Monday we woke up early and packed up to head to Muir Woods on the suggestion that it was a place best visited early before the crowds. Even with the unexpectedly long drive, winding through a lot of hilly roads, we were there just before 8. We happened to find… Continue reading
Prelude Janet and I decided to take another vacation, probably because I failed to organize a winter ski vacation. Going to San Francisco came up because, well, it’s supposed to be nice to visit and didn’t have any specific preparation requirements other than pondering what we wanted to do when… Continue reading
WPC 33 was held in Helsinki, Finland. Know for, among other things, being the home of Nokia and being a place where the sun barely sets. This likely will have been my last WPC meeting. Scott and I announced a few weeks before that we would not be up for… Continue reading
Day three of the Smoky Mountains adventure was back to hiking waterfalls, and first on the list was Laurel Falls. This had to be the most popular falls because it was a paved trail (in rather poor condition) up to the falls. Like the Clingmans Dome trail, I think this… Continue reading
Since the previous day’s visit to Clingmans Dome was a bust, we headed up there first thing on Friday. The view was much better. The Clingmans Dome trail is a half mile paved trail up to a lookout ‘tower’ at the top. I suspect it’s highly traveled because it’s paved,… Continue reading
Prelude: Janet and I drove down to the Smoky Mountains in late June, which means that I’m about a month behind in posting this. We left my car at her parents’ house and departed the Chicago area on Wednesday night. She was driving and got us into Kentucky where we… Continue reading
As wrap up for the West Trip (no pictures in this one), here was our basic itinerary. This was recorded after the fact, so it doesn’t show any options or contingencies and some of the drive times are from memory or are otherwise inaccurate. The rough color coding is this:… Continue reading
We had an evening flight back to Chicago, and most of a day to kill in Denver. It’s possible we could have avoided spending the day in Denver and instead have had an extra day elsewhere, but that was not how things worked out. There were two options to continue… Continue reading
Saturday was largely a travel day, but we routed the trip through Aspen, Colorado to do a bit of hiking on the way. We stopped off at the Maroon Belles and hiked back into the valley a bit. We went in as far as the lake, which I think was… Continue reading
Bryce Canyon is known, at least by Janet, for two things — lots of expansive views of the canyon full of hoodoos and bristle cone pines. We’ll start with the latter item first. Bristle cone pines are a very slow growing tree, which will easily be out competed by other… Continue reading