I've finished culling, sorting, and organizing the photos that I took during our trip. There are 339 photos, 132 of which are in the "60 mi Gallery" and probably not all that interesting except as a curiosity. That leaves 207 actual pictures of potentially interesting things.

USA Southwest 2005 Photo Gallery

Enjoy!

We arrived back in Barcelona on tuesday morning. Our train was nearly two hours late, apparently due to some sort of railway workers' strike. This was actually fortunate, because it allowed us to check into our room in Barcelona immediately, without waiting around for an available room.

We had lunch at Les Quinze Nits, a reasonably priced Catalan restaurant with excellent food and mediocre service. As usual we had the Creme Catalán for dessert (which is much like Crème Brulée, only better). Then we took a nice long siesta because we really didn't get a very good night's sleep on the train. I think the Spanish are definitely onto something with this siesta idea.

Our plan for wednesday was to take a day trip to somewhere up on the Costa Brava (the part of the Mediterranean north of Barcelona). Almost all the towns along there are named [something] del Mar. There wasn't any regular train service up there, but the buses ran regularly. Anyway, when we woke up in the morning, it was raining! Not much, but not really a great day to go to the beach. So instead, we went to see the Palau Güell, a national historic building that is in the process of being restored. We only saw the stables in the basement, and the roof, and one of the interior floors. But it was very cool.

By the time we were done with that, the weather had cleared up and it was sunny again. So we decided to head to the bus station to pick a $random_del_mar to visit. We decided to go to Tossa de Mar, a little resort town with an old medieval castle and ruins. But not 20 minutes after we left Barcelona on the bus, it started raining again! Sure enough, it was still raining when we got there.

Not to be deterred, we got a map and wandered toward the beach area. The town almost seemed deserted, especially for being in the height of the summer season. There were a row of shops selling cheesy beach stuff and souvenirs, and we popped in there a bit to avoid some rain. But by the time we made it to the beach, the rain had almost completely stopped.

The beach at Tossa de Mar is not really sand but more of a fine granite gravel. We walked along the beach for a bit and the sun peeked out, so Amy laid out a towel and I poked around the rocky coves and such. After we sat on the beach for a while, watching people slowly come back out to the beach after the rain, we headed over to the old medieval town to check it out before our bus returned to Barcelona.

Thursday was my last full day in Spain, and we started it by sleeping in a bit. Amy wanted to get a bit more time at the beach (after the mediocre beach day in Tossa de Mar), so she headed down to the Barcelona beach while I explored a market and bookstores etc. In the evening, we took a sail on a 75 foot catamaran along the Barcelona waterfront. It was quite relaxing, and we had wanted to do some kind of sailing since the first few days we were there.

My flight home left at 10:40am, so we figured I should get to the airport around 9am. We got up on friday at 7am or so, did final packing and so on, and took the metro to the train station. The trains to the airport leave about every half an hour or so. We looked up at the departure monitor, and it said 8:38 to the airport, and my watch said 8:37! We heard a train arrive and quickly purchased one one-way and one round-trip ticket to the airport. Ran downstairs and there were two trains, luckily I had noticed which platform was airport-bound. 30 seconds later and we would have missed the train.

When we arrived at the airport, we said our goodbyes and Amy took the train back to downtown Barcelona. I headed to the terminal area and looked around for the Delta checkin desk. There was a mass of people in all kinds of lines extending around the area, and I had to cut through a few to find Delta. Then I followed the line back, and back... and back! There were probably 200 people in line. So I located the end, confirmed with somebody else in line that this was indeed Delta, and waited. This was 9am. At 10am, after waiting an hour, I had moved perhaps 20 feet. My international flight was leaving in 40 minutes, this was not good.

I had overheard the Spanish-speaking couple in front of me mention that they were also heading to Nuevo York. The lady had gone up to the desk a couple of times to see if she could figure out what was going on. Eventually she came back and motioned for her husband to bring everything and go with her. I followed, knowing that this was probably my best chance to get on this plane. Spending a day or possibly a night in the Barcelona airport was not my idea of fun.

We cut through lines and went straight up to the first class checkin desk, with me following trying to look like I belonged there. The agent hurriedly helped the couple with their checkin and bags, and then I said that I was on the same flight. The agent asked me how long I had been waiting (I said an hour and a half), she kind of sighed, asked me how many bags ("just one"), and finally said "ok, give me your passport". She quickly checked me in, I put my bag on the carrier they had specifically for our three bags, got my boarding pass, and headed up to security. Fortunately, the line there wasn't long. Then I realized that I wasn't in my originally assigned seat, but I was in 2G, a first class window seat! I ran to the gate, avoided the long line of people waiting to board by joining the first class boarding line. I was seated and had finished an orange juice by the time the rest of the people were done boarding. What luck!

Since it was a daytime flight, and I wanted to make sure my internal clock didn't get further screwed up, I stayed awake for the whole 8.5 hour flight. Believe me, if you're ever going to have a fortunate bump to first class, you can choose no better leg than the longest flight on your way home. That definitely made up for the extra JFK-ATL connection that I had to take on the return trip.

If you have read this far, you've reached the end of my journals for this trip. As your reward, my pictures from the trip are now online in my photo gallery. There are 190 photos in several albums (watch for the sub-albums especially the three in Barcelona). Enjoy! We certainly did.

While perusing my web server logs recently, I noticed several referer hits from a German train message board post. While discussing freight trains, somebody wrote a post that linked directly to one of my pictures taken at Tehachapi Loop. Now, I don't really have a big problem with this sort of thing, especially when the poster says things like "found a few spectacular pictures from Tehachapi Pass", but there was no credit given to the photographer (me) or a link back to my site.

So I finally got around to doing something I've been thinking about for a while. I modified my photo gallery software to add a copyright notice to the bottom of every image. The thumbnail images have just a copyright notice with the date and my name; the larger ones have the copyright, URL to the image page, and the description (if available). Now, the inlined image on the train message board shows the description, copyright, and URL to the original.

I still have a little bit of work to do. Currently all the images claim they are copyright 2004, but I'm going to add the ability to set a specific copyright date for each image or set of images. Also there are a couple of images which were not actually created by me, which shouldn't have my copyright. I'll get all this sorted out soon.

Initially I was unhappy about how the copyright notice looked on the thumbnail pages, but I reduced its size a little bit and I think it looks okay now. What do you think?

I took the day off today and went to Enchanted Rock with goulo, ivo, moonwick, paradox0220, shyape, texaspatsfan, xomox, and Aphid. Oh, and Woodie the dog, who always wanted to be at the front of the group.

We first hiked up to the top of the main dome to get a good view of the area. It was windy up there! Then we went a bit further down the north side and explored one of the caves. Well, they aren't really caves so much as spaces around and below huge granite boulders that have fallen into a ravine. Nevertheless, it was dark and cool and damp inside, just as a cave should be. We also found some amazing rock formations around the dome (see pictures).

Then we headed back to the smaller dome called Little Rock, going around and over it to pick up three geocaches on the way. I think Ivo was the first to find all three of those. We had some cactus encounters; at one point I had to extract a needle from my leg using pliers. The final cache of the day was a great one deep in another cave, but unfortunately the group was a bit fragmented at that point and only three of us found our way inside.

After a bit of confusion while getting everybody back down to the same altitude, we headed back to Fredericksburg for dinner and drinks at the Ausländer Biergarten. The food was good and the company was outstanding.

Thanks to everybody for a wonderful day!

It snowed in Austin! I took some pictures. More later, I'm going to go see if I can jump out of a plane today.

I was working away during the sunset today, and shyape called out across the office to bring my attention to the sunset outside. I looked over at the window and saw all orange, so ran outside to catch a picture. Unfortunately it wasn't quite as impressive as it first appeared, but still pretty. (As usual, click on the picture for a larger version.)

There was a spectacular sunset this evening, so I ran outside (I was still at work, still not enough hours in the day) and took some pictures. Some more in my gallery...

I got several good lightning pictures this evening. Here's one:



You can see the rest of them in my gallery.

Although I didn't have a chance to fly, this was certainly an enjoyable weekend anyway. Most of the enjoyable parts were spent in the company of friends, the rest of it was me procrastinating about doing some yardwork (which I eventually did get around to doing). I was considering doing some geocaching but didn't get to it. Maybe the next non-flying weekend. I'm going to load a bunch of local cache coordinates into my GPS so geocaching can be more spontaneous. Less planning, more doing. (Thanks openmynd :)

In case you were wondering, the title of this post ("fulmo bonegas") is Esperanto and essentially means "lightning is awesome".

Yesterday we had some good storms come through in north Austin. Every time a storm comes through I try to get lightning pictures, and got a nice one this time:



If you look at the larger picture, you can see drops of water. Although I was indoors when I took this picture, the drops are not on the outside of the window. These are raindrops falling through the air, captured in freefall by the strobe-like illumination of the lightning strike! Very cool. This is a great demonstration that falling raindrops do not take on a "teardrop" shape, as is commonly depicted.