Not much new for traveling...

Sorry for the lack of updates, but I only been traveling to San Jose and Austin since my last visit. I will visit Kansas City this week, and I'll remember to bring my camera along for a picture of something (hopefully a giant steak for dinner).

We've been traveling less for work, due to the current economic conditions, hence the lack of posts. I will be visiting Shanghai and Tokyo at the end of April, stay tuned for lots of pictures of my first trip to a Communist country, as well as a return visit to one of my favorite places in the world. I can't wait to stock up on pens!

Back to California for work

I made my first regular commute to San Jose in January, and I was able to spend the weekend there since Liz had to work over the weekend back in Beantown. I stayed with my friends Anthony and Maria, who are recently engaged! On Saturday morning, we walked down to the Piedmont Farmer's market. I was greeted with this marque over the historic Grand theatre. I say amen to this:


Later in the day, Anthony and I did some grilling. We made some ribs on the Weber to take over to our friends the Shelver's, who are now the caretakers of my dog Sheila. Here she is, looking quite fit. She even remembered who I was!

First Business Trip of 2009

In the second week of January, I headed from Boston to Newark, NJ via the Amtrak Acela, which is the high speed train along the east coast of the US. It's pretty darn fast from Boston to southern Rhode Island, then it has to go at a more leisurely pace. Still, I got to NY Penn Station in 4 hours, not too bad. I visited with the FDA near JFK airport on Wednesday before heading to Austin for some work. Here's a picture of Terminal 5, the terminal formerly known as the TWA Flight Center, designed by Mr. Eero Saarinen, the famous Finish architect who also is known for the STL arch. The day after I left NYC, the US Airways flight ditched into the Hudson River. It was cold, very cold that week, I'm glad our Airbus made it to AUS from JFK without troubles.

49 states under my belt, only one to go!

We took a weekend trip up to the Pine Tree State the first weekend in the New Year. I had never been to Maine before, along with South Carolina. We spent the weekend at a little B&B in Freeport, Maine where we were the only guests on Friday night, and one of only 2 parties the next night. On the way up, we passed by 41's compound in Kennebunkport, and visited the factory outlet store of Tom's of Maine, our favorite toothpaste. You can get a lot of stuff for $22 at this store! We visited many stores in Freeport, L.L. Bean, of course, and Liz bought some shoes at Cole Haan. We also spent some time in Portland checking out their cool lighthouses. We had to head home a little early on Sunday due to the 6-8" of snow, but the Prius had no trouble on the drive home.
Jon by the L.L. Bean Hunting Shoe left by Paul Bunyan for repair.

Good thing we brought our warm coats, it was cold, but it felt good in the lungs!
We're set for toothpaste for a while now.

Kaua'i, 2008

The second week in December, we took a trip to the Garden Isle of Kaua'i. My mom and Mike had a timeshare that we were able to stay at, and with 2 frequent flyer miles and $10, United took us from Boston to Lihue via IAD and LAX. After many hours on Boeing 757s, we finally touched down at LIH.

Day one was really windy. In the morning, Mike and I went for a hike on the NaPali coast. The guidebook said the 5 mile round trip would take about 3 1/2 hours, so Mike and I wanted to see if we could do it in 2. It took us about 1:50, but we were moving. Here's a shot of our destination, a small beach where a stream enters the ocean. Too rough to go for a swim this time of year, but it's a nice senic spot.


Time to get back, we've got a flight to catch!

We had an airplane sightseeing flight around the island as one of our Christmas gifts, thanks mom and mike! We boarded the plane, and began our trip around the island in a clockwise direction. This plane is from Australia, designed for use in the outback. It was less than 1/2 year old, and used much less fuel than a helicopter, so we felt green and safe. More on the green later. The clouds were around 3000' so we couldn't see up into the canyon or any of the waterfalls.



Up we went, I was hoping to sit in the right seat, since I always wanted to be a commercial airline pilot or at least get my private license, but someone else got to due to weight balancing issues. Oh well. We go around the north west end of the island, off of the imposing cliffs of the Na Pali coast and it got very bumpy. This is where a lot of us started to feel a bit green due to the bumps! The view was nice, however, and he's a shot out of the window.

We made it around the island, and our pilot made a great touch down on runway 17 at LIH. I don't get to take many shots from this viewpoint. It reminded me of a good blog I like to follow, check out Rand the NW/DL pilot's blog here.


Rand probably hasn't used runway 17 at LIH as I believe he's used to the other runway, for larger jets. You can see the approach lights just to the left of the runway, right of the pilot's headset. There are 4 Fresnel lenses here to help the pilot see if he's coming in too high or too low. If he's on the right slope, the 2 on the left will be white, the 2 on the right will be red. In this shot, the 3 left are white, the 1 on the right is red, meaning we're a little bit high. However, the pilot corrected soon after this shot and we had a smooth touchdown in a brisk crosswind of about 25 knots. Elizabeth gave him a round of applause after touchdown!

The next day was our Zipline tour. We got to ride 9 ziplines around and over a series of trees and streams, and it was a blast! We had lunch at a swimming hole, jumping of a cliff and enjoying the scenery. Elizabeth and my mom were really scared to go, but they did just fine. Luckily, the first zipline was a short easy "bunny hill" zipline to get them warmed up. Here's my mom crusing across one of the valleys.



That was pretty much our last day without rain for the rest of the trip. The skies opened up and there was no snorkeling or scuba diving for me. We even had thunderstorms and a tornado on the island! Lots of flooding on the roads and some mudslides. Sort of a bummer. The last time I went to Kaua'i, I had bad weather too, so I think I'm done with that island for a long time. Here's a picture of the friend we had outside of our condo. He would make sure that we were out of bed every morning nice and early. I learned to put my earplugs in before going to sleep. I wanted to catch him and throw him on the BBQ, but then I got a close look at those talons! They are pretty wary anyway, so I didn't bother trying to catch him in the end.



ALOHA!

Melamine and you

This week, I made a quick visit to the FDA lab in Irvine, California. The FDA uses one of our instruments, a triple quadrupole mass spectrometer (seen here) or LC-MS/MS, to analyze various food products for the presence of Melamine and Cyanuric Acid. These are the compounds you may have heard about in the news recently, found in products from pet food to infant formula to chicken, pork and fish. The good news is that we're pretty safe here in the US, as long as we stay away from food products produced in China, especially if they contain dairy ingredients. The bad news is that some of the products we find a the store contain ingredients that may come from China, but that information isn't on the label. For the most part, melamine isn't too toxic for adults, so the trace amounts that have been detected aren't really too much for adults to worry about. However, it sort of makes you mad that certain food producers are putting these chemicals in our food products in order to make a litte bit more money. Luckily, the FDA is inspecting our food (using the best Mass Spectrometers on the market, Thermo Scientific!), and working hard to keep us safe.

False Advertising?

Here's a picture of Rudy's Country store and Bar-b-q from Round Rock, TX. I was in Austin again last week for work, at a software meeting. Now if you look closely at the small print, you'll notice that Rudy's has the "worst Bar-b-q in Texas!" I ate it anyway, and I can tell you they surely are lying, as this stuff was amazing. The cool part about this particular Rudy's is that it's built into a gas station. My buddy Jamie from work, who is a native Texan, told me that this is how the Rudy's stores are out in the middle of nowhere, so even though this one is in the middle of suburbia/stripmall land, they keep up the theme. I went to lunch with my co-workers, Peter from China and Yoko from Japan (don't worry, it's not that Yoko, this one never would have broken up the Beatles). Peter and I are going to open up a Rudy's BBQ in China some day if we lose our jobs over here. He's convinced that the Chinese would love some good ol' fashioned "worst BBQ in TX," and there would be lines going out the door. I'd believe him too, this was his second vist to Rudy's in 2 days, and he loved it!