Been a while since I have posted a ridelog. Took a quick lunch ride today up to Rockford with the MEWS. A nice farm country road ride. No twisities, but a good group.
Below is a short narrative I wrote from the sub-reddit "Writing Prompts". It is a sub where a topic is posted and users post a story that comes to their mind. This is what sprang to my mind. Below is the topic.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I’ll be right outside if you need me,” said Private first class Jennifer Mutin before she turned away from me. I turned my attention back to the room and the door slid closed behind me and I found myself alone.
The air smelled stale and cold and the room had no furniture. The walls were sparse, only covered with the steel panels from the inner ship hull. The floor was a brushed steel plate and my freshly polished boots contrasted starkly against the stainless steel. I took a long deep breath before I had the courage to look up from the floor to the center of the room, where I knew I would fine him. When my eyes finally saw him I had to choke back the tears. I steadied myself, straightened my uniform and then stepped towards the center of the room.
Cast in a single spot light lay my father. Dressed in his marine blues, his body was draped with the flag of the marine corps. His arms were folded across his chest with white gloves holding a silver ceremonial sword. My eyes moved from the flag up to his face. It was dark, tanned and he had long curls of hair cast around either side. He looked exactly how I remembered him all those years ago. Is that what faster than light travel did?
From my uniform I pulled out an envelope with a wax seal and my name on it. “Marcus” was written in pencil on one side and on the other was a green seal stamped with the letter “R” for Robert. I had received the letter just that morning. It was hand delivered to me with the instruction not to open it until I saw my father.
I hesitated before opening the letter, but broke the wax seal and then unfolded the paper inside.
Marcus,You are never going to believe what happened, but i need you to trust me. What I am about to tell you now will determine if you ever see me or anyone again. It must be close to twenty years in your time since you last saw me. For that I am sorry, but it has only been a few months since I have left you and your mother. I hope she is doing well.That night, on March 26th, when I left the house to get milk and bread, something extraordinary occurred. Humanity finally made contact, or rather contact finally touched humanity. I was there and I went with them. I am still with them. But there is something dangerous out here in the deep of space and it is coming. It has taken notice for humanity.Please believe me that I need your help. From here on out you cannot trust anyone. They know that I am going to try and get in touch with you. I need you to follow my instructions precisely.After you read this letter proceed immediately to the spaceport at NYC13. I have made arrangements to get you more information there.Please be safe, and remember do not trust anyone.Love,Dad.
I lowered my hands and stared in astonishment at his body lying on the table. Was this some sort of joke? Had my father gone mad before his death? The official report stated that his death was classified. I had not seen my father in twenty years and then suddenly two days ago I received communications from the naval intelligence office stating that he had been killed in the line of duty. Questions were swirling in my mind and I looked from the letter back to my father lying on the table in front of me. What did this letter even mean? What did he mean “if you ever see me again?"
Before I could even think, the door to the room opened and I turned to see Private First Class Mutin standing in the doorway, only this time she was accompanied by two military police.
“Ensign Caldwell. You need to come with me."
A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to goto the ESRI User Conference in San Diego. It was quite an impressive conference with approximately 15,000 people in attendance.
This is the second time that I have been able to goto San Diego, before was when my wife had a conference of her own there. I won't get into all the geeky details of the ESRI conference, but I think there are two things that were cool from the conference that the general public can enjoy. Most of ESRI's tools are geared towards enterprise solutions so they are paid accounts, but there are a couple of free things out there for people to try.
ArcGIS Online.
The first one is ArcGIS online. This is basically an online mapping interface for people to create maps. Most of us are experienced with using Google Maps, perhaps even some of us out there have done some line or polygon drawing in Google. Over the past couple of years I think Google has basically ruined their mapping interface and while it is still good for routing, creating custom maps is a nightmare.
ESRI thankfully has a pretty easy and robust solution. Over at ArcGIS.com you can setup a free account that gives you 2GB of storage space to upload files, data, images or whatever for map creation. They have really done a nice job and their embed and creation tools are really robust. Plus they have a fantastic community of "base maps" from census.gov, the USGS, etc. that people can use. It really blows Google Maps out of the water so if you do any sort of tracking with GPS for hiking, biking or whatever, I would highly recommend people check it out.
Story Maps
The second tool thatI saw was Story Maps. This is essentially an interface for loading your maps and photos into a cool interactive web program. Have you seen those cook New York Times or National Geographic articles that use mapping and images? This does that. You'll need an ArcGIS.com account, which I noted above, but from there they have templates you can use for telling a story. Simply upload your geotagged photos from your phone, or if you have a map already made use that. There are some wonderful examples on their website in their featured content section. Here is a great example they created: http://storymaps.esri.com/stories/2015/river-reborn/
Finally....
Finally we did have a bit of fun while in San Diego. The food there is always wonderful and we had an opportunity to visit the zoo one day.
Finally had an opportunity to upload the route from the Tri-state tour my dad and I did a few weeks ago. Putting it on the map gives you a good idea of how long the route really was.
View Great River Road in a larger map
Last week I took a long weekend road trip up to Minneapolis for the 2014 BMW MOA International Rally. On my way up we road the Great River Road up through Wisconsin, which is a very scenic road following the Mississippi River. Overall I would highly recommend it as a (long) day right out there for anyone interested. There is some really fantastic shots. I took my GoPro along with me, but unfortunately I only turned it on after La Crosse so I didn't get the best of the ride on film. I will have to do that at another point.
This past weekend I had a chance to do a nice quick ride down Route 113 near Kankakee. There is a nice thirteen mile stretch along the south side of the Kankakee River through the state park down there. If anyone is in that area, it is worth hitting up this little stretch for a pleasant ride. Unfortunately it seems like the "New Google Maps" is terrible for trying to load GPS data into it. I'll put that in another post, but in the mean time enjoy this quick video of the ride.
Our third day in the park was our first full day in the Valley. This would have been my day to do the Half Dome, but I unfortunately was unable to obtain a permit to do the hike. What we did instead was hike up the Mist Trail to the Vernal Falls and then ultimately the Nevada Falls. These were both pretty rigorous hikes, but the first portion of the Mist Trail was paved for the first mile or so. I was actually pretty amazed at how many people I saw who seemed unprepared for the hike, wearing sandals and tank tops.
We ultimately made it up to the Nevada Falls and there was a really nice pool at the top of the water fall to cool our feet off. On our hike down we decided to take the less steep John Muir Trail. This was brutal for Megan and the trip took quite a while down since it really bothered her knees.
We also visited the Awahanee Hotel, which is the beautiful hotel in the valley that everyone who has money stays at.
That evening we went on the stargazing tour, which put us on a bus from the valley back up to Glacier Point. Yes, I did go there a lot. The star gazing tour featured a great tour of the night sky. We were only able to stay until about 11:00, but you could just barely begin to see the Milky Way coming out. I wish we could have stayed until 2-3 AM though when the Milky Way really comes out.
You can see all of my photos over at Flickr
Day two in the park had us transferring down to Yosemite Valley. My initial intention on this day was to drive down to the valley and then hike up to Glacier Point. After looking at some maps and seeing some recommendations I noted that it would be quicker for us to just drive up to Glacier Point since it was on our way. This ended up being the ideal solution, especially since Megan's blisters were bad. We were able to get to Glacier Point fairly early in the morning and avoided most of the crowd. We were not disappointed by the view.
Next, on our way back down the mountain we stopped by Taft Point and Sentinel Dome. Both of these hikes were very light, approximately 1.1 miles each and both again rewarded us with some great views. They were well worth the hikes and probably my favorite parts of the trip.
That evening we may our way into the Valley and then checked into Curry Village, with three nights to be spent in the Valley.
You can see all of my photos over at Flickr
Finally I have had the opportunity to get all of my photos uploaded online from my trip.
The first two nights in the park we spent at the Wawona Hotel. This was a gorgeous hotel that was built around the turn of the last century. It had a really nice quaint feel to it and it was one of these places that it is surprising that there was even electricity. It all made for a really quiet experience though. Everyone had the windows open to their rooms and all of the guests were out and about in Adirondack chairs.
Our first full day at the park was at the Mariposa Grove. This is the most famous grove of Redwoods in the park. We decided to hike the ~6 mile trail from the hotel to the grove. In retrospect I would not have done this again and I would not recommend people to do this in the future. It was not a particularly scenic hike and unfortunately Megan got some major blisters on day one. In the future I would just recommend people to take the shuttle and spend their energy instead hiking up to the vista point in the Mariposa Grove.
The Wowona Hotel also had an excellent dining room and we had two very nice dinners while were staying there. I had pot roast and trout on each of the nights and the second night I had pine nut pie for dessert.
You can see all of my photos over at Flickr
This past weekend we had the opportunity of having our niece spend the night and this gave Megan and I the perfect opportunity to go out and buy some more games from our favorite game shop, The Wandering Dragon. We of course ended up buying a lot more than we possibly could have played, but we bought the following games.
We started out the evening by playing Forbidden Island. I knew as a cooperative game that this would be easy for everyone to play and we ended up having a blast with it. We played two games and had a great time. The next day we also played some Zombie Dice while we ate lunch.
Later on Saturday I tried to play Dragon Dice with Megan. We sort of got the gist of it, but the rules for the game were pretty terrible. I ended up having to go online the next day to watch some Youtube videos on how to play Dragon Dice. If you are looking for some good videos, these guys over at Youtube have made some really nice videos. In the the end I think the game can be a lot of fun. There is an incredible depth and scalability to this game that I really like. It can be as simple as the starter pack that I bought or much more complex. I find that intriguing.
FInally I had to buy the Red Dragon Inn as it has become one of my favorite games as of late and I haven't been able to find the original game in many places. When the Wandering Dragon had four copies on their shelf, I had to pick it up.
Lastly, Megan bought Eye for an Eye, which we unfortunately need at least five people to play. It looks like a cool party game though where it has a sorto f murder mystery aspect to it.