And the views of the area are, well, pretty industrial. To be fair most airports aren’t in the most scenic of neighborhoods. Still, Newark Airport seems to live in a particularly stark pit of the universe. If I landed here at the start of a visit to the US, I’d certainly wonder if I should turn around and head home rather than venture out into that wasteland.

I’ll go see where we get our candles in case it gets dark before we leave.

The following text exchange between Sue and I was kicked off by my dropping Thomas off at the MSP airport for his flight back to Massachusetts:

Me: Tom’s heading off through security looking all grown up and scruffy! Love you!

Sue: Sniffle

Sue: Hug

Me: Ditto!

How exactly did we get to be parents of an increasingly adult-like creature?

(Don’t answer that. Really. Don’t.)

And has packed his bags for Egypt.

He’s going on a UMM course “Pyramids and politics on the Nile” led by UMM Poli Sci faculty Sheri Breen and UMM librarian Jayne Blodgett, both super cool people. This is a pretty structured experience (full itinerary as a PDF) using Cairo as their primary base but with trips down the Nile to Luxor and Aswan, visits to Alexandria, and time at a desert research station.

One of their requirements is to keep a journal during the trip, and they all had to write a “Letter to Cairo” before departing as their first entry, and I thought I’d play along.

Dear Cairo,

Please take good care of our son. I really wanted to start with something more profound, but to be honest this is the first thing that I thought of. I’m genuinely not worried. His mother and I survived a number of great study abroad experiences which did so much to define who we are, and we’re sure he’ll have an amazing and glorious time. Still, it’s an exciting time to be in Egypt, and I’d greatly appreciate it if you’d play nice.

Inspire some wonderful writing. People keep telling him to take lots of pictures, but they’re really barking up the wrong tree, as he doesn’t really do that. (Here the apple fell on a slope and rolled well away and down the hill.) Tom is much more likely to digest and record his experience in words than images. It probably won’t be straightforward journaling, however, and instead be more indirectly represented in his poetry. “Vulcan’s bed”, for example, is a response to his time with me in Lava Beds National Monument two years ago; it is his version of all my photos. So while I know that he’ll have phenomenal experiences in Egypt, I hope to see them creep (or smash) into his poetry and other writings.

Open some doors; I’m sure he’ll walk through them. Morris has been a wonderful town for Tom to grow up in, but it’s a pretty small world. Thomas has had the huge advantage of living in the UK twice, and travelling in Europe on both of those trips, but it’s still been a very European life. You represent such a fascinating crossroads of history and culture: Mediterranean and Arab and African and Islamic and pharaonic and crowded and vibrant and changing and old and new. In 3.5 weeks he’ll only be able to sample such a feast, probably taking more than he realizes in some ways and less in others. When he comes back, though, I suspect he’ll never quite see things the same, sometimes in ways that may take years to fully realize.

I know that he’ll be a tiny mite on the huge organism that is Cairo, so odds are that you’ll never even notice he was there. You’ll loom huge for him, however, and we appreciate all you have to offer.

Best wishes,

    Nic aka Thomas’s Dad

I spent most of a day last week thinning apples from our two apple trees. These poor things had struggled in the shade of the boulevard trees for most of their lives, but as we’ve lost most of our boulevard trees in the last few years, these apple trees have come into the sun and finally started producing fruit. This year one of them in particular set a ton of fruit, so while I bagged apples, I also thinned, at least where I could easily reach.

In the end I bagged around 150 apples, and probably thinned off at least twice that in little baby apples. Now we wait for a wonderful crop of nummy apples in the fall!

In quasi-related news, this afternoon Thomas and I embark on a monster road trip through New England. The purpose of this adventure is college visits, and we’ll visit 11 colleges in 30 days: Kalamazoo (Michigan), Ithaca (NY), Hamilton (NY), Bates (Maine), Hampshire (Massachusetts), Marlboro (Vermont), Vassar (NY), Drew (New Jersey), Swarthmore (Pennsylvania), Yale (Connecticut), and Brown (Rhode Island). Whew!

This will be the last college tour, so hopefully he’ll have a pretty good idea of where he wants to apply after we get home.

The real reason for the trip, though, is to allow me to catch several states I’ve never visited (Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine). After this trip I will have visited all but two of the 50 states: Hawaii and South Carolina. South Carolina is annoying because I’ve driving within 20-30 miles of South Carolina at least twice, but never actually made it. Hmph.

The trip might provide some photo opportunities, so I might actually post a little in July :-)

In the meantime, we have had a ton of snow this winter. Just sayin’

So I’ve been a pretty good boy while here in Minneapolis, and have left my camera back at the B&B every day, focusing instead on important things like course prep. Yesterday, though, I gave myself one day of photography, focusing on St. Anthony Falls, the Mill District, the Mill City Museum, and the Guthrie Theater.

While I was in the Guthrie I made my first trip up to the 9th floor where the Dowling Studio is. The 8th and 9th floors are mostly for education and cutting edge work, and the architect felt that this called for yellow windows to ensure that the people working there always had a "sunny" view. I’m not sure I buy that argument, but I must say that they provide a really amazing view of the city, including this shot back across to the old Mill District and the great Gold Medal Flour sign. So the weird colors here aren’t my doing, and nothing in Photoshop, but are the result of shooting through several inches of yellow-tinted glass.

If you’ve been to the Guthrie, but never been up to the 9th floor, I definitely recommend it. To get there you have to catch an elevator at either the 4th or 5th floor (only staff can use that elevator to go to the 1st floor) and head up to the 9th floor. It’s totally cool to go there, because that’s how you get to the Dowling Studio, which is the third and much smaller theater at the Guthrie. I was there in the mid-to-late-afternoon, and the light was really interesting, but I suspect that it changes quite a lot all through the day.

In all my wandering around I also learned a ton about the origin of Minneapolis (which I’d known almost nothing about). I’d always assumed the Cities were here primarily because of the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers, but no! Minneapolis is all about the water power of St. Anthony Falls, the only waterfall of note on the entire Mississippi River. This initially powered sawmills which sliced up the northern forests into planks, and then drove the amazing flour milling industry that for 50 years made Minneapolis the largest producer of flour in the world.

Most of the old mills are gone, but there’s are bits of a few, including this old General Mills grain elevator and the shell of the adjacent mill that now houses the Mill City Museum.

Fascinating stuff, and a really fun day of taking photos.

Conveniently yesterday’s prompt from The Daily Shoot was

Make a photograph that features a sign of some sort today. Maybe a stop sign. Maybe an information sign. Or an advert.

Hey, I took a lot of photos of signs (many, in fact, of this wonderful Gold Medal Flower sign), so here you are.

We then spent most of the day hanging around Portland together, including a visit to the mighty and wonderful Powell’s City of Books (one of the last, great independent book stores) and checking in at GECCO to get my registration stuff. Tom totally loved Powell’s (“I could get lost in here!”), and has in fact spent large amounts of my money and his time there this week while I was at the conference. We also went out and saw Toy Story 3 that night, which turned out to be every bit as good as everyone’s said it is – lots of fun and very well written.

Day 8 was our last college visit in this part of the world, as we headed up to Olympia, Washington (2 hours north of Portland) to visit Evergreen State College. This was a real eye opener for both of us. I knew Evergreen was cool (and another of the small number of public liberal arts colleges in the U.S.), but didn’t know a lot of the details, and I think we both found the unusual curriculum and environment really interesting and thought provoking.

I had arranged beforehand to meet some of the computing faculty at Evergreen so we could learn a little more about their program as part of a program review we’re doing at Morris, so after the information session and tour we met up with Sherri Shulman and then headed over to meet her husband and fellow CS faculty, Neal Nelson. When Neal walked in, there was this very weird moment where we both those we knew each other but weren’t sure why. Duh, duh, and double duh – Neal was my undergraduate thesis advisor at Reed! I’d lost track of him when he left Reed in 1988, and I somehow thought he’d gone into industry so I wasn’t even looking to find him anywhere in our travels. Given all that and the the fact that his name doesn’t particularly stand out (and that I’m really crap with names), I totally didn’t consider the possibility that I knew this Neal guy we were going to see. After recovering from that somewhat awkward start, Sherri, Neal, and I had a really excellent conversation that ran a couple of hours easy. Lots of catching up on old times, as well as discussing undergraduate computing curriculum with limited resources in a public school – many thanks to both of them for all their time!

After returning to Portland, we went to Papa Haydn’s, possibly the best source of wonderfully scrumptious and rich desserts that I know of in the U.S. I had a wonderful Autumn Meringue and it was just like being a college student again (without the metabolism of a 20 year old). We used to walk out to Papa Haydn’s from Reed (maybe a 30 minute walk) several times a year and indulge, and was so cool to go back and find that it really hadn’t changed much in all those years.

That night was the opening reception at GECCO, so Tom and I hung around for a few hours eating little snacky things and chatting with various folks. Tom had never met most of my EC friends and colleagues, and he was very cool at meeting a bunch of strangers that are, even worse, all science nerds to a very high degree. Luckily it’s a really cool group of people, and I think he actually enjoyed himself.

By Day 9 I’d actually skipped out on the bulk of the first two days at GECCO, so at this point I essentially abandoned my son to the wilds of downtown Portland and started pretending to be a scientist for a bit. He spent most of his time hanging at Powell’s and reading books, while I listened to people talk about their cool evolutionary computation research.

That night I did actually skip out on the last session, though, and went back to Reed to join a bunch of faculty that have a regular Friday beer and food gathering at Woodstock Wine and Deli up the hill from campus. Jim had invited me to join them, and it was a great chance to meet some people I knew that I’d missed before (like Ray Mayer) and a bunch of other faculty that are new to the college since I was a student there in the dim past.

I wasn’t the only one meeting up with old friends, as Tom met up with Perry Webster from Morris (currently attending the University of Portland) and hung with her and a family friend pretty much the whole evening, which was a neat chance for him to spend a little time with people more his age :-).

Day 10 was much the same, although I stayed at the conference pretty late because the poster session and associated reception was that evening.

Day 11 (today) was the end of the conference, including eating lunch in the hotel sports bar with a bunch of very enthusiastic Europeans watching the World Cup final! Eli Mayfield (UMM ’09, now a grad student at Carnegie Mellon studying natural language processing) gave a talk today, and did a really excellent job. Tom and I went out to Jake’s Famous Crawfish with Eli and Bill Tozier. Jake’s was a great seafood house back in the day, and they didn’t disappoint, providing us with excellent food to go with the fine conversation. That was a great way to end our time in Portland!

Now we’re off to bed, and tomorrow we drive south to Tule Lake and Lava Beds National Monument. With a little luck we may hook up with Wayne Manselle in Eugen on the way!

Wow – lack of internet and the busy-ness of college visits and GECCO in Portland have once again put me behind on this. Enough so that my wonderful mother commented on it.

Oops.

Sorry.

It’s day 11, and I’ll try to get us up to day 6 today :-).

So, a quick recap, but generally no pictures because I’m even more behind on those.

On Day 3 we drove from Great Falls to Glacier Park Lodge on the eastern edge of Glacier National Park. This lodge is one of those great railway lodges in the park built about 100 years ago using enormous timbers brought by rail from the west coast forests. We’d booked ourselves on the Red Bus Secret Valley Tour, which drives you to Two Medicine Lake, takes you across the lake and back on a boat, and then swings by Running Eagle Falls on the way back. The weather was pretty cloudy and occasionally rainy, so the views weren’t those stunning clear shots you get on postcards, but still quite impressive in its own way (see the photo above). Running Eagle Falls was back out of the mountains a bit, and it was clear and sunny there, which gave us some nice views there. The photo below is from the river there, and illustrates the three main colors of rock that form the mountains of Glacier: Red, green, and yellowish-brown.

We had a really nice dinner that night in the lodge, looking out on the mountains, and then played cards and hung out in the grand lobby the rest of the evening. There are, indeed, worse things.

The highlight of Day 4 was the drive through (over really) the park on the Going-to-the-sun road. I drove us to the park entrance, (the panorama above is as we approached the park from the east) but Tom drove the entire Going-to-the-sun road. If you’ve never been to Glacier, the Going-to-the-sun road is a little 2 lane job winding through very high mountains — definitely not like driving in Morris — and Tom did an excellent job. It was again overcast so the views were less than steller, but it’s still an amazing and awe inspiring place. Logan’s Pass (the high point at over 6K feet as you cross the continental divide) was cold, probably in the 30’s (F) with wind chills well below freezing. The road had only opened two weeks before we crossed, and we stood there on July 4th freezing and surrounded by big snow banks. There are two main trails that leave from the ranger’s station at Logan; one was closed due to “unsafe snow” and the other still had several feet of snow on it. The latter is apparently wheelchair accessible when clear, but people were using cross country skis on it when we were there.

The driving ended with our arrival at Lake McDonald Lodge, where we stayed in a nice if simple little cabin accommodation. After lunch Tom decided to hang in the lodge, and I went out and hiked and took pictures for about two hours, mostly along a muddy horse trail up parallel to the lake from the lodge from the Sperry trailhead towards John’s Lake. We then had dinner, and spent another fine evening playing cards in the lodge. The Lake McDonald Lodge is a smaller affair, and we played on a table on the second floor with a view of the grand fireplace and an audience for the various guests that shared their musical talents on the piano and banjo. I could totally manage to spend many an evening there.

Day 5 was the big push from Glacier to Portland. That was a long drive so we swapped quite a bit, but I think Tom drove over half of the day. Tons of beautiful mountain views at the beginning, and we ended with several hours in the amazing Columbia Gorge. We also had some nasty traffic in Coeur d’Alene, which turned out to be because of a light aircraft that crashed in the median between the two sides of our interstate the night before! They had cranes out and were still cleaning things up, and that plus rubbernecking was wreaking havoc with traffic.

We were pretty pooped after all that driving, so we got checked into the PSU dorms (the student housing for GECCO, and a hell of a deal compared to downtown hotels), ate dinner at Hot Lips pizza :-), wandered a little, and crashed.

Day 6 was devoted to Reed College, both as a visit to a prospective school for Tom and as a major nostalgia trip for his father. We had an excellent day there, starting the information session and tour (and me mumbling about how things were 25+ years ago). After lunch we went to the library, where I gave them a couple of signed copies of the Field Guide and Tom and I got to look at yearbooks and student newspapers from my time there. The weirdest bit of that was Tom’s discovery of a front page piece I wrote about the campus nuclear reactor receiving some minor regulatory thwaps; I have absolutely no memory of writing the piece, but it’s pretty clearly my name and my writing style, so I must have :-). We then had long visits with Irena Swanson and Jim Fix in the Math/CS department, and Walter Englert in Classics. Walter was my first year Humanities prof, and a huge influence even though I only had him for one course. Irena and I overlapped as students and took at least one class together, and Jim is the sole computing faculty at Reed and it was cool to meet him and learn what and how he’s managing the computational side of the curriculum at Reed. I think Tom was pretty bored listening to me talk show with the Math/CS folks, but he really enjoyed meeting Walter and talking about Reed, colleges in general, and courses like Humanities. We went up the hill with Irena, her husband Steven (who also overlapped with me at Reed), and son Simon (who didn’t, since he’s 17) and had beers and conversation, and then Tom and I came back, wandered around a bit and collapsed!

I forgot to mention that yesterday we got to visit “Salem Sue”, a ginormous statue of a holstein cow just off of I-94. Here’s hoping that wasn’t the highlight of the trip :-).

After dinner last night in Medora, we drove along part of the loop road in the park, ending out at Buck Hill, the highest point in Roosevelt National Park, where we got to watch the sun set. On the drive there and back we saw gobs of prairie dogs (a given around here), numerous bison, wild horses, and some deer.

That night a bison wandered through our campground around 11:30pm, even pausing to drink from the water faucet right across from our camp site. Reminded me of camping trips to the Wichita Mountains 30 years ago, where bison and cattle were regular night time visitors.

Sunrise was at 5:03am, and we were up and moving before 7 as a result. After some fruit and conversation, Tom decided to hang in the campground while I went off to take pictures and hike around some.

I went down to the Lower Paddock Creek trailhead, where I encountered two large male bison who weren’t much interested in getting off the (one lane gravel) road for me. One in particularly clearly felt that our little Honda Fit wouldn’t stand a chance in a fair fight, and I was inclined to agree. I started backing down this little road, and halfway down encountered a big SUV heading the other way. I explained the situation to them, and they asked me to pull over a bit, and they’d just pass me and go have a look. Once they’d gone past, I decided to follow them in case they had better luck intimidating bison with their much bigger vehicle.

When we got there, the really stubborn fellow had already moved off the road, and the new folks were able to use their SUV to bully the other guy off as well. I took full advantage and swung into the trailhead parking area and headed out to get at least a little hiking in. When I came back out some 45 minutes later, they’d ambled down a bit, but had happily (for me) remained off the road. The photo above is the cranky one taking a bit of a dust bath – here’s hoping it improved his spirits!

After my safe return, we had a somewhat comical bought of tent folding and packing, and then an excellent breakfast at the Elkhorn Cafe in Medora. From there we began the drive across the great expanses of eastern Montana. I’d forgotten (or never realized?) how much “badland” landscape there is there – I’d always thought of it as much more flat prairie. The only other time I’ve driven across that part of the state it was farther north on US 2; perhaps the landscape is quite different up there?

We travelled most of the day on Montana 200, which large stretches of very little in the way of people or buildings. Towns like Lindsay are really just 8 or a dozen families at a crossroads a heck of a long way from anywhere. Tom did a lot of excellent driving, not all of it in the best of conditions (rain, a detour, semis passing in the rain on narrow roads, etc.), which was really nice.

The nice folks at the Days Inn where we’re staying in Great Falls recommended Bert and Ernie’s for dinner, and they were spot on. The food was wonderful, and our waiter was easily among the best I’ve ever had.

And, on that happy note, to bed. Tomorrow we drive to Glacier National Park. The weather looks wet and gurpy, so I’m not sure how things will play out. Fingers crossed!

Today was mostly spent on I-94, about 400 miles crossing western Minnesota and almost all of North Dakota. NoDak greeted us with a monster SW wind, but only 3 wind turbines to be seen as we crossed all that flat.

We’re camping tonight at Roosevelt National Park. It’s hotter than heck here, so we’re hiding in a pizza joint with A/C and wifi. Got the tent set up before dinner, though, & saw many prairie dogs & a pair of wild horses.

After this little break we’re going out driving/hiking for a bit before we lose the light.

Oh, and I hit a crow in flight with the bumper while doing 60! He was essentially unable to make headway into the wind. A first in several decades of driving.