quite a challenge at night. They have a limited number of putters and balls. One soft-spoken high-school student works in a nearly empty clubhouse. If you want a drink or a snack, you’ll need to scale the chain link fence to reach the convenience store next door. The holes are constructed of artificial turf on concrete pads with walls made of bricks. In many places, the turf is coming up from the concrete. In other places, the turf is gone entirely. Many of the bricks are broken or missing. In fact, the large number of unsecured bricks on many holes means that one could rearrange the holes as desired. The water holes had no water. Many stones from the surrounding landscaping were present on the course, leading to some interesing and unexpected ball trajectories. Some of the holes weren’t lit which makes them quite a challenge at night. There was one other group on the course when we showed up. Other than that, it was only us. Clearly, Burnsville Mini Golf is nowhere near the upper echelon of the miniature golf galaxy.

Regardless, we had a good time playing the course. When your ball is just as likely to leave the course by traveling through a hole in the wall as it to go into the cup, you can’t take the game too seriously. Josh didn’t even have a miniature golf ball; he had a regular golf ball. This meant that his shots often acted very differently from ours, often to interesting and funny effect. So, while Burnsville Mini Golf isn’t likely to host any sort of professional miniature golf tournament any time soon, if you just want to be out and about on a pleasant September evening, it suffices.

Sunday morning, we strapped much of the coring equipment on top of the car, said our goodbyes, and headed back to Wisconsin.

As usual, I posted some pictures of the trip.

Like anyone who likes to travel, I constantly maintain a list of places I want to see and things I’d like to do or experience.Boeing a few years ago floated the idea of building a supersonic commercial airliner, but like most ideas that captivate the mind and offer some hope that the world isn’t in a constant race to the bottom, that idea quickly died. At the time, Boeing was looking down the barrel of an unknown future filled with airline fleets of the Airbus A380, the gigantic airliner recently flown in Europe. Boeing thought that airlines might like to offer their customers the option of getting somewhere faster, rather than arriving in a massive heap of humanity. As it turned out, the airlines are too mired in their own cess pools of tunnel vision and cost cutting to care much about what their customers liked. (If you need evidence of that, I challenge you to find me ten people who actually want to be dehumanized at the airport security line, then crammed into an impossibly small seat, and charged for the privilege.) Why do I bring up this piece of aerospace trivia?

Nearly ten years ago, I decided that I wanted to fly on the Concorde some day. It occurred to me that I probably was never going to fly faster than the speed of sound any other way, so I needed to get onto the Concorde. The problem was that I didn’t have $20,000 dollars to spend on a round-trip flight to Europe for Sarah and I. Time passed and I never was able to get together $20,000 for the purpose of a pair of airline flights. As we all know, the Concorde now flies no more and my chance to travel faster than the speed of sound now sits grounded in a museum hanger in Virginia.

As I read about Hurricane Katrina the last few days, I started wondering if I missed my chance to see New Orleans, too. For the last four years, after reading about New Orleans’ extreme vulnerability to hurricanes, I’ve been saying that I need to see New Orleans before it is gone forever. As I went to bed last night, it appeared that New Orleans was going to join the Concorde on my list of missed opportunities.

Now that the city has been spared the full fury of an apocalyptic storm, I’ve pushed New Orleans back on to my list of places I need to see, and soon. Next time, the Big Easy may not be so lucky.

Sarah and I took the better portion of today to visit the Experimental Aircraft Association’s AirVenture 2005 exhibition in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.AirVenture is among the biggest airshows in the world. It routinely sees 10,000 planes fly-in and while the show is running, the Oshkosh airport is the busiest airport in the world. Hundreds of thousands of people attend the show every year. It is a really, really, really big airshow.

Sarah and I arrived in Oshkosh early this morning and left around 16:30 because we needed to get home to let the dog out. During our time on the show grounds we walked by literally hundreds of aircraft and probably didn’t stop to look at more than a handful of planes for a significant amount of time. For all the walking we did, we probably saw or walked by less than a quarter of the planes on display. The number of warbirds on display was endless. If there was a warbird you wanted to see, and if it wasn’t at Oshkosh, it probably doesn’t exist in flyable form anywhere in the world.

Upon entering the grounds, we immediately encountered a field of P-51 Mustangs. Let me repeat that, a field of Mustangs. We’re not talking about one or two or even five. We’re talking about a whole field of P-51 Mustangs. We saw all sorts of warbirds, some so obscure I couldn’t even begin to guess at their names, numbers, or heritage. There were numerous B-17 and B-25 bombers on display. Supposedly, there was a B-29 somewhere on the grounds but we never found it. There were replicas of WWI biplane bombers, modern military jets, and everything in between.

Every afternoon, an airshow starts overhead. Today, the airshow featured plenty of formation flight by single-engine warbirds, numerous P-51 flybys, some P-51 formation flights, flights by various other sundry military craft, and a USAF so-called Heritage flight where US military craft from different eras fly together in formation.

For me, the highlight of the entire show was hearing Burt Rutan, the man behind SpaceShip One, White Knight, Voyager, the Beechcraft Starship, and the Verieze, speak on the future of manned spaceflight. For those who don’t know or remember, SpaceShip One completed not only the first private manned space flight in 2004, but two additional space flights that year, as well. That feat made Rutan even more of a star EAA attendees than he already was.

In his talk, Rutan repeatedly took NASA and the US Government to the woodshed for their lack of vision and courage. Rutan presented some startling facts and figures about innovation and safety in space (or the lack of both) that really brought home just how mismanged the US manned space program is. In Rutan’s view, the Space Shuttle (which coincidentally had launched earlier in the morning), is about the worst possible vehicle for space flight. It is complicated, prone to failure, extraordinarily expensive, and offers no advantages over platforms like the Saturn V. I wonder how the folks in the NASA tent, which was just 50 yards away, might have felt had they heard Rutan’s speech.

Rutan’s speech profoundly affected my thoughts and feelings about aviation. After hearing his speech and seeing SpaceShip One up close and personal, I started to perceive just how warped and ineffectual much of the aviation and space industries are. Instead of doing really bold, creative things and learning from our mistakes, we tend to do safe, boring things that don’t fail all that often. As Rutan noted, in just eight years (1961-1969), the US went to the moon. Where have we gone in the thirty-plus years since then? Well, we built a space station. No, that doesn’t count because we had Skylab in the seventies. Umm… We launched some probes? Well, we did that in the seventies, as well. Essentially, we’ve gone to Earth orbit. Oooooo….

In many ways, I started to feel as though the fascination with warbirds is really just a sick manifestation of airplane geekiness that lacks an appropriate outlet. You should have seen the crowds around SpaceShip One (SS1). There was a Dornier Do-24ATT across the flightline from SS1. There is exactly one Do-24ATT in the world. For all that anybody looked at it, the plane may as well have stayed at its home airport. Maybe people get excited about warbirds because they are rare; maybe people get excited about warbirds because WWII was among the last times that aviation was a grand and glorious affair.

Given something really new and really exciting, the aviation community came out in force to hear all about it and shower glory upon its creator. Ask almost any EAA attendee and Rutan not only can walk on water, he can repeal gravity and cure the common cold given enough time and money. I don’t feel that way about him, but I definitely drank the Kool-aid he passed around during his speech. The man is clearly a visionary and an asset to this country. In many ways, Rutan’s company, Scaled Composites, is more valuable to the nation’s future success than all the oil under Alaska.

Look what the man did: he got a man into space twice in less than two weeks with a plane smaller and lighter than a C-141, without government money, without government tax breaks, and without government advice. Who else among us can say that? Who else among us has even tried that?

We took some pictures at the event, for those interested in seeing a very small snapshot of the day.