Yellowstone, Evil Student Disease, Mustangs and California

I’m on another plane, so there is more time for posting to this blog…

The research group meeting in Montana was very successful, and it was worth my trip up there. Following a full day of work we headed out for a meal, and those of us who had no sense / wanted to play at being students again went on to ‘Molly Brown’s’, a local hangout for more beer, shots, and beer. 2am rolled around, and I found myself back at the hotel courtesy of our designated (student) driver. It’d been a while since I’d seen 8 people in a 5 seat 4x4, but all made it safely.

The following day I collected a rental car from the airport and drove 2 hours to Yellowstone National Park. I had unfortunately caught student disease, which (for those not in the know) is a combination of a hangover and the flu. This meant I had a bit of a slow day, but it was cool to see the park and a bunch of bubbling pools and geysers. Quite interestingly, it was incredibly cold, and it was snowing a fair bit too – I always forget that America is a big place, and just because it was 100 degrees in Houston doesn’t mean that it’s hot elsewhere.

I drove in towards the main geyser basins, and stopped off at the always well marked exhibits – there are boardwalks taking you around the boiling pools where you can see the hydrothermal fluids bubbling up from deep in the crust. It’s pretty cool – deep blue pools, sulphur smells and bubbling mud.

I called in at Old Faithful (of course) and hung around fro about 15 minutes in the sub-zero temperatures until it blew its thousands of gallons of boiling water over 100 feet into the air.
I saw Elk and Bison (no bears though) among other animals – all in all quite a packed day. The snow started again as I headed through to Mammoth Hot Springs where I was spending the night.

You can see all the photos right here in the Gallery.

On Sunday, I basically had to leave for the airport at Bozeman, feeling horribly fluey, and using up about a tree’s worth of tissues. The plane left at 1pm, and went via Denver where I changed to the next plane for Houston. By the time I was back at home, it was after 9pm, and I wanted to go to bed, but had to unpack, wash clothes, repack before hitting the sack at 11pm.

At 9am the following day, Jimmy’s Limo arrived to take me to the airport yet again – this time bound for John Wayne Airport in Orange Country, southern California. I boarded Continental flight 655, and skipped all the food and drink, just sticking to the paracetamol. California was sunny, warm and felt brilliant – a crazy taxi took me at 90 mph to the Hilton Hotel at Anaheim where I checked in for 2 nights.

Disneyworld is just over the road, but my reason for being was to give a talk in front of the assembled masses the following day. Entitled BHP Billiton: Tapping in to a Massively Interconnected Knowledge Network, it covered all you needed to know about what I’ve been doing over the past 2 years – creating this pretty much state of the art Knowledge Base targeted at the subsurface. Although it was my first big public speaking engagement, the hour session went pretty well (despite my radio mike being cut off by someone else’s presentation in the session next door!). I ended up stopping, telling the assembled that my talk was much more interesting than the one interfering with us, and my colleague unplugged the speakers. A bit of good old fashioned vocal projection nailed the talk and after questions and a lot of discussions with interested parties, I was off the hook and could relax.

That night, our software developers (Blue Fish Development Group) took all their clients out for a big bash. We were picked up in huge stretch Hummers at 7pm, and taken to a Museum which was ours for the evening. We had an hour drinking bright blue cocktails looking around the exhibits of Egyptian Mummies and their Sarcophagi before being herded into a room for dinner, which was pretty excellent. Due to my general ill state, I didn’t head out afterwards for more drinks, but headed back to my room for sleeeeeeep.

On Wednesday, I only used half a tree of tissues before finishing up some meetings. Then I was on vacation! Tom (brother #1) was over in San Francisco for work, so I had taken some days vacation, had rented a car and planned on driving up to S.F. along Highway 1, the road that hugs the California coast. Naturally the only way to do this properly was in a convertible… So after presenting myself at the Hertz Rental Desk at the hotel, I became the proud ‘owner’ of a Ford Mustang Convertible.

I left the lid on whilst I whizzed along the freeways through Anaheim and Los Angeles, but when I hit the coast and joined Highway 1, I pulled up for Petrol (Gas!) and at a touch of a button the roof hinged up and magically folded itself away somewhere in the back.

I spent much of the rest of the day on Highway One speeding through the famous cabbage fields of Southern California. I have no idea who eats all these cabbages (unless they ship them to Primary Schools in the UK) but I was disappointed, having been lead to expect groves of citrus and vineyards.

Further on however, the coast came back and it was superb – the sky was clear, the views magnificent and the air warm and vaguely scented of herbs, which was a vast improvement on the cabbages. Towns flew past to the sound of my CD collection blasting from the stereo, with the big engine making a nice grumbling noise. Let me explain how it sounded…

Grrrrmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Does that help? If you floored it, it would go

Grrrmmmm-neeeee-e-e-e-e—eee- Grmmmmm Neee Grmmmmmmmm neeee-e-e-e—e-e Grmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Nice!

So I lost a fair bit of track of time, but stayed overnight someplace and continued the drive the following day. The coast was increasingly spectacular; the road high on the coastal cliffs, the fog out at sea in the distance and the Pacific waves crashing on the rocks far below. I’d fly along, twisting round corners and crossing bridges, all to the soundtrack of Green Day, Guns and Roses, Barenaked Ladies, Rod Stewart, E.J., the Clash, the Who and various other greats… I stopped at State Parks – one was Limekiln – and a short hike up a canyon of about 2/3 of a mile took me to 4 giant kilns set among the redwoods used for slaking Lime.

The sunset over the Pacific never bored me – you can see the sun drop into the ocean, grow in size due to the magnification effect provided by the atmosphere before almost turning into an hourglass shape that heralded its final plunge into the sea. If you look pretty closely, when it is just disappearing from sight you get a brief green flash. I’m not sure why this is – unless it’s something to do with the blue-green end of the spectrum being refracted by the atmosphere after all the red light is gone. (A little Googling showed up http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/atmos/redsun.html if you're interested...)

Tom called to say that he’d got out of work early on Friday, so I headed into San Fran and picked him up on an intersection, and we drove open topped over the Golden Gate bridge into Marin County, where we spent some time looking at the Mustang.

Oh, and the Bridge too of course...

posted by Sam @ 12:36