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
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
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
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
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
The Sun-n-Sand Motel was where Janet had stayed during her last visit to the area, and is an interesting enough place that it was kind of the destination in and of itself. The next morning, we got to meet Wayne in person, and the reviews are accurate — he is… Continue reading
The drive to Zion was long, especially coming off of a relatively full day at Arches. We got there around 2-3AM and went straight to the visitor center where they assign the Narrows passes on a first come — first served basis. We slept in the car for a bit… Continue reading
The Colorado National Monument is best toured by car, driving along a 20+ mile road around the ridge in and out of the canyon channels. Along the way, there are lots of stops to hop out, look, take pictures, hike, etc. – enough to spend a large chunk of the… Continue reading
GPS tracklog overlay. The above was made at GPS Visualizer. It makes some very nice plots, and has a lot of configuration options. The only downside is that because it’s all done through a web interface, there’s a lot of slow iterations to find the settings that work. In that… Continue reading
To me, the mark of waves getting big for surf is when there’s really no effort needed to catch them in a sea kayak. This happened often today – if I was not making a concerted effort to paddle out, the waves were going to surf me in. Josh and I both got a number of good, and thanks to the size of the waves, fast surfs. Continue reading