I’m trying to catch up with some older stuff, so here is a trip I took back in March 2004 to Olympic National Park in Washington state. Everyone should go to a temperate rain forest at least once in their life. Big trees are cool.

Yeeha, finally finished up the Eastern European trip from September. Here are the last two days.

Here is more from Vienna, getting closer to finally finishing up this trip. Of course, I still have a giant backlog of trips to post.

Also, this weekend they had some street performers around town as part of the Green Space Festival. One of the groups that was performing was just awesome, Bombay Baja. They are billed as “one of Europe’s first Indian brass bands”, and sounded pretty cool. I really like the rhythms of Bhangra music. Looking at their website, they are used to playing some pretty big crowds. They must have been a bit disappointed here, since there weren’t more than 20 people watching them. It was raining, but I think they just didn’t get advertised very well. BTW, I did take a couple of videos, but they just didn’t capture the sound well enough.

Cheers..

Hello readers (assuming anyone is looking at this ) :

I’m getting closer to finishing up the Eastern Europe trip from last year. Here is day 05, which was the first day in Vienna, Austria.

Here’s yet another installment from my Eastern Europe trip. More from Budapest…

Here’s another installment of my Eastern Europe trip… I think I should have taken more pictures.

Well, I guess the “more frequent updates” thing fell through… Anyway, here is the first installment from my Eastern Europe trip back in September.

Let me know if you like it or not….

If you haven’t visited Zion National Park, put it on your schedule. It’s definitely one of my favorite places, and IMHO one of the coolest looking places on earth. And if you do go, make sure to do it in a convertible, since most of the scenery is up Of course, since so many people like to come to the park, you can only drive your own vehicle from November through April. The rest of the time you have to park outside the boundaries and take one of the shuttle buses. Lots of cool hikes on the inside. Here is a taste of what is to come when I get around to building a proper travelogue for this trip…

Today was Guy Fawkes day here in England. Basically, this is an example of a 400-year long grudge. Guy Fawkes was a member of a Catholic group who tried to assassinate the Protestant king James I in 1605 (the Gunpowder plot). They failed, were tortured and executed, and ever since then are remembered on every November 5. There are fireworks and a large bonfire in which Guy Fawkes, aka “the guy” is burned in effigy. There is a bit of a pagan air about the bonfire, but basically it is just an excuse to party! They have been setting off fireworks around town for the last 3 nights, and tonight was the big celebration on the Stray (our huge city park). There was a decent fireworks display, and a truly enormous bonfire. They fueled it with what appeared to be a bunch of wooden pallets, and the tops of IKEA desks. I got a couple of movies of it (sorry about the big file sizes):
Here, it is just starting to catch, and you can still see the guy at the top right (16MB)

Going a bit better now… (7MB)

Then the wind kicked up, and the lower stuff caught (9MB)

This is the maximum height, and it was almost too warm to stand where I was… (12MB)

It’s still pretty huge, even after 15 minutes and 100 yards away…
hehe, fire is cool..