Around the World in Two Hours

The real reason I attended AIChE. Just kidding/not really kidding. After some debate, we were going to go to the Magic Kingdom on our one free day in Orlando, but then found out they were closing early for Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party, so we ended up at Epcot instead. It turned out to be a good decision, because the crowds were very manageable, and we were there in the middle of the food and wine festival. No, we did not drink around the world. Which is a thing that people do. 

Instead, we rode all the rides and visited all the countries in the World Showcase before ending the night with fireworks. The last time I was at Epcot was the summer after ninth grade, which was ten years ago. [Ten years. That’s crazy to think about. Also, the current college freshmen were born after 2000. They’re from a different century.] Anyway, Epcot hadn’t changed very much since 2009, which is why I think there’s construction going on there now. Animal Kingdom got blue people land and Hollywood Studios got Star Wars, so it was time to upgrade Epcot, maybe deal with any “outdated cultural depictions.” The entrance was a bit of a mess, but we found our way around eventually.

Spaceship Earth at night

The first place we ended up at was Mission: Space. I’ve been on both versions of the ride and can’t definitively say that I can tell the difference between them, but this time we rode the orange version. Somehow, without any actual training, we successfully landed on Mars. Next, we went on Test Track, which had changed since the last time I rode, though not significantly. The premise of testing a car design remains the same, but the setting was updated? futurized? – think neon lights and OnStar (it’s sponsored by Chevrolet).

Since we didn’t have a map, we then found ourselves circling the World Showcase. We didn’t spend much time in each country, mainly just looked at the architecture and what representative foods were being served. We did watch the animatronic American Adventure show about US history and get funnel cake along the way though. Because #America?

Back in Future World, we made the rounds though the rest of the rides [sadly(?) only missing Journey into Imagination with Figment]. First we walked on to the incredibly popular Living with the Land for a boat ride through some simulated biomes and actual greenhouses showcasing aquaponics, aeroponics, hydroponics, and pumpkins grown into the shape of Mickey’s head. But probably the main attraction in the Land pavilion is Soarin’, formerly Soarin’ Over California, now Soarin’ Around the World. The ride originated at Disneyland in 2001, hence California, and was brought to Epcot with the same film in 2005 before it was replaced by the current movie in 2016. So now, instead of the Golden Gate Bridge, redwoods, Half Dome, and vineyards, you soar over the Matterhorn, Kilimanjaro National Park, the Great Wall of China, and the Taj Mahal. Still a great ride.

We had time before the fireworks for the last two rides at Epcot – The Seas with Nemo and Friends and Spaceship Earth. The Nemo ride is a highly abbreviated based-on-the-movie affair probably most exciting to small children, but you get to ride in a clamobile. Spaceship Earth is inside the giant geodesic dome itself, and goes through scientific/cultural innovation through the years, from writing to the Internets. Thanks to the relatively short lines all night (I don’t think we waited more than fifteen or twenty minutes to get on anything), we rode Soarin’ again before our last event of the night – the fireworks. As part of the renovations, Epcot is transitioning from their fireworks show IllumiNations to something called Harmonious, and is temporarily showing Epcot Forever. I didn’t follow the storyline, if there was one, but there were fireworks. There were kites. We left happy.

Fireworks.  Taken without a tripod or any idea what my camera setting should have been.

Mainly, Epcot was similar to the park I visited ten years ago, except with more touchscreens, which is probably why they’re doing construction on it now. It was fun to be there during the food and wine festival, and even with that going on, the crowds were manageable, and the screeching children few. Like I said, we didn’t wait very long for anything. I think we avoided the one potential wait at Test Track by using the single rider line. We had funnel cake. We saw fireworks. We rode Soarin’ twice. It was a pretty good day.

#AIChEAnnual

I went to a conference and it had its own hashtag. And app. Welcome to the 21st century. I’ve been a ChemE for seven years now, and this was my first time attending the annual meeting of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE – most properly pronounced by spelling out A-I-C-H-E, often pronounced as “achy,” like “achy, breaky heart”). I figured I should at least go once, to experience it. Plus it was held in Orlando, Florida, this year. 

Well, after experiencing AIChE once, I can say that the best way to describe it is crazy. There are thousands of attendees, hundreds of talks and posters, and a couple dozen things going on at any given time. I’m glad I went, but it was five days of controlled madness. You can’t find anything in the program book, because it’s three hundred pages long. You can’t find anything in the app, because it’s horrible. You could search, verbatim, for the title of your talk on polymers, and the app would return talks on drug delivery, oil refining, and microfluidic devices. Even better, the app had the ability to be less helpful the more specific you were. You would search for the start of a talk and get lots of irrelevant results. To help the app out, you would then add more words . . . and get more results.

My coworker and I flew into Orlando on Saturday, in time for the opening festivities on Sunday. We spent the morning recovering from the previous day’s travel, then drove to the conference site in the afternoon. After collecting our name badges, we met up with some other lab members, ran into some Michigan people, and attended the welcome reception for the sake of free food. As a general rule, the bigger the conference, the less free food they’re likely to provide. It’s understandable, because the sheer amount of food required, and making sure everyone gets food, is a massive logistical and monetary undertaking. But as mostly destitute graduate students, at least some snacks would be appreciated.

Part of the conference center.  Poster sessions in the rooms on the left, vendors and attendees in the center, rooms for talks to the right, behind, and ahead left (out of the picture).

On Monday, the conference started in earnest. My labmates gave their talks bright and early, so we were there bright and early. Then lunch was a special event, held offsite with twenty-five years of our advisor’s graduate students. Some of his first students were there, all the way down to his current students. I’ve met former lab members before at info sessions or other conferences, but it was cool to see a bunch (there ended up being about a dozen of us) of them at once. After lunch, it was back to a somewhat random selection of talks and posters, though we did make it to a couple complex fluids talks, before the receptions that night. Most people who attend AIChE will admit that a decent percent of the reason you attend AIChE is to network and meet up with people you know. The first two nights, that’s accomplished by the receptions hosted by many of the larger universities in attendance. Basically, each university sets up in a ballroom or meeting room and gives out food and alcohol for a few hours. If you’re looking for an academic position, this is your time to go hunt down faculty; if you’re not, this is your time to wander around, eat, drink, and run into people you know.

Michigan’s reception (they had really good cake) was Monday night, but we also managed to make stops by MIT, Columbia, and UMass Amherst before calling it a night. Tuesday included more marginally tangentially related talks, plus Cornell’s reception. I saw former professors, classmates, and grad students, and got dessert, so I was pretty satisfied. The rest of the night involved crashing the Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and National University of Singapore receptions.

By Wednesday, we were tired and hungry, but the conference was only half over, and I hadn’t presented yet. We attended a lot of complex fluids talks, some of which were actually relevant to the work our lab does, before leaving at dinner time. On our way back to our lodgings, we stopped by Olive Garden, which ended up being one of the more palatable meals of the trip – i.e. not random appetizers on a plate or Americanized tourist-trap food. I managed to find the blandest item on the menu, pasta in a lemon herb sauce with grilled chicken. No cheese, no tomato sauce, nothing fried, and it even included vegetables.

Late afternoon outside the conference center

Finally, I presented on Thursday. In the afternoon. We attended a few talks earlier in the day before I reported to my session, heard about some projects involving similar systems to the one I work with, and gave my presentation. Being late in the day and late in the conference, you’re mainly just grateful anyone besides the session chair is there. And so we were done with any and all obligations at AIChE. We celebrated with Shake Shack.

After attending AIChE, I will say I’m glad I went, but it was a long week. Though there are constantly things going on, it’s hard to find the things that are most relevant to your research. Besides the actual content of the conference, the location was not the best. The conference center itself was fine, but the only places to get food inside it were the price-gouging hotel-owned restaurants/coffeeshops. Outside the conference center, it was tourist-trap central. All the restaurants were either places you’d take your date/business clients or bars/nightclubs. There wasn’t anywhere you could easily just get a piece of fruit, or a sandwich that wasn’t either grilled or soggy. And I’ll say it again, the app sucked. But I got to hang out with lab people, Michigan people, Cornell people, and other assorted friends, so I guess it was worth it.

Big Red Hockey

For the first time since graduation, I saw my favorite hockey team play live. It started when I got the Michigan athletics email offering staff discounts on select (i.e. out of conference, not popular) Michigan hockey games. That made me think about Cornell hockey, so I went to look up the team and see what they would be up to this season. In the back of my mind, I was wondering if any of the games in New England would be near when I was going home for Christmas, or if there was any way I could structure my break to see a Cornell hockey game. Instead, what I found out was that Cornell men’s hockey was coming to East Lansing, Michigan, to play Michigan State. East Lansing is a mere hour’s drive from Ann Arbor. 

One of my friends, a fellow Cornell graduate, didn’t take any convincing to agree that we should go to the game. I bought the tickets, we dragged along another friend (who had never seen a hockey game before), and headed out for Lansing on a Friday evening. Munn Ice Arena is the sixth hockey arena I’ve been to, after Lynah Rink (Cornell), Madison Square Garden, Thompson Arena (Dartmouth), the Bright-Landry Hockey Center (aka Lynah east) (Harvard), and Yost Ice Arena (Michigan). It was a lot like most of the other rinks I’ve visited – lots of plastic and metal, video screen, weird prize games during the period breaks. The band was pretty good though. They at least looked like they were having more fun than the Michigan hockey band, and I strongly approve of their second period break set – “Everybody’s Everything” (Santana, 1971), and “Sell Out” (Reel Big Fish, 2010). Nothing like some classic rock and ska to go with your hockey. And I played both of those songs regularly with the Cornell pep band, so I was happy to hear them.

Cornell hockey!

I was also happy with the final score. Based on the rankings, odds were that Cornell would probably win, but they were on the road for their first weekend of NCAA-counted play, versus MSU’s second or third. The rankings carrying over from the previous season also sometimes don’t mean that much, depending on the amount of team turnover from graduation. All of that is to say that Cornell started very shakily. The whole team kept giving up the puck directly in front of their own goal, they couldn’t pass out of their own half, and when they were in MSU’s half, they weren’t getting shots off.

End of game.  Final score: Cornell 3, MSU 2.

Shortly after the start of the game, MSU went on the power play, and before Cornell could get organized, scored. They got a goal back, also on the power play, to go into the first period break tied. In the second period, Cornell started looking a little better, but their penalty kill unit still looked questionable, and MSU scored on a 4-on-3 power play. Again, they managed to tie the game, this time by a lot of hacking and bashing in front of the net that somehow ended with the puck sneaking over the line. The next goal of the game came on another Cornell power play near the end of the second period. With that, Cornell went into the third period up a goal and had twenty minutes to either hold on to their lead or extend it. They didn’t score again that night, but neither did MSU, so they got the 3-2 win. During the rematch the next night, they picked up the scoring (final score, 6-2), leaving Michigan with a pair of wins and an encouraging start to the season. I can’t say Cornell ever looked great at their game Friday night, but they looked better as the night went on. The defense got themselves sorted out and the offence started to string passes together. Their goals were of the “puck is in the net” variety rather than the “great play/shot” kind, but in the end what matters is the number of goals, not the quality. They got the job done, and I got to see them do it. Until next time. Let’s go red.

Fall at the Arboretum

My latest quest was to find fall colors at the Arboretum, but it’s not like I really need excuses to go stomping through the mud. While the weather was still considered tolerable (and downright nice some weeks) by the majority of Ann Arbor, I took to wandering through the Arboretum after church on Sundays. I wasn’t expecting much, because unlike New England, Ann Arbor lacks 1) hills, so you don’t get good views of expanses of trees, and 2) maple trees, which affects the yellow/red color balance. Yes, it is possible to be persnickety about fall colors. Nevertheless, it still looked nice in Ann Arbor, just not as spectacular as miles of rolling hills covered in yellow, orange, and red.

A fall colored tree

Early in the season, there wasn’t much, just some isolated branches and tips of trees. After a couple weeks, I found a whole tree. This was one of the days when it was too nice to not be outside, though, so it was still worth being at the Arboretum, and the very tall grass was still there. A few weeks later, we hit what was probably peak color. I had a concert the week after that, and then was heading out of town the following week, so it was definitely the peak color that I saw. The more forested trails were covered in leaves, and a lot of the beeches/elms/sycamores/whatever were nice and yellow.

Fall-ish trails

View from the overlook

And then I went away for a week and came back to snow. Six months of winter, here we come.

Fall Flavors

Another month, another visit to Greenfield Village. This time, one of my college friends was visiting home, and I joined her and her parents for Fall Flavor Weekends at Greenfield Village. It was a cool, cloudy day, but I was still surprised by how uncrowded it was, not that I was complaining. I guess Fall Flavor Weekends aren’t a huge deal compared to some of their separately ticketed events, but I enjoyed it. Mostly things go on in the village as usual, except with more cooking and demonstrations.

When we arrived, we first headed in the direction of the farm, where they were threshing, and later baling, wheat. The thresher was powered by a steam engine that would have made the rounds to each farm as needed and also periodically let out giant plumes of smoke. From there, we visited the mid-19th century Firestone Farm, home to Harvey Firestone, the tire guy. He was friends with Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, and apparently the three of them would sometimes go vacationing together. At the farm, they were in the middle of lunch (featuring cabbage, squash, and a bread or cake?), and were making apple butter in the basement.

Threshing wheat

We next briefly looked around the Liberty Craftworks area, but it was mostly business as usual for them, though the print shop did print up some recipes for ham. On our way to lunch, we walked through the farmer’s market set up in the pavilion, which I had never seen open before then. For lunch, I got pork and beans with cornbread at A Taste of History, and it was delicious. I still really appreciate that their food tastes like food and not salt and oil.

Barns by the craft shops

After lunch, we wandered through the rest of the houses that were cooking. McGuffey’s birthplace (~1800, Pennsylvania) was making rabbit stew and some sort of English pudding that gets boiled. The Mattox family home (~1930, Georgia) had crackling bread and peach cobbler. Outside near these two houses, they were also making cheese and butter, plus baking apple pies (three of them, cooked in three slightly different ways – how do I get a job that involves more pies?) on an open fire. Then at the Edison homestead (~1915, Canada – this was Edison’s grandparents’ house that Edison would visit) they were having ham, a grape/celery/mayonnaise salad, and something else involving rolled fried spinach. The Susquehanna plantation (~1860, Maryland) was cooking crab cakes and biscuits, and finally, the Daggett farmhouse (~1760, Connecticut) was cleaning up by the time we got there, and had just finished brewing a batch of beer. We learned about some of the different things they used to flavor the beer, and the grains that were cooked into a mash and could be eaten as a sort of breakfast cereal before fermentation.

Overall, I liked the event; it was a different look at the houses in Greenfield Village and they kept it pretty low key. No crowds, a bit of behind the scenes, and food. What more could I ask for?

But wait, there’s more. The last fall flavor is mine. I had been watching The Great British Bake Off again and decided what I really needed to do was bake a cake. Specifically a nice complicated upside down apple cider cake that involved cooking apple slices in cider, melting butter and sugar to caramelize, arranging a layer of apples on the bottom of the pan, baking a spice cake (from scratch) over the apples, and turning the whole thing upside down. It’s a bit of a pain, but worth it in the end, because it’s not like I have better things to do with my time. (Research? What research?)

Upside down apple cider cake

Birthday Hockey

Part of my birthday celebrations this year included hockey, because after four years in pep band and dozens of hockey games, the sport grew on me. It was only the second time I’ve ever paid to go to a hockey game, but I did get a slight staff/faculty discount. One of the few perks of being a grad student is that we’re considered both students and staff, so we get all the discounts.

The reason I chose this game was not just because of the discount tickets, but because Clarkson was coming to Michigan. Clarkson, like Cornell, plays in ECAC hockey, and finished directly behind Cornell in the standings last year, so I figured I’d watch some conference friends(?) and get an early indication of how the ECAC season might shape up. With that in mind, I headed to Yost Ice Arena on a cool fall Friday night. Yost Arena is probably nicer than Cornell’s Lynah Rink, but I like Lynah and its wooden benches, low rafters, and no video replay screen. Yost, like a lot of things about Michigan, is almost too polished. Life is messy. It has rough edges. It’s not all shiny and sparkling chrome and glass. But Michigan hockey is better than no hockey at all, so I forked over my money and entered the high-ceilinged, aluminum-clad arena.

Near the end of the third period, tie game

It was early in the season, which usually means teams are still getting back on their skates, so to speak. This game was no exception, with players falling and more crossed signals than typical. Clarkson ended up scoring near the end of the first period on a power play, then conceded an even-strength goal midway through the second period, and that concluded the scoring for that game. ECAC plays a single five-minute sudden death overtime period during the regular season. If no team scores during overtime, the game ends as a tie, which is what happened on this night. Apparently for Big Ten conference games, the tie stands for NCAA records, but after the first overtime, they play a second five-minute sudden death overtime, except 3-on-3, and if the game is still tied after that, there’s a shootout and the winner receives an extra point in the Big Ten standings. For this out of conference matchup, however, the game ended as a 1-1 draw after a single overtime.

Third period, student section and hockey band in the background

There was a rematch the following night, and Clarkson came away with the win, which is what I would have expected. Michigan had home ice, but Clarkson (and Cornell) started the season ranked pretty highly. Overall, neither team was particularly inspiring, but Clarkson’s defense looked more organized, and though their offense wasn’t as active as Michigan’s, they had more dangerous fast breaks. All said, it wasn’t a bad game to watch. I brought my DSLR and experimented with shutter speeds, and I got to see what might be my favorite penalty¹ – too many men on the ice.

¹Hockey penalties are great. While most cards in soccer are for “unsportsmanlike conduct,” in hockey you get penalties like boarding, hooking, slashing, cross-checking, charging, high-sticking, holding, holding the stick, elbowing, interference, roughing, tripping, and playing with a broken stick. And of course, too many men on the ice.

The Rest of the Summer

When I wasn’t in the office doing research or galivanting across the state/country with my visitors, I spent the summer much as I have the last two summers. I walked, biked, and bussed my way to all corners of Ann Arbor. I went grocery shopping and attended church. I trekked through parks, natural areas, fields, forests, and fens; visited the farmer’s market; watched soccer; ate ice cream; and overall had a pretty good time.

Besides going to the arboretum a fair amount, I visited a couple of parks that I hadn’t been to before. Both were nice areas, but both were also plagued by my number one complaint about Ann Arbor parks: traffic noises. Is it really nature if you can still hear the cars roaring by at fifty miles an hour? If a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s there- Anyway, Furstenberg Nature Area on the east side of Ann Arbor features woodlands, prairie, wetlands, and marshes along the Huron River. It also connects to Gallup Park, which I’ve biked through on the Border to Border trail. I saw the river, some swans, and interesting clouds.

Clouds

All the way at the southeastern corner of the city, technically in Pittsfield township, is Lillie Park. I biked there, discovered the Costco and airport, did not get run over by any motor vehicles, and biked back, for a total distance of 21 miles for the day. Again, the park itself is nice, but it’s nestled right up in the intersection of I-94 and US 23. Nothing like some motors revving to go with the birdsong and wind rustling through the leaves. I walked some of the trails through the woods and across/around a couple lakes and learned about eutrophic ponds. In a eutrophic pond, plant matter accumulates faster than it’s carried away or decomposed, so the pond will eventually fill up and become moist forest or a meadow.

The eutrophic Duck Potato Pond

After peony season at the arboretum, I went back a couple times. In summer, it’s quietest when it’s raining, right after it rains, or when it might rain at any second, because that keeps the drunken tubers off the river and the fair-weather, also possibly drunk, picnickers away. My discovery of the season was very tall grass. It was taller than me, which sometimes isn’t saying much, but this was tall grass.

Very tall grass

Additionally, there was another visit to the botanical garden for yet more cactus/succulent photos. We survived another year of art fair. It was not a good year for the artists. Every single evening, it poured, and the high winds flipped at least one tent. As usual, I walked around but did not buy anything. I volunteered at a couple of engineering outreach events. At one, I mixed two hundred pounds of cornstarch with water to make a viscoelastic pool that I then walked across. It felt like I was being initiated into the ChemE secret society, except it was in broad daylight and a couple dozen middle school girls were watching. At the other, I was the photographer and got paid for the first time ever for photos that I took. I can now say that I’ve been a paid photographer. And finally, the two ice cream flavors I tried at Blank Slate this summer were peanut butter cone crunch (peanut butter butterscotch ice cream with caramel and chocolate covered waffle cone pieces) and campfire s’mores (caramel ice cream, chocolate ganache, graham crackers, and marshmallow cream). Would recommend both.

Road Tripping: The State of Ohio

Our last day on the road, we were headed west for Dayton, Ohio, then north back to my temporary home in Ann Arbor. My major accomplishment of the day was driving across the entire state of West Virginia. We stopped at the visitor center/rest area to switch seats and say we had physically set foot in the state, then I drove. If you’re familiar with US geography, you might know that West Virginia has a little spike that sticks up between Pennsylvania and Ohio. Yeah, that’s what I drove across. More hours in the car later, we pulled into Dayton. What’s in Dayton? you ask. The Wright brothers were from Dayton, and the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park is there, featuring exhibits, the Parachute Museum, one of their bicycle shops, and the Huffman Prairie Flying Field, with interpretive center.

We started at the interpretive center, where there was an exhibit about the Wright brothers and flight, covering their bike shop days, Kitty Hawk, and further experimentation at the Huffman Prairie. Because they no longer had the consistent winds of Kitty Hawk, they had to change from launching their flyers off a track to using a catapult. They spent two years improving their flying machine, then stopped flying altogether for two years to secure patents. After that, they travelled internationally, manufactured Wright Flyers, and trained pilots. Besides the exhibit, there was also one of those obviously educational videos with cheesy acting and blatant CGI/green screen. I thought it was great.

The next stop was the Huffman Prairie, the cow pasture where they tested their flyers. This is where things get interesting. The interpretive center and prairie aren’t in the same location, but they are both on the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Some parts of the base – including the parts where the interpretive center and prairie are located – are accessible to the public. Some parts are very much not. After some help from the friendly ranger in the interpretive center, we found the publicly-accessible gate and followed the signs to the Huffman Prairie. Mainly, it’s a big field, but they have a replica of the catapult and their flying shed/barn, plus a wildflower walk and a bunch of signs warning you against trespassing. It was a bit of an experience.

Flying shed at the Huffman Prairie

At that point, we still had time to go into Dayton itself to see the Wright brothers’ bike shop and the visitor center for the National Historical Park. Their bike shop in Dayton is similar to the one Henry Ford hauled up to Greenfield Village. At various times, their shop occupied six different locations – the one in Dayton is the only one still in Dayton; Ford took their last building to Michigan. Our last stop was the visitor center. There, we saw some of their printing equipment from when they had a print shop, and the Parachute Museum. Unrelated to the Wright brothers specifically, related more generally to aviation.

The Parachute Museum

On the way back to Ann Arbor, we took a detour back to Columbus to have dinner and see a friend. I know Columbus best as the home of the Columbus Crew, not The Ohio State University, if that tells you anything about how much I care about NCAA football and the Big Ten. We ended up having dinner down the street from the university, walked around a bit, then made the drive back to Ann Arbor. Two countries. Five states. Four days. Would I personally have planned it that way? No, it’s not my style. We’ve established that I can spend entire days in a single museum. But I saw some sights I wouldn’t have seen if I had planned the trip, and spent time with my friend, which was my main goal anyway. And so ended my summer 2019 travels.

Road Tripping: Back in the USA

To circle Lake Erie in four days, we had to cover a significant amount of ground. Which is to say, we drove a lot on the last two days of our road trip. We drove out of Toronto in the morning, headed for Niagara Falls. Since we were already in Canada, we made a brief stop on the Canadian side of the falls. Having been to both sides, and having done some of the tourist activities on both sides, I will argue that I like the American side better. The Canadian side has a paved walkway with better views of the American and Horseshoe Falls, I’ll admit, but it gets worse as soon as you get away from that one area. Behind that street are casinos, hotels, souvenir shops, minigolf, Tussaud’s waxworks, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, a Ferris wheel. You know, everything you really need to truly enjoy the natural wonder of the waterfall with the highest flow rate in North America.

Top: American (L) and Horseshoe (R) Falls from the Canadian side

Bottom: American (L) and Horseshoe (R) Falls from the American side

We stayed long enough to take some pictures, then made the border crossing, which took approximately five minutes. On the American side, we stopped again to get the opposite point of view. This side isn’t completely noncommercial – there’s still the Maid of the Mist and Cave of the Winds – but it’s within a state park, which at least tempers the commercialism. The state park is recognized as the oldest in America, but has been majorly refurbished in the past 20 years. Being a state park, there are trails away from the falls where it’s much less crowded and much more nature-y. Again, we mainly remained long enough to take pictures before getting back in the car for one of our longer stretches of driving. We cut south through New York on some alleged highways through a bunch of villages, hamlets, and towns with no grocery stores, gas stations, or traffic lights to be seen. Although we were stuck inching down the state at 45 miles per hour, it was a lovely drive. There were these things called hills. Everyone from the west is laughing right now, but the Midwest is actually, seriously, flat. You don’t always realize it, because it’s not like there are zero elevation changes across the entirely of the middle of America, but you’re rarely surrounded by hills. This brings my list of things I miss about New England to Wegmans, the northeast accent, actual snow, and hills.

View from Rimrock Overlook

Our destination for the day was Pittsburgh, but we made one more stop on the way. We stopped, again very briefly, in the Allegheny National Forest in Pennsylvania. Confusing fun fact of the day: the Allegany State Park in New York (just across the border) spells Allegheny without the h and with an a. I probably could have spent days walking around in there, but we didn’t have days, we had an hour, so we drove up to the Rimrock Overlook, and I hiked down a bit before hiking back up. It was almost quiet on the trail, if it hadn’t been for motorboats on the lake in the distance. But it was still a lovely walk, with plenty of trees, dirt, rocks, steps, and it was even slightly muddy.

On the trail

And I also miss hiking trails that look like this

When I returned to the car, we drove the last few hours to Pittsburgh. We got upgraded to a suite at the hotel, which has never happened to me in my life before. I guess this is what happens when you book using a business account instead of discount hotels R us dot com. I had dinner at IHOP because it was nearby and also I get hungry for breakfast for dinner once in a while. Back at the hotel, I settled into my personal bedroom to watch American Ninja Warrior and poker. Because no matter where you go, the hotel TV is always showing American Ninja Warrior and poker.

Road Tripping: 2 countries, 5 states, 4 days

I know. I just said that I usually like to only schedule one major event per day three posts ago. However, that’s when I’m in charge of the itinerary. I’m not usually in charge of the itinerary, for various reasons. Most of them being that I occasionally sometimes often have a different definition of fun than my traveling companions do. See: hiking 17 miles in a day with no practice or training, ripping all the skin off my hands, and walking around in snowstorms, for just a few examples. On this most recent trip, I was not responsible for any of the planning and was mostly along for the ride around Lake Erie through Toronto, Niagara Falls (New York), Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio.

We set out for Canada after church on Sunday. Normally, coming from New England, we cross the border at or near Niagara Falls. Even when it’s busy, I don’t remember sitting in line for more than 20 minutes. Wherever we crossed in Michigan, we got stuck for close to an hour. Eventually, we made it to Toronto, with a stop for Tim Hortons on the way. Because donuts.

In the morning, we set out to see some of Canada. We first walked to the Kensington Market/Chinatown area to look at the shops and eat a bit. We had dumplings in Chinatown, and poutine at Kensington Market just because I’ve never had poutine despite having been to Canada at least four times up to this point. It was fine. The cheese was good. The gravy wasn’t too salty and had somewhat herbal notes (rosemary, I think). After our breakfast/snack/lunch, we returned to our lodgings to pick up the car so we could drive to the beach. We went about half an hour up the lakeshore from Toronto to Bluffers Park along the Scarborough Bluffs, which run along Lake Ontario for about 15 kilometers total.

The Scarborough Bluffs

We walked around a bit before going to the beach. There, we discovered that they were banning/very strongly discouraging swimming or wading in the water due to high E. coli levels. I hadn’t been planning to get very wet anyway, so I wandered around some more. It wasn’t a great beach to sit around on. The sand was hard, and it was kind of crowded and noisy, but the bluffs were nice. We left a little after that to explore the lake back near where we were staying. We ended up walking through Coronation Park and the Toronto Inukshuk Park to get to Trillium Park where we saw some nice views of Lake Ontario. These parks are also right by Exhibition Place, which hosts shows, concerts, conferences and other events of that nature, and BMO Field, home to MLS’s Toronto FC, who are right in the mix of teams in the eastern conference playoff race along with the Montreal Impact, Chicago Fire, Orlando City FC, and the one and only New England Revolution.¹

View of Toronto from Trillium Park

Anyway, Trillium Park was very nice. It just opened in 2017. It has walking paths, play areas, a restaurant/café, a Cinesphere where you can watch movies, and a concert stage. Overall, it was a pretty good day in Toronto. I ate some food I hadn’t eaten before, saw some things I hadn’t seen before. I will admit Toronto’s not my favorite city (and my least favorite subway system). I don’t know why, but it isn’t. It’s reasonably bike/pedestrian friendly, with plenty of people doing both, but the roads are also very busy, and things can be a little spread out. If I make another trip to Toronto, I think at this point what I’d want to see is a Revolution game at BMO Field, the Hockey Hall of Fame, and maybe the Royal Ontario Museum. Other than that, I’ve been up the CN Tower, been to Casa Loma, eaten at Chinatown, seen the University of Toronto campus, and now explored some of the lakeshore. On this trip, this was our only full day in Toronto, and the following day we’d be off on our way back to the good ole United States of America.

¹As of writing. As of posting, the Revolution clinched their playoff spot with a 2-0 win over NYCFC last Sunday. It was a fantastic game.

Road Tripping: The Michigan Edition

Days after my friends left, another Cornell friend came to visit. Last year we met in Chicago; this year she came to see me; maybe next year I’ll go see her. We had plans to go on a road trip, but first we spent a couple days in Michigan. First, we got more use out of my Ford Museum membership by making the rounds through the museum and Greenfield Village. Besides all the usual spiels, we got printed copies of the Declaration of Independence, caught most of the Wright brothers’ (+sister Katharine) first flight at Kitty Hawk retelling, saw wool being carded, and heard Edison’s recording device. Inside, we walked through most of the planes/trains/cars/assorted farm equipment, but spent more time in the historical With Liberty & Justice for All exhibit, which covers independence, the Civil War, Woman’s Suffrage¹, and the Civil Rights movement.

Clockwise from top L: Wright Brothers' house, Wright Brothers' bicycle shop,

Rose Parks bus, Hot dog car

After dinner, we returned to Greenfield Village, this time for music and fireworks. When we were in Ithaca, we used to be able to watch city fireworks from the slope. It wasn’t the official viewing location, and you had to be okay with having some of the fireworks blocked by West Campus, but it was kind of fun to share in the unofficial experience on campus with other students. As far as I can tell, Ann Arbor doesn’t do fireworks for the Fourth of July. The Detroit Symphony Orchestra, however, partners with Greenfield Village to do an outdoor concert ending with fireworks accompanied by music. It sounded like it could be good, so I got tickets. The weather had possible thunderstorms in the forecast all evening, but the rain held off, and they only cancel for lightning, no refunds, so we went back to the village. As we found a spot on one side of the lawn, it started pouring.

DSO concert at Greenfield Village

Of course it did. They didn’t evacuate the premises, so we put on raincoats, huddled under umbrellas, and waited it out. After the rain delay, we got to listen to an abbreviated concert. Honestly, you go to outdoor concerts for the experience, not for a quality musical experience. Even the combined dulcet tones of a hundred musicians blaring away don’t carry well outside. There were speakers, so we could still hear, but a lawn in the rain is no acoustically architectured concert hall. They started out with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which I first played in seventh grade for a PawSox game in Rhode Island and last played three years ago in Schoellkopf Field for a lacrosse game at Cornell. They played the overture from Candide (Bernstein, played it last fall in band), some jazz, skipped Copland’s “Variations on a Shaker Melody” (“Simple Gifts,” most probably), played the Army/Coast Guard/Marines/Air Force/Navy service songs (played most of these in ninth grade at Memorial Day parades), John Williams, more jazz, and ended with (not shockingly enough) the 1812 Overture. During the fireworks, there was more music – think patriotic tunes along the lines of “God Bless the U.S.A.” Although the rain threw things off a bit, the experience was still worth it. We managed to get out without too much trouble, even after forgetting where we left the car, and were only slightly damp.

The next morning, our destination of choice was the Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park. I’d been once with my parents on our way back to Ann Arbor from Chicago after my brother’s graduation. It’s a couple hours from Ann Arbor, but it’s somewhat different from a typical art or natural history museum, so I think it’s worth visiting. They have lots of plants, some conservatories, a new Japanese garden, and dozens of sculptures amidst the paths and trees. The sculptures range from abstract figures and blocks to metal people, horses, birds, other animals, and giant shovels. Everything’s generally arranged in a big loop, so it’s pretty easy to navigate. We made a round, had lunch, and took a quick walk around the Japanese garden before heading out.

Clockwise from top L: Giant horse, crashed UFO, giant neuron, parallelepiped

Since we’d driven the couple hours across the state, we figured we’d drive a little more to the western side of the state to see Lake Michigan. With the help of Google, we found Hoffmaster State Park and the lake. There was a small beach area but it was pretty crowded and we didn’t have any beach things, so we walked along the shore for a bit to enjoy the sand, water, and views. Before driving all the way back across the state, we climbed up to an overlook for a view of the lake. Then it was three hours in the car on some wonderfully paved highways (read: terribly paved) back to Ann Arbor where I packed for the start of our road trip the next day.

Lake Michigan, Hoffmaster State Park

¹The one thing I was absolutely supposed to learn and remember from US History II was that women gained the right to vote from the fifteenth² amendment to the Constitution.

²Just kidding. It’s the nineteenth³ amendment.

³For real this time.

The Roommate Triangle, part 3

On the third day, we arose and got ready to do one of my favorite activities. No, not solving crossword puzzles, baking cookies, or watching British detective shows. Hiking. Again, because I was in charge of the itinerary, I got to do the things I wanted to do. We packed turkey, mayo, and cucumber sandwiches for lunch. I skipped the cucumber and there were also supposed to be tomatoes, but guess who forgot them? Yes, hi, that would be me. Tomato-less sandwiches packed, we headed out for the Pinckney Recreation Area. The recreation area is one of the most, if not the most, popular mountain biking locations in the state, which is relevant because some of the trails are shared by hikers and bikers. From reviews on the internet, this was either a minor inconvenience requiring vigilance from both hikers and bikers, or the worst hiking experience ever, with trails overrun by bikers rocketing around bowling hikers over. As with many things on the internet, it was somewhere in the middle of two extremes.

A walk through the woods

I was hoping to get out early enough to avoid the heat, humidity, and the majority of the trail traffic, but as it turns out, not everyone crawls out of bed, puts on the first not-gross-smelling clothing they find, has a cup of milk followed by dry cereal, packs a sandwich/rain jacket/sunscreen/bug spray/first aid kit/water, and is ready to roll out the door in half an hour. So we got there closer to midmorning versus early morning. The parking lot wasn’t very full when we arrived, and we ended up seeing a decent number of bikers, but not hordes of them. We hiked the Crooked Lake Trail, which featured not many views of any lakes, crooked or otherwise, but it was a decent hike. Not my favorite, partly because you do have to be on the lookout for bikes all the time, partly because it’s not super interesting. No mountain views, lakeshores, streams, rock scrambles, or steps. However, it is in the woods, and it’s relatively quiet and removed from the noise of traffic, so since I have very few other options, I’ll take it.

Lake-ish view

Other than that, my major critique of Pinckney is that in some areas, it’s very unclear which direction bikes/hikers are supposed to be travelling. Most of the time, they travel in opposite directions so they can see each other coming, but there are certain parts of the trail where, depending on where you start, no matter which way you go there are sections where bikes will come at you “the wrong way” from behind. Because of the shared nature of the trails, I also wouldn’t recommend it for kids, at least any you don’t want to be turned into pancakes. Also try to go early, and bring bug spray. We ended up finishing the 5+ mile trail in a little over 2 hours before having lunch by the main lake/beach area. By that time, the beach was plenty crowded, though we managed to find a picnic table away from most of the craziness.

Frog sighting

There was another trail I wanted to try, but apparently not everyone considers a five mile hike a quick jaunt through the forest, so after a little geocaching, we left. It was still too early to head into downtown Ann Arbor for dinner, so we took a quick detour to the Botanical Garden. Unlike earlier in the spring, there were actually flowers blooming. Finally, we drove into Ann Arbor to have dinner at Aventura. Normally this is out of my budget, but hey, live a little once in a while, right? Aventura serves Spanish-style tapas and paella, and it took me way, way too long to realize that aventura means adventure in Spanish. Anyway, the food was expensive but really good (we got an assortment of tapas, chicken paella, and pears with crème anglaise¹ for dessert), and I also got sangria (because #YOLO²).

With that, our adventures in Ann Arbor were almost over. The next day, a Sunday, we went to church, and afterwards to the arboretum. After an early/quick dinner, it was off to the airport and it was just me in Ann Arbor again.

¹I watch too much of The Great British Bake Off, so I now have a tenuous list of extremely finicky, moderately obscure, distinctly British flavoured desserts I kind of want to try making. Including crème anglaise, which makes frequent appearances as being a pain in the neck to get the consistency correct.

²You only live once. Takes me back to freshman year of college.

The Roommate Triangle, part 2

Since I ended up devising the itinerary, I got to decide what/how much stuff we did. I’m not usually the one who plans these kinds of things, but I’ve found, based on my extensive travels¹, that having one main activity per day keeps things structured without making them hectic. That way you avoid the back and forth “I don’t know, what do you want to do,” but you’re not spending your days sprinting through the museum so you finish in time for your lunch reservations followed by a boat tour after which you’re meeting friends for dinner, and anything else you see besides that one thing is a nice bonus.

Train

That said, our activity for day two was the Ford Museum and Greenfield Village. I ended up buying a membership because it paid for itself in a single visit. [As adults going to both the museum and village from open to close, you get your money’s worth pretty quickly. When I returned later with families with young kids who are interested in about three things and are ready to leave after a few hours, I realized that’s less the case. Your mileage may vary.] We started outdoors in Greenfield Village when it was just hot and humid as opposed to very hot and very humid. We made the rounds through the farm and craftworks where we heard about cooking, wheat harvesting, pottery, tin, printing, and glassblowing. By that time, we were ready for lunch, so we headed over to A Taste of History, which serves a variety of historically inspired foods ranging from sandwiches and soups to baked potatoes and pork pie. The cost is about what I’d expect for museum food (~$10), but I appreciate that it tastes like actual food and isn’t over-seasoned. After lunch, we got frozen custard and walked by most of the houses we hadn’t seen yet before heading inside to the museum.

Pottery workshop

Tin shop

The first exhibit we went to see was the temporary Star Trek exhibit. They had a bunch of the costumes, props, tie-in products, sets, scripts, and spaceships from everything from the original series [retronym-ed to The Original Series (TOS)] to Discovery. There were tribbles, phasers, communicators, the bridge (it’s literally a bunch of flashing lights). I’ve only seen about half of the first season of TOS and a couple of the movies, but I’m familiar with most of the characters, so I thought it was pretty cool.

Star Trek exhibit

We then saw some of the rest of the museum, including all the planes, trains, and automobiles, plus tractors, Henry Ford’s violins, and stoves, before people started getting tired. We returned to Ann Arbor for dinner at HopCat, the first restaurant I ever ate at in Ann Arbor. They serve pretty standard bar food, but their fries are above average and their beer list, the reason we were there, is ridiculous. They have somewhere around a hundred beers on tap, including lagers, ales, pilsners, IPAs, porters, stouts, sours, ciders, and miscellaneous. I don’t actually know what most of those are, but the point is that they have a lot of options. I ended up having a beer from the Wolverine State Brewing Co, who are based in Ann Arbor. I didn’t hate it, and it tasted like beer. We ended day 2 with more Star Trek – the TOS episode “Mirror, Mirror” featuring dilithium crystals, parallel universes, and evil Kirk.

¹To such exotic places as New England (as opposed to Old England), Canada, Holland², Ithaca², Plymouth², and Disney World.

²That would be Holland, Michigan; Ithaca, New York; and Plymouth (Plimoth) Plantation, Massachusetts or Plymoth, Michigan, respectively.

The Roommate Triangle Reunites

I’ve spent 36 months in Ann Arbor. For the first 34 of those months, the only people who visited me were related to me. At the end of June, I doubled my visitor count when most of my closest friends from Cornell all decided this summer would be a good time to come to Michigan. The first group included one of my suitemates from junior year, my junior year roommate, and my senior year roommate. My junior and senior year roommates lived together during their sophomore year, hence the roommate triangle.

Since they were only coming for a long weekend, I didn’t want to spend a lot of time driving across the state, so we mainly stayed in the Ann Arbor area. (Plus, they wouldn’t definitively tell me what they wanted to do, leaving me to plan the itinerary.) Our first full day in Ann Arbor, we went into the downtown/central campus area to see some of the university and visit the free museums. We parked by the library and made our way to the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) via the library and Cherry Republic. The art museum isn’t huge, but it’s also not as small as you might think. There’s an old wing and a new wing that was completed in 2009. Both wings are generally organized by type/location of art (i.e. modern art, Asian art, etc.), and there’s a good variety (so not twenty-seven rooms all filled with portraits of European royalty in the 1600s). Some highlights include Tiffany doors/windows, swords, a few Picasso pieces (modern art), and the old building itself (it’s a nice building, okay?). After about an hour, we moved on to the Museum of Natural History.

Tell me this isn't a nice building.

The Museum of Natural History semi-recently moved from their old building into the new Biological Sciences building. The main exhibits opened in April, and the remaining exhibits will open in November. I never made it to the natural history museum in their old location, but the new building is nice. Like the art museum, it’s not huge, and can be covered in about an hour. When you enter, you’re greeted by two mastodons. Besides them, the first floor also has a café, a short film about Michigan natural history, an exhibit on time/length scaling, and the planetarium, which costs money. The main exhibit, on the second floor, is Evolution: Life through Time. It’s like a smaller version of the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, and the Field Museum in Chicago also has a similar exhibit. Basically, you’re walked through lots of fossils and bones that progress from worm-things and trilobites to funny-looking fish to dinosaurs to chickens and walruses. It’s not as extensive as either the Museum of the Earth or the Field Museum, but it’s still well done. Right now, the only other things on the second floor are a bunch of rocks and minerals [there are some pretty cool ones – petrified wood, the minerals that are different colors depending on their impurities, fulgurite (it’s formed by lightning)] and just your friendly neighborhood Quetzalcoatlus.

Mastodons at the entrance

Following our afternoon enjoying the free air conditioning, we headed back off campus to the Main Street/downtown Ann Arbor area for dinner. We ate at Frita Batidos, my first time there since moving to Ann Arbor. They serve Cuban-inspired burgers (fritas) and milkshakes (batidos). The milkshakes are really good (particularly with rum – yes, that’s an option), but to spare my stomach and wallet, I only ordered a chorizo frita this time (no churros either).

Quetzalcoatlus

Our last activity for the day was an escape room, the one request for an activity I got, besides eating, which we did plenty of as well. I’d never done an escape room, but I do have a slight puzzle solving compulsion, so I was definitely interested. The goal in the room we did was to escape from a desert island, which we did with some minutes left. We did end up getting a couple clues, one to start us off and one because something we thought should open wouldn’t open but it turns out it did open after all. Overall, I thought the room was well-designed. The puzzles made sense and didn’t require any “of course you should have known to stand on your head and spin around three times to make the palm tree start talking” logic. Would recommend if you like puzzles. And that wrapped up day one. Stay tuned for the rest of the weekend.