Saw this on the swissmiss site. It's an alternative to a money belt for safely hiding your passport or other valuables while traveling...that is as long as you don't mind having a passport that smells like stinky feet. Check out the socks here.
I’m no expert on explosives. However, I learned today that a child’s enzymes can convert ice cream into an explosive mixture that can take down a plane. Either that or the TSA classifies ice cream as a liquid, gel or aerosol.
A little kid was about a third of the way done with an ice cream cone purchased on the concourse and the family was going to board their flight. They were called to board. The TSA agent wouldn’t let the ice cream on the plane. Wow! Wouldn’t a kid get sick if he were eating ice cream with explosives in it? The kid was bawling when they threw out the ice cream to board. I’m glad I wasn’t on that flight!
Thanks, George. I feel much safer flying without kids with ice cream.
Today I drove west of Reno to Truckee and then south to see Lake Tahoe. It was pretty warm in Reno, about 83. Around Lake Tahoe it was a comfortable 72 and in the mountains driving back to Reno it cooled to 63. The highest point was about 8000ft. It is a beautiful area. There are a lot of evergreen trees - a mix of fir, pine and cedar. Every time I got out of the car, there was a lovely pine scent in the air. But judging from the road signs, I think the winters would be tough. There were quite a few places where the road was marked to pull off and install tire chains, and the reflecting posts marking the edge of the road that are usually about 4ft. high are about 12ft. high on the road over the mountains from Tahoe to Reno. That, and the bear crossing signs, made me wonder. Click here to see the entire set of photos that I took around the Lake Tahoe area.
I packed heavy for this trip - even more than usual. The weather forecast for this weekend in Reno is cool. After sitting through snow flurries for the final race a couple years ago, I packed some cold weather items for this trip. However, tomorrow is supposed to be over 90, so I also have shorts and sandals. I also brought a wind jacket which is good since Thursday they are predicting 20-30 mph winds gusting to 40! I wonder how much racing there will be if it is that windy. In any case, I packed for everything. I have it all.
Dianne took me to the airport this morning. We were nearly there when she asked if I packed the binoculars. Crap! That's the one thing I forgot. So I stopped at REI in Reno to get a pair. Don't want to miss any action on the back side of the course.
I like Jim Borgman's editorial cartoons. Even though we don't subscribe to a local paper, I'd occasionally look at his creations. Today I stumbled across Jim Borgman's blog. I found it pretty interesting. Besides showing the cartoons, he will sometimes show sketches that led to the final cartoon and give some background. I thought this cartoon about the TSA's recent antics was pretty funny.
TSA....vigilant, effective, efficient. Yeah, right! I guess that's why a utility knife was found on the seat of a plane going from Philadelphia to Connecticut.
P.S. -- This is my 200th post to the blog!
This morning we got up and had breakfast at the M Street Bar & Grill. It’s located just across the street from the CBS building. While eating, Dianne noticed several camera crews setting up at the CBS building entrance. We didn’t recognize the gentleman who came out the door, but he stopped and answered questions for the reporters. I checked the Face the Nation web site and found out the guy was Daniel Ayalon, Israel’s ambassador to the United States. That’s our brush with greatness during the trip.
We started out the day at the National Archives. Unlike the movie ‘National Treasure’ where Nicholas Cage just waltzes into the rotunda area to see the Declaration of Independence, we had to go through a rigorous screening where all gum was purged. It was crowded in the document area and dimly lit to protect the documents. Although you could take pictures without a flash, the Constitution and the Declaration were so faded they were difficult to read in person. I could barely see John Hancock’s signature on the Declaration. All in all, I wasn’t too wowed by the experience. The principles the founding fathers put in the documents seem way more important than the faded documents themselves. Interestingly, just outside the rotunda there was one of the four copies of the Magna Carta that was approximately 700 years old and yet was much easier to read. Here is a shot of the National Archives building from across the street in the sculpture garden. Note the person in the red hat.
After visiting the Archives we went to the National Gallery of Art. It is a large museum and there is a lot to see. I enjoyed the Impressionist art (or the lumpy stuff as Dianne likes to say) and the Netherland/German realism art. These schools represent two extremes of realistic, almost photographic representations of still lifes or people and a blurry, overall impression of a subject conveyed as much through color and lighting as in shape. Dianne enjoyed the more contemporary American paintings (Sargent, Homer, etc.) as well as paintings by the Masters like Rembrandt and Durer. Dianne also wanted to check out the special exhibit on Venetian drawings, but they were more watercolor and gouache type media than strictly pen and ink or pencil drawings.
After seeing the indoor art, we went across the street to the sculpture garden. There were a lot of nice flowers and landscaping, a few large sculptures, and a large pond & fountain. People were sitting on the edge of the pond with their feet dangling in the water to cool off. Dianne called it the fountain of feet (see the picture above). One of my favorite sculptures in the garden was that of a large typewriter eraser. 
Another, which really didn’t photograph well in two dimensions, was a representation of a house which from a long way off followed perfect lines of perspective. However, up close, you noticed the different walls of the house and the roof tilted opposite of the way they would meet at the actual corner of the house. It was like they were inverted from their normal perspective – almost like the house was turned inside out. I thought it was a very clever play on perspective. I also got a picture of Dianne near a sculpture made from concrete cubes showing her counting the blocks like one of the exercises in the Big Brain Academy game. Some of the sculptures were strange – or I guess I wasn’t able to appreciate them. For example, this sculpture was just a metal plate with rounded corners. Go figure!
You can see a collection of photos from the National Gallery and the Sculpture Garden by clicking here for the Flickr group.
After the sculpture garden, we walked to the International Spy Museum. There isn’t any photography allowed in the museum. It covered the basics of becoming a spy and the techniques and gadgets they use as well as many blurbs about spies throughout history. Personally, I liked the gadgets like .22 caliber cigarettes, spy cameras, bugs, etc. It’s a nice museum, but a lot of reading so I’m not sure how well it would be received by kids.
Dianne’s feeling a bit better, but still not eating too much. Surprisingly, she actually asked me to slow down while walking and she didn’t wander away much today.
Got up this morning and had breakfast with Dianne – well, I had breakfast while she picked at some fruit. We went back to the room and she fell asleep almost instantly. After an hour or so, she said she still wasn’t feeling well and suggested I should go to the National Air and Space museum on my own. It’s sad she wasn’t feeling well, but I don’t think she was thrilled about going there anyway. I grabbed the Metro just south of Washington Circle and went through the museum. It was fun to see many historic planes and space vehicles. In the main area there is the Spirit of St. Louis, the X-1 Glamorous Glennis, the X-15, and SpaceShip One that recently won the X-prize. Across from these planes on the second floor were other notable planes like the Lockheed Vega (the B model that was similar to the Winnie Mae flown by Wiley Post) used by Amelia Erhardt to fly solo across the Atlantic (~5 years after Lindbergh) and the Lockheed Sirius floatplane used by Charles and Anne Lindbergh to chart great circle routes from the West coast of the US to the far East. 
Some of the early planes like the Wright Flyer and the Vin Fiz (made the first transcontinental flight) were interesting. Pictures of the Vin Fiz are here and here. I wonder what Vin Fiz tasted like? The story of Cal Rogers and his journey across the US in that plane to win the prize put up by William Randolph Hearst is pretty interesting. I can’t imagine seeing the US that way. The Ole Miss was perched high above the viewing floor. Imagine riding in a plane continuously for about a month! They even had a platform built just behind the radial engine so they could work on it while in flight! It’s amazing what folks did to promote aviation. In that same era were air racing items like the Hughes Racer that set speed records and the Bendix Trophy.
One thing nice about the NASM is not only can you walk around the planes at their level, but you can also view the planes from raised platforms that go around the periphery of many of the rooms. That gives you an interesting view that you don’t get at other museums like the US Air Force Museum in Dayton. An example is this picture of an ME-109 – a German WWII era fighter. You can see other pictures from my visit to the NASM by clicking here for the Flickr group.
It was very hot in DC today (upper 80’s) and very humid. I walked over to the reflecting pool in front of Capitol Hill and felt like jumping in the water to cool off. On the way home, I stopped at a 7-11 store to get some liquids and meds for Dianne. She looked pretty pale, complained about being cold, and felt pretty hot. She’s not having a great vacation so far. Hopefully she’ll get back on feet tomorrow. I think I’ll be eating dinner by myself again tonight.
We made it to Washington yesterday afternoon. The flight was smooth except for the descent into DC. There was some turbulence going through the cloud layers and the pilots were working to fly the approach the whole way.
After checking into our hotel, we went to the National Natural History museum as they have summer hours that extend later in the day. We spent a good 3+ hours walking around. It is a nice museum with lots of different exhibits including dinosaurs, fossils, skeletons, minerals & gems, etc. A lot of the fossils in the dinosaur area came from Ohio. Some were similar to those you see around the Caeser's Creek park area near Waynesville, OH. I enjoyed looking at the skeletons of creatures both extinct and those around today. It was interesting to see things side-by-side through the ages to get a picture of evolution. One of the best presentations of that we saw was an exhibit comparing horse skulls and forelimbs through the ages. Click here for a picture of Dianne at the exhibit. At the right is a picture of Dianne standing under a set of shark jaws from millions of years ago. If you look at the wall, you'll see a white outline that was projected on the wall to depict the body of the shark around those jaws. It was large! Click here for a close up picture of the jaw. Just above Dianne’s head and a bit behind the large jaws, you’ll see a smaller set of shark jaws from a recent great white shark. Quite a difference in size! We didn't spend a lot of time in the gem and mineral area, but we did see the Hope diamond and I took this picture for Eric. From top to bottom that collection of crystals was at least 4 feet high.
We also walked to the main building of the Smithsonian. Around the south side of the building (away from the Mall) is an extensive rooftop garden. Here is a picture of Dianne sitting in one section of the garden area. While sitting at the garden, Dianne mentioned she was tired and wasn’t feeling the best. I thought it was because we didn’t get much sleep Thursday evening and we hadn’t had anything to eat since having a light brunch. We jumped on the Metro and found our way back to the hotel. She didn’t feel like dinner, so I ate by myself in the hotel. Unfortunately, she is fighting some type of GI bug and isn’t feeling well at all. Check out her blog entry. Finally, all the Friday pics are collected in a group here.
As Dianne mentioned in posts here and here, we spent a few days in Ithaca following a business trip I had to upstate NY. It was really wet, but nevertheless we had fun. I thought I'd post a few photos even though the light wasn't great for photography. Click on any photo to see a larger version at Flickr. At the right is a view of Beebe Lake from the stone bridge on Thurston Avenue, just North of the chemistry building. The white mist above the bridge is from the water going over the falls. A couple spots on the web said these falls were 85 feet. This gorge, Fall Creek, is just below the two chemistry buildings on the Cornell campus. Dianne and I walked over this bridge hundreds of times going to campus. You never get tired of this view.
A little further downstream is a pedestrian suspension bridge that connects the Cayuga Heights area to the Cornell campus. The bridge is still in great shape. Dianne was shaking the suspension bridge a bit. If you jump or shake as hard as you can, you can feel a little movement of the bridge. There are trails from this bridge that take you down into the gorge. a lot of people take advantage of that to reach some swimming areas.
This photo at right is looking upstream from the bridge. I don't know how high the bridge is at this point, but the windows in the building give some sense of scale. 
The level of the bridge is about the same as the base of trees on the right side of the gorge.
We drove to Ithaca Falls as well (further downstream), but the photos didn't turn out too well. We also explored Six Mile Creek, but the trees have grown up and spread over the gorge so much that it is hard to get good views from the easy vantage points. Trees grow a lot in sixteen years.
We stayed downtown at the Hilton Garden Inn near The Commons. It is a nice place and provides good access to restaurants like Collegetown Bagels (one of Dianne's favorites) and the Moosewood - a place I never ate while in Ithaca years ago. We tried it during our visit and enjoyed the food. We also went to The Greek House and had a Souvlaki platter (Greek salad with lamb chunks and fries) as we did years ago.
We walked around campus a bit - most of the time in the rain. Campus was pretty dead due to fall break, although there was a field hockey game in the rain on Friday and a football game on Saturday. This photo is from the deck near the Cornell clock tower looking west over Cayuga lake. You can see how overcast it was. The leaves were just starting to change color in Ithaca. You can see a bit of color on the hillside along the far side of the lake. The warmth from the lake slows the transition. Away from the lake the fall color was about 50%.
On the western shore of the lake, about a third of the way up the lake from Ithaca, is Taughannook Falls park. It's a very nice park that has one of the highest falls east of the Rocky Mountains. It's higher than Niagara although the volume of water is less. Dianne got a picture of me near the overlook area. I remember years ago when my Dad was visiting me in Ithaca, we hiked to the top of the falls. Somewhere I have a picture of him sitting on the rocks at the top of the falls with his legs dangling over the edge! That will be etched in my memory forever.
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