The Eclectic Traveler

While it’s nice to have some open ground behind our yard, that means we have a quasi-infinite supply of moles that move in from the trees and grass behind us and start tunneling in our yard. Various baits and traps never seemed to work very well until I found the “Easy Set” Mole Eliminator trap. This scissors-style trap seems to work much better than the old-fashioned “bed of nails” traps.

So far this spring, six moles down but there are lots more where those came from, so it’s a continuing process. Trap one, another one moves in. At least I have them (mostly) pushed back to the edge of the yard where they don’t do too much damage before they are “eliminated.”

For a while now, I’ve been wanting to start documenting some of the model rockets I’ve been working on the past few years.  First effort along those lines are a couple of video clips shot from a rocket using one of Creative Labs’ “Vado” flash video cameras.  About the size of a cellphone, these will record up to an hour of video.

Last week, I took the video rocket over to MICDS where the athletic fields make for a nice large open area. We launched the rocket twice, once as a single stage, once with a booster stage under it. Videos from both launches plus a launch still of the two-stage setup are on this page. The files are large, 11 meg and 35 meg, respectively, so expect quite a bit of download time.

We flew to Munich over Christmas to visit Nathan, studying at Technische Universität München. After a few days in Munich, we flew to Barcelona and took a Mediterranean cruise to Turkey, Cyprus, Rhodes, Egypt and Palma de Mallorca. We were supposed to have visited Sardinia, as well, but a storm blowing through that part of the Mediterranean kept the ship down along the coast of Libya and Tunisia until the waters settled down.

The photo album is up for your viewing pleasure.

We just got back from a tour of Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay. The photo album is under the “Travels” pulldown.

We visited Lake Titicaca and La Paz in Bolivia, Asuncion in Paraguay plus Montevideo and Colonia in Uruguay.

The annual Highpointers Club convention took place over the previous weekend. While there, I shot a panorama at the summit. The club’s timing was great because Saturday was the pick day of the event, weather-wise, so everyone had a great day to either hike up a couple of miles of the Appalachian Trail or just drive up to the parking lot a couple of hundred yards from the highpoint monument in the aptly-named High Point State Park.

While on a business trip up to Minneapolis, I had a free weekend. Having done all of the nearby state highpoints, I decided to find some other interesting site to visit. I drove up to Lake Itasca, the source of the Mississippi River. At the outlet of the lake, there are a series of rocks across the outlet stream, otherwise known as the Mississippi River, so you can quite literally walk (well, rock-hop) across the Mississippi at that point. I shot a panorama from one of the rocks in the stream.

A little ways downstream, there is a log bridge for those not quite so venturesome as to hop across a bunch of slick rocks. I shot a second panorama from the bridge. If you look upstream in that pan, you can see some people making their way across the rocks. In warmer weather, you could easily wade back across that small pool between the rocks and the bridge.

In addition to the Ha Long Bay cave panorama mentioned below, I shot four additional VR pans:  The courtyard of the National Museum in Phnom Penh, an interior courtyard in Angkor Wat, a pan from the upper terrace of the Pre Rup temple near Angkor Wat and the Tran Quoc pagoda complex in Hanoi.

Yesterday, we returned from a two-week tour through Cambodia and Vietnam. Interesting trip and a lot of photogenic sites, especially the temple complexes at Angkor Wat, Cambodia. I’ve posted the photo album of the trip. To run that as a slide show, click on the “play” icon in the upper right corner of the album page.  Look for updates as I go through and annotate the individual image pages with more information about them.

We’re nearing the end of a two-week tour of Cambodia and Vietnam.  While there, I shot a panorama in a cave on an island in Ha Long Bay.  See this page for the panorama in Java format and a link to a larger Quicktime VR format as well.

If you’re visiting this site for the first time, the “about” page link in the upper right corner will give you a little background on mtritter.org, which has been around for nearly 10 years.  I started out with my old AT&T homepage and registered the URL a couple of years later.  Since then, the site has been hosted on a couple of different companies, most recently hostmonster.com.

If you’re familiar with the site, I replaced the introductory verbiage on the main page with this blog. Something different for a change, and a way to let me visibly note changes to the site, recent additions, etc.