Miss Teen South Carolina 2007 video

Here's the video from the pageant mentioned in my last post.

More travel ahead

I was hoping to add a few more posts this week but, well, a bit of shopping got in the way. The bargains to be had at all the stores in Framingham are just too good to pass up. On Sunday we are heading down to New York City for the week to meet up with Karen's parents and some other people. When we first arrived in NYC in late June, we realized that getting online in the city without your own computer is 1) very difficult and 2) extremely expensive. Karen is bringing her new laptop with her this time around, so hopefully we can get on to update at least once, but we have a very busy week ahead of us. Less than 2 weeks to go until our trip really comes to an end and we fly back to London!!! Where has all the time gone???

On Friday night we went to a concert in Rhode Island (Collective Soul, Live, and Counting Crows; yes, I know all these bands haven't been popular since 1994, but they still played a lot of songs we like and the show was good), which brought our total of states visited on this trip to 25. Yep, that's right, a full one-half of the fifty states! In case you're wondering, they are New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, and Rhode Island. And we also paid D.C. a visit.

We didn't hit South Carolina on this trip, but you might enjoy this video from the Miss Teen USA pageant. I think the video speaks for itself. I'm going to try a separate entry to see if posting the video directly in the blog works.

And not to perpetuate the stereotypes about Southerners, but I just have to share this picture from our hotel room in Arkansas.



Now, why would I take a picture of some not-so-good hotel "artwork"? Only because it was hanging upside down.

Well, I might as well exhaust my whole collection of pictures from Arkansas, so here's the other one (I only took two in the day it took to cross the state).



We did swing by the state capital, Little Rock, and saw the outside of the President Clinton Presidential Library, but it was already closed. We also missed one of the key attractions in Arkansas, Crater of Diamonds State Park. It's the only diamond-producing site in the world open to the public and you get to keep what you find!

Fun in the sandbox

So, where do you think the tallest sand dunes in North America are? Somewhere in Mexico? Maybe California, or Texas, or Florida? How about Cape Cod? In fact, the tallest sand dunes in North America are located at Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve in southern Colorado. Pretty surprising considering Colorado is famous for its mountains and not a place you'd expect sand dunes. This is a part of Colorado that most people don't get to, but if you happen to be in the area, it's well worth a visit. We hit this place on our drive from Boulder, Colorado to Taos, New Mexico.

The dunes in the park rise up to 750 feet from the floor of the valley and are surrounded by mountains in the Sangre de Cristo Range, with many mountains above 13,000 feet. A pretty dramatic setting all around.

You can bring your own sled, snowboard, skis etc. and have some fun. The national park website even gives you some tips about the best methods (e.g. cardboard does not work). We were actually pretty fortunate when we visited because it was overcast and had just rained before we got there. That meant it wasn't too hot, the sand was cool, and the sand wasn't being whipped around and blowing in our faces.

I climbed to the top of some of the dunes while Karen took a nap at the base. Knowing how difficult it is to walk on a flat beach, you can only imagine how difficult it was to climb a couple hundred feet up these sand dunes. Hard work, but I was rewarded with some great views.

One interesting aspect of the park was the stream flowing through. As it gets a lot of sand deposited in it, it forms little sand dams. After a while, these mini dams break, creating a mini wave in the water. The combination of many of these breaking dams creates larger waves, leading the stream to be permanently choppy. Interesting to watch up close.

Here are pics from various vantage points.



































And I liked this picture from the park's website so I'll include this one too.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright is one of America's most famous architects. While in the Chicago area, we made a trip to Oak Park, Illinois, the hub of all things relating to Frank Lloyd Wright, including his primary home and studio. Wright designed over 300 buildings across the USA (and a few overseas, I think). His most famous work is the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.



Wright also had quite an interesting personal life, having married three times and having some scandalous affairs along the way. In 1914, one of Wright's servants set fire to Wright's home in Wisconsin and axed 7 people, including Wright's mistress, to death while the fire burned.

Chicago is probably America's premier city for architecture, so if you visit Chicago, be sure to take an architecture tour (there are many available). And if architecture is your thing, you should definitely spend half a day making a side trip to Oak Park (also the birthplace and boyhood home of Ernest Hemingway), which is only about 10 miles from downtown Chicago.

In Oak Park, you can take a tour of Wright's home and studio (no pictures inside, so I don't have any to show you). A lot of fascinating stuff to see. He also designed many of the houses in the immediate neighborhood, so you can take an audio guide tour around a few of the blocks and see some of his designs executed. Wright hated the prevailing Victorian style of architecture that favored tall, vertically oriented houses. He was one of the leading proponents of the Prairie School of architecture which promotes a wide, flat style, which you can see in some of the pictures below.

Here are pictures from our walking tour of the neighborhood. Please note that most, but not all, of these houses are designed by Wright. I can't remember which ones are which, but you can see that the neighborhood has a lot of beautifully designed houses, whether they were Wright designed or not.

Aww, isn't that cute

Since it's my duty to keep you informed about various polls from around the world, it is my pleasure to inform you that the World Wildlife Fund is running a survey to find the world's cutest animal. Online voting is currently open to whittle 40 animals down to 5 semifinalists. This round of voting goes until the end of August, with the finals being voted on September 1 through 20. You can vote for your 5 favorite now at:

http://wwf.worldwildlife.org/site/PageNavigator/WCA2007_Phase1

Of the 40, the ones we saw on our trip (in the wild) included: bison, blue-footed booby, iguana, penguin, sea lion, sea turtle, seal, tortoise and whale. We missed seeing the nocturnal black-footed ferret in South Dakota. We also saw a few more (notably panda) in various zoos we visited.

Of course, like most lists, this one is also heavily biased, as the WWF seems to give major extra points for being endangered and basically the poll is designed to raise awareness of endangered species. I mean, where are the alpacas and llamas? Just be aware that by voting, your email address might be added to WWF mailing lists.

My five were panda, blue-footed booby, tortoise, sea turtle and, of course, penguin. There were at least 5 more animals I could have included if I had had more votes.

Well, since the secret's out already ...

... about my love of license plates, I thought I'd share one more that I saw today that I really liked. Today Karen and I drove up to Maine, the easternmost state in the US (if you don't get technical about the Aleutian Islands in Alaska being further east). Maine is famous for its seafood, especially its lobster (read: lobstah), which is probably the best in the country (but their clam chowder (read: chowdah) comes a distant second behind Boston's). One of the license plates offered in Maine is this one:



It doesn't say "save the lobsters" or "enjoy Maine lobster" or "support lobster research" (which the license fee goes toward), it just says "Lobster". I love it.

By the way, when the Pilgrims first landed in Massachusetts, lobsters were so plentiful that they were literally crawling on the beaches. The Pilgrims, however, were fairly unadventurous eaters and, despite the natives showing them how to eat them and how good they were, they shunned everyone's favorite crustacean. The Pilgrims simply preferred their grain based diet. They considered lobster tasteless, were embarrassed to be forced by hungriness to eat it and considered it peasant's food. In fact, the most likely use for a lobster in the early days was to ground it up and use it as fertilizer for corn. Some claim it was even fed to the pigs. And there is at least one account of indentured servants ensuring in their contract that they would only be served lobster a maximum of twice a week. The fact is that today's delicacy was shunned by Americans until at least the 1880s.

If you want to read more about "homarus americanus", this book: "The Secret Life of Lobsters: How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean", seems to be getting very good reviews.

Colorado Dreaming

This isn't in order (Kevin just wrote a post about Memphis but we went to Colorado much earlier than that) but I haven't posted in awhile so here I am. Plus, I've just bought a fast new computer and we couldn't skip writing about gorgeous Colorado on our blog. We spent almost a week in Boulder and Vail and loved the healthy atmosphere and gracious hospitality we experience. Colorado is a mecca for Suburus (as is Maine where we went today), hikers, skiiers, and crunchy granola types. It is also on the cutting edge of eco-friendliness. I never saw so many Prius per capita and the lovely people we stayed with, the Wonsiewiczs, had a cute blue one. Here they are with me on the top of one of the ski trails at Vail.



They also survive on solar panel energy so we pretty impressed. And when we bumped into 2 other cute blue Priuses on one street and we all started caravanning together, I thought I had died and woken up in some eco-friendliness gone mad advert. Bud Wonsiewicz is a frat buddy of my dad's from MIT. He and his wife Marie are really into their skiing and hiking, so we were happy to have them bring us to a particularly beautiful spot in Vail, the Missouri Lakes walk.



These photos show what a beautiful day we had and come close to capturing the amazing alpine scenery we saw. I can't wait to come back in the Winter!








On our way to visit our friend Vicky in her slightly remote mountain home outside of Boulder, we bumped into this little guy (see the deer in the background?)



We hadn't seen Vicky since she attended our wedding in 2004, so it was good to see her so happy (she had just done a triathalon the day before). She's doing her PhD at University of Colorado and graduated from Yale a year ahead of us.



Finally, just because I don't know when I'll have the opportunity to fit this photo in, I just had to post a photo of Kevin cleaning our car window on a particularly windy day during our road trip. Luckily, Kevin didn't blow away!