The Eclectic Traveler

We took a cruise from Kiel, Germany up to Iceland, Svalbard and Norway (with a stop in the Shetland Islands of Scotland along the way). The full photo album is online for your viewing pleasure.

In January, 2014, we spent two weeks touring India and Nepal. In addition to the traditional tourist sites like the Taj Mahal in Agra, we visited several other cities in India and several locations in and around Kathmandu, Nepal. The photo album is posted for your perusal.

I am experimenting with a different “skin” for my photo albums. If you right click on the link and tell your browser to open it in a new window, then maximize the window, images will be displayed larger on your monitor.  The “play” icon in the upper right will run the album as a slide show, 4-second interval.  (You may change that if you wish)  Also, when navigating manually through the larger images, the right/left arrow keys on you keyboard will move to the next/previous image in the album.

A new pipe organ, Opus 3898, built by Casavant Freres in Canada, is being installed at First Presbyterian Church.  The physical installation is complete and the final voicing and tuning will begin the first week of November.  I have compiled a photo album of the installation.  The instrument replaces a 1957 Wicks organ that was installed when the Sanctuary was built.  That organ has been donated to the Cathedral in Apia, Samoa and should be installed and ready there sometime in the spring of 2014.

The Casavant organ has 4,357 pipes and is installed in the existing pipe chambers in the Chancel, with two antiphonal chests and pipes installed on the rear wall of the Sanctuary.  The initial use of the organ in worship will occur on Christmas Eve of this year.

The photo album from our British Isles cruise is now online for your viewing pleasure.

My 2013 highpointing trip took me to Borah Peak, Idaho and Kings Peak, Utah, both for the third time.  Borah is one of the toughest climbs among the 50 state highpoints but we succeeded in getting past the aptly-named Chicken-Out Ridge and on up to the summit.  Contrariwise, the weather didn’t cooperate with our plans for Kings Peak a few days later.  Fortunately, Kings is up a beautiful valley and a pleasant hike to the base camp near Dollar Lake so having to return for a better weather window isn’t too bad.  For more details, please read my illustrated trip report.

Over Nathan’s Christmas break, we flew to Sydney, Australia, for a cruise up to Vanuatu and New Caledonia. After returning to Sydney, we flew down to Hobart, Tasmania for a couple of days before coming back to Sydney once again for the New Year’s celebrations. For Nathan, Australia marked his seventh continent and one hundredth country (per the Travelers Century Club list).

The photo album is online.

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 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.