Archive for the Category Travel

 
 

Leave of Absense

Well, both my website and my Flickr pages have been noticeably quiet for a while. My only excuses are that I’ve been trying to keep my computer turned off more often (in an attempt to save power and be more green) and I’ve been trying to get back into my old habit of voraciously reading anything I can get my hands on. At last count, I’ve read 5 books in the last month and a half and am in the middle of 3 other books as I type this.

In the void, Lauren’s mom stopped out to visit for a week and Lauren and I also took a trip back east to visit my parents for both vacation and to get more wedding plans set in stone. Lauren toured the campus with her mother and I took a few days off to show her Mt. Lemmon and the Desert Museum. The trip back east was great; we spend a lot of time at their lake house and did everything from visit relatives, to hike at the local waterfall, to just relaxing. We went to take some July pictures of the wedding location to get ideas for next year and, at one point, Lauren took my sister dress shopping.

I’ll be posting tons of pictures to Flickr soon, so be on the look out for pictures of anything from our kittens, to a trip to the Sonoran Desert Museum, to my poor attempts at catching star streaks, to me playing with some new macro filters for my camera, to the Bushkill falls hike.

I’m hopping to get better about actively blogging at least once a week… we’ll see how that works out.

Back from NJ/MA/PA… it’s 106 out… and we got a fish tank

Lauren and I spent the last week and change running around the North East visiting the three states that we spent the vast majority of our lives calling home while seeing our families and friends.

We spent a few days traveling, three days in Massachusetts visiting the sights around Boston, a day in Pennsylvania visiting the Philadelphia and Bethlehem areas, and then another three days in New Jersey relaxing and taking a day to enjoy Six Flags Great Adventure.

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Back from Phoenix

We left for Phoenix Wednesday morning and decided to take a detour to the Biosphere 2 up in Oracle. It was a great facility and I learned a lot about what the Biosphere project was hoping to gain from their experiments; unfortunately, the property was just purchased by a developer and could be closing as soon as the end of the August. After leaving the Biosphere, we drove up to Tempe and did some creative sightseeing (my passengers thought I was lost, but I really knew where I was going ;)). We stayed at the Fiesta Inn and used that as our base of operations for the part of the vacation up in the Phoenix area. On Thursday, we went to see Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West facility where he taught young men and women his techniques in organic architecture. Later that day, we went to Old Scottsdale and met up with one of my sister’s friends and his grandfather for dinner. The evening was made more exciting when a restaurant down the street caught on fire! After leaving Old Scottsdale, Jeramie and Lauren went for a swim and I played with my camera without a flash. Friday was a lounging day since we had been doing things every day my mom and sister were here; we sat around and read at the pool and then went out shopping at the outlet mall later in the day. Lauren and I got home yesterday early afternoon and my mom and sister left Phoenix and arrived back in New Jersey last night. This past week was amazingly relaxing and just what the doctor ordered (even though Lauren and I are now somewhat sick from a bug my mom and sister imported with them)!

My mom and sister are out here

Mom and Jeramie came out on Saturday evening and we’ve all been hanging out here in Tucson doing the tourist thing for the last few days. We went to Saguaro National Park on Sunday with Jenny, the Desert Museum yesterday, went out to dinner at the Melting Pot last night with Lauren’s uncle Kevin and his kids, and today we are going up to Mount Lemmon and possibly Sabino Canyon. Tomorrow morning, we are headed up to Phoenix to spend the rest of the week seeing what there is to see up in that neck of the woods.

Titan Missile Museum

I finally posted the pictures from last weekend’s trip to the Titan Missile Museum.

YESNet, a group for young members of my company’s engineering and science staff, organized the trip for any who wanted to go see the museum. It was so popular that they had to open up a second tour just for us to prevent it from getting too tightly packed in the complex.

The tour was an amazing look at the only remaining silo of the fifty four Titan II silos that once surrounded Wichita, Little Rock, and Tucson. Crews consisted of four Air Force soldiers (two officers and two enlisted technicians) that were underground and sealed off for twenty four hours at a time. They ate, slept, and trained together for that entire time and were usually expected to be on site between 4 and 8 times a month.

It’s definitely an eye-opening look at what we, as a country, did during the Cold War to try to prevent an actual war from breaking out by making sure that, should there be a war, the country that attacked would be destroyed.

Click on the image to see more pictures
Titan Missile Museum Album