My last weekend...

I got back from Las Vegas on Thursday night, and on Friday we went to Lake Camanche for one last camping/boating trip. That was absolutely awesome with hot sunny days and warm water to swim and tube (and even to ski and wake-board for the more energetic!). We went with some friends of Colin and Janet's who I have also got to know quite well and had a great time relaxing, eating good food and enjoying the lake.

One of Colin's favourite pursuits is to try to dislodge riders from the tube. Here you can see an action shot as Bryn went flying, and I am about to follow! Lexi is hanging on for her life (the middle is usually the safest place to be, but even there I managed to fall off by doing a somersault over the front of the tube as it slowed rapidly when someone else had just fallen off and Colin had throttled back the boat suddenly!).

Somehow it seems fitting that my last photo of the U.S. should be of a stunning sunset during a weekend of excellent memories with wonderful friends.

Viva Las Vegas!

The trip to Vegas was very interesting. I have been there for conferences several times (in fact, most of them for the conference that me there this time too). What was noticeable this time though was just how much more confident I felt about getting around, etc. — I guess living in the U.S.A. for a year has had an effect on me!

The conference was good (actually, it is a little too big to be really good: 2000+ delegates is a massive crowd). My paper went well on Wednesday afternoon, and there was some nice discussion and questions about it afterwards.

One of the main highlights of the trip was the chance to do some geocaching and to add Nevada to my list of states that I have cached in. Many of the caches along "The Strip" are virtual caches (i.e. there is no physical cache container, you simply visit the spot and answer some question(s) to validate that you were there), due to the crowds of people that are ever-present. However, I did also get to visit my first Webcam cache. This requires some assistance from a friend. Essentially, the geocache coordinates take you to a spot where there is a pubic webcam. When you reach the spot, you phone someone (in my case Jared was very helpful) who can then go to the webcam's site and take a "photo" of you to prove that you were there. I'm not sure that the quality of the photo here proves much, but that really is me standing on the steps!

The other HUGE highlight was attending a performance of The Lion King on Wednesday night. That was absolutely breath-taking — it is amazing how well they create the animals with puppets and actors. However, it did make me a little home-sick (I never thought I would get misty-eyed when hearing "Moloweni" as a greeting!). Maybe it's a good thing I'm going back within a week!

Leaving Davis

I was back in Davis on Monday for my final small group/Bible study meeting. That was actually a potluck/bring-and-share supper (some delicious barbecued/braaied chicken with various salads, etc.), and was my "farewell" to the group. The small group had got me a book about the Davis area and had all signed a card, which was very nice of them. It's great how one has a Christian family all over the world.

Colin and Janet had lent me their Dodge Durango SUV for the trip to Davis on Monday. Packing my stuff into the SUV and cleaning up in Davis was relatively unstressful and I was back in Rocklin by 3:00pm on Tuesday. It was nice to have the big vehicle as it swallowed a chest of drawers and a small desk easily with stacks of space to spare for the two suitcases, as well as numerous bags of junk, bedding, etc. which need to be returned to their owners or donated. I'm ignoring the challenge of fitting everything I want to bring back to SA into two suitcases for the moment!

I need to get back to Davis sometime to collect the bed and the bicycle, which will need a trailer — the plan is to do that on Saturday.

Next week I will be in Las Vegas for the 2009 International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications (PDPTA'09), part of the 2009 World Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Applied Computing (WORLDCOMP'09). That's a huge conference that I have attended several times before. I'll be presenting a paper on some of the work that I did here late last year.

Then there is one last camping/boating trip planned before I fly back to SA.

It's hard to believe I leave here in only two weeks now. The time seems to be flying by rather fast!

A Geocaching Milestone

While most geocachers are adamant that "it's not about the numbers", keeping track of the number of caches found and celebrating significant milestones is a very common habit!

A while back I had realised that I was fairly close to reaching 200 caches found, and that I could reach this in the USA by finding about three caches a week. I took advantage of the end of my formal commitments at UC Davis to go out on a country ride last week and managed to tick off quite a few, bringing me up to a total of 193. I then considered trying to reach the 200 mark while in Yosemite over the weekend, but that would have meant pushing the geocaching rather hard (and would not have been all that considerate to the others on that trip). Still, the caching on our hike in Yosemite did bring the total tantalisingly close: to 197!

With today as my last day in Davis I had to do something about this and went out for a quick ride to get three fairly close-by caches, deliberately aiming for a specific one for the milestone. My quest was successful and I hit the target, just hours before leaving Davis!

The ride was actually very pleasant, mostly on a bike path that follows the original Lincoln Highway route into Davis, parallel to the current highway. The highway is particularly spectacular at the moment with masses of blooming oleanders in all sorts of colours down the median.

The geocache that I found for the milestone is an interesting one. Called "Losing Yamar's Marbles" it was placed by a cacher called Yamar, and the cache container is full of marbles. The idea is to take a marble and then drop it off anywhere you care to, noting the location on a website he has set up (he describes it as a study in Brownian motion!). I had noticed this cache some time ago as it is quite close to where I was living in Davis (just a little difficult to get to, as it is on the other side of the railway tracks). More importantly, no marbles have been dropped in Africa yet — an omission that had to be rectified!

So, I reached my goal of 200 caches, on my last day in Davis, and will be able to drop the two marbles I took when I get back to South Africa.

All in all, a very satisfying day of geocaching!

Yosemite: Day 2

After a relatively strenuous day, the plan for day 2 was a lot calmer. We started off with the obligatory cooked camping breakfast (including a neighbouring squirrel!) and then headed off into Yosemite again.

We took the Northern road, which runs right through the park this time and headed up towards the North-East part of the park. This involved a fair amount of climbing (fortunately, with the SUV doing the work this time, rather than human legs!). As we climbed, the terrain and vegetation changed noticeably from the pine forests to relatively bare rock, with patches of some very pretty wildflowers.

Our destination for the day was a short (a few miles), and flat (maximum climb 100ft, or about 30m) hike along the Tuolumne River. One of the main goals was for Colin to do some fly-fishing.

It was the perfect way to recover from the previous day's exertions and we thoroughly enjoyed the gentle stroll along the river, with pine forests and wide-open meadows. We stopped a couple of times for fishing breaks before reaching a lovely, quiet meadow spot where we had lunch with very few other people in sight or passing by.

Shortly after lunch we were somewhat surprised when two women walked up to the river (about 200m from where we were sitting in plain view, and much closer to some other people sitting on the river bank) and proceeded to strip off their clothes and plunge into the icy water before sunning themselves on the rocks! As most Americans are relatively prudish and wouldn't dream of being seen naked in public, we decided they must be European! (And, no, I didn't take any photos!).

After a post-lunch rest (for the non-fishers), Janet and I walked a little further along the river, enjoying the ever-changing interactions of the water and the rocks.

A rather long, but pleasant and scenic drive with musical accompaniment by Casting Crowns had us back at the camp site reasonably early for our dinner of braaied chicken and baked potatoes.

It had been a very different day to the first, but served to highlight the amazing variety of terrain, vegetation and activities available in Yosemite.

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On Sunday morning, Janet and Erin had to get up early (5:00am) to get back home as Erin was leaving on a church camping trip for the week. Colin did some last minute fishing before breakfast, after which we packed up (again, relatively easily in the RV) and headed back to Rocklin. The first part of the trip involved 5 miles of rather steep and winding descent, which we did very slowly in the "bus" and there was a lot of end-of-holiday-weekend traffic, so we took a lot longer to get back than Janet and Erin had.

Yosemite: Day 1

The past weekend was a long weekend in the US (with the Fourth of July falling on a Saturday, Friday was a public holiday). We headed for Yosemite national park (South-East of Sacramento) on Thursday afternoon. Colin and Janet had borrowed their neighbour's RV (Recreational Vehicle — a monster motor home!) for the trip, as the thought of tent-camping in bear country did not appeal too much! Getting camping sites in Yosemite on the Fourth of July weekend was a non-starter, so we stayed in a camp site just outside the park gates. We left Rocklin on Thursday afternoon, and arrived at the campsite early that evening, in good time to set up camp (relatively easy with the RV) and enjoy a dinner of braaied sausages and salad.

On Friday morning, we tried to get up and going reasonably early, but with with relatively little success! The line of cars waiting to get into the park was a little daunting, but was moving reasonably quickly and we were soon through the gate and enjoying the beautiful scenery of pine forests, dramatic rocky mountains and cliffs, and rushing rivers. The mission for the day was to tackle the hike to Nevada Falls. The round-trip distance was about seven miles (about 12km), but the difficulty lay in the 2000ft (600m) climb (and descent)! There were several geocaches located along the trail, which added to the fun of the hike.

Our route up the trail took us along the Merced River most of the time. The first climb of the day was up the "Mist Trail" alongside the Vernal Falls. The spray from the falls provides a very welcome, cooling mist as you climb up a set of stairs built into the cliff face. At the top we stopped for lunch at the pool above the falls, and got our breath back before the next stage.

From Vernal Falls, there was a short section through some woods, before starting the climb up to the top of Nevada Falls. That was a little more hair-raising than the climb up to Vernal Falls, as the steps were relatively rough rock, with no hand rail. It was also in hot sun most of the time and far enough from the river and falls that there was no cooling mist effect on this climb. The effort was more than worthwhile though, as the view from the top of the falls was amazing and there was a lovely cold, refreshing pool in which to soak our feet before contemplating the descent.

We took an alternative route for the descent, which didn't follow the river as closely, but also took the descent more gradually (the alternative trail is used by horse riders, which pretty well rules out staircases!). It was also well shaded and reasonably cool.

By the time we got back to our parking spot, it was starting to get quite late, so we abandoned our plans to try to get to a scenic sunset spot (a fair distance drive away), and settled for getting some pizza for supper at the "village" near the parking. After dinner, Colin tried fishing for a while in the river, before we headed for the campsite and showers.

While we didn't see any bears, we did see a lot of squirrels and a few deer in the park, but the highlight was without a doubt the spectacular scenery.