The Eclectic Traveler

Over Christmas/New Year’s, we flew to Georgetown, Guyana and from there toured Suriname and French Guiana.  Those three countries finish off South America for Marcia and me (Nathan still needs Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay, sorry, kid).  Our country totals are now Marcia, 144; Nathan, 107 and myself, 128.

Photo album from the trip is online.

This October, we flew to Athens and boarded a ship for a cruise of the Aegean and Adriatic Seas. Six new countries, six new pins in the map.

The photo album is on line.

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.

We spent a few days in Istanbul, then flew to Odessa.  The tour included Yalta and then a cruise up the Dnieper River to Kiev. Photo album is online.  Very interesting trip, a lot of history especially in Yalta, where Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met in 1945.

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.