Jared's One Blog

While my previous post about part 1 of my recent road trip was more words than pictures, I’m pretty sure this one will be more pictures than words, or at least closer to 50/50. I’ll pick up where I left off.
On Sun 30 May, I left Green Bay about mid-morning to drive to Two Harbors, Minnesota. On WI-29 a few miles west of Wausau, I spotted a sign pointing the way to a geographical marker four miles north of the highway (near Edgar, Wisconsin). I’ve passed by that sign several times over the years, but never took the time to go check it out. This time I decided I’d go take a look though. I’m a sucker for geography and maps and such things, after all (and let’s face it, I’d gotten in a picture-taking and road-tripping mode!). So I finally visited the marker at 45ºN latitude, 90ºW longitude, only to find out that it’s not exactly at the crossing of those lines. The real crossing is about 1100 feet away from the marker, somewhere in a field (shown below). That part was somewhat disappointing, actually, especially since it was on “Meridian Road.”

Up in Two Harbors almost my entire family was at the Lake Superior house for the weekend. My parents were there, my brother Nathan & Laura and their kids were there, and my sister-in-law Eve and her kids were there too. It was a very efficient way to visit family. 🙂 It was a nice evening, though, so we got a small campfire going on the ledgerock on the lakeshore. Mmmmm, snacking on s’mores while listening to a serene Superior surf…

And then Memorial Day itself was so gorgeous, about 70 and sunny, that after Nathan & Laura left for home, I just sat outside on a bench and a hammock, looking out over the lake, and reading a book for a couple hours. Now that is a relaxing holiday!

After staying at Two Harbors until afternoon, I drove a couple hours over to Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where my Penn State friends Vic & Lindsay live, to hang out with them and see their new house there. The house itself (which is technically in Coleraine, just north of Grand Rapids) is so new that the lawn is still gravel, and the road the house is on doesn’t yet exist on Google Maps or Mapquest! They both absolutely love the culture of Minnesota (Lindsay especially), being in the northwoods surrounded by incredibly friendly people (Minnesota Nice is for real!). They’re appreciating the food too — at dinner we got an appetizer called Minnesota Sushi, which was walleye and wild rice wrapped in lefse. Pure awesomeness. After dinner they also took me for a tour of their office. They both work at WindLogics, a company that focuses on wind forecasting and wind energy. Incidentally, back in college I interviewed for a summer internship with WindLogics in their Saint Paul office once (but I didn’t get it because they’d just hired three full-time people who they needed to train), and it’s a company I’d certainly be interested in applying to once I’m done with my PhD and looking for a “real” job. It really was fun to see Vic & Lindsay again, and to see where they live and work and everything. Since they live only a couple hours from my parents new house in Two Harbors, I anticipate I’ll be usually seeing them when I go home for visits.

In the morning (Tue 1 June), Vic & Lindsay had to go to work, and I initially had planned to go straight home to Cumberland. While we were having breakfast though, I got the idea to drive over to Itasca State Park to see the Headwaters of the Mississippi River, and to Bemidji to see the status of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. I deliberated over it for about 15-20 minutes, but as they were leaving Vic & Lindsay said to me, “You know you want to go, just do it.” I mean, I’d never been to those places before, they’re places I’ve wanted to visit for quite some time, and I’d never been as close as I was (Bemidji is only about 80 miles west of Grand Rapids). So at 8:30 in the morning, instead of heading east on US 2, I headed west to Bemidji. Here are some photos from Paul Bunyan Park, on the shores of Lake Bemidji on the Mississippi River:

From there I grabbed a Subway sandwich to go and drove a half hour south to Itasca State Park. I took the scenic Great River Road to the park, which crossed the fledgling Mississippi several times along the way. I managed to pick the park entrance that was closest to the headwaters, and had lunch on a park bench at the headwaters. And I walked/waded across the Mississippi River four times. Pretty cool. I had always wanted to do that. 🙂

Then I took a walk down Schoolcraft Trail, which went a mile along the North Arm of Lake Itasca from the Headwaters to Hill Point, which looks out at Schoolcraft Island. It was quite a pleasant walk, except for the dozens of mosquitoes that I killed (or, more specifically, the myriads that I didn’t). Out at Hill Point I climbed out onto a tree that was growing horizontally out of the bank out over the water. And I have my camera with me too. That gave me extra incentive not to lose my balance and fall into the drink. 🙂

It was cool to read about the history of the expeditions searching for the source of the Mississippi, and of the early history of the park. I also learned how the lake came to be named Lake Itasca: explorer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, upon being brought to the lake by an Ojibwe guide in 1832, combined the Latin words for “true” (ver-ITAS) and “head” (CA-put). Very interesting. I bought some stuff at the gift shop too (including a painting that I gave to my parents as a gift), and then on my way out of the park I went to one more scenic view, Peace Pipe Vista on the East Arm of Lake Itasca.

Then on the way back from Itasca State Park to Cumberland, WI, I went through the town of Walker, MN, a nice little resort town on Leech Lake. With my office being in Walker Building back at PSU, I just couldn’t stay away from Walker, lol. I even took pictures of downtown Walker as I was driving through! Then I continued to play tourist and snapped some photos of a few other random things on the rest of my drive back to Wisconsin. I’ll say though, there’s a whole lot of nothing in northern Minnesota, unless tamarack swamps and pine forests count as something. It’s really hard to have a cell phone conversation while driving across northern Minnesota and northern Wisconsin!

I got back to Cumberland in time for a late dinner, and then spent the whole next day hanging out at my parents’ house. Well, okay, so I went to Rice Lake to renew my Wisconsin driver’s license Hooray no more awful chin goatee pic from 2002! I actually didn’t have to wait interminably long at the DMV (10 minutes), but I did have to argue with the clerk that it didn’t matter whether I put my residency address or my apartment address here in PA for my mailing address. She tried to say that because I wouldn’t be there for the full 8 years of the license, that I wouldn’t get my renewal notices and whatnot after I moved unless I changed my address. Umm, okay? I’ll have tons of other mail to change addresses for when I finish my degree and move somewhere else too, and it’s not like I’ll be moving back to my parents house when I get my PhD (the lady was trying hard to convince me to use their address as my mailing address, basically insinuating that since I’m a full-time student, I must not be responsible enough to change my address when I move). I still insisted that it be my PA address, and eventually the clerk relented hesitantly and said, “Well, I’ll do what you want, but…” Sigh… Anyway, I was tired from all the driving over the past several days, and I needed to spend at least some time with my parents while I was home, so it was good to take a day off and chill (except for the argument at the DMV, haha). I tried to go for a run that morning too, but after 2-2.5 miles or so, my left foot started hurting pretty bad again (it started hurting after the previous time I ran, which was a week earlier). I had wanted to go about 5.5 miles that day, but my foot put the kibosh on that. Now that it’s been a couple weeks since that run, I’m itching to go on a run again and test it out. We’ll see how it goes.

On the afternoon of Thu 3 June I drove down to White Bear Lake, MN, to hang out with my friends Scott & Katie. Especially since he finished his time in the Navy and came back to the Twin Cities to work on his bachelor’s degree, Scott’s become a very good friend of mine. He’s one of only two people that I keep in regular contact with from high school anymore (the other being Mike, the groom in the Lambeau wedding in my previous post), and someone I make a point of seeing when I come home. Anyway, Scott just graduated this spring from the University of Minnesota with a degree in international affairs, so I of course wanted to celebrate with him! We all went out to Buffalo Wild Wings to pig out and then Dairy Queen to top it all off. So full, but so good! After dinner Scott had a bonfire in his backyard and all the neighbors came over (apparently a typical night for them, which is pretty cool). They have some cool neighbors, including the former long-time Vikings mascot, and a cop for Maplewood, MN (who told us about the two recent police killings, one of whom was his immediate supervisor who died in a shootout…). It sprinkled a couple times very briefly, but overall was quite a nice night for a bonfire. I spent the night there, and then hung out and talked with Scott the next morning, then heading back to Cumberland after lunch. It was great to see him again. And maybe I’ll get to see him more frequently in the future, if he gets one of the jobs in New York or Washington that he’s applying for. Scott’s done a lot of cool stuff already so far with his time in the Navy as a Rescue Swimmer and then his study abroad recently in China, and no doubt he’ll get to do a lot more cool stuff with whatever job he gets, wherever in the world it is. He just not always at liberty to say a ton about it. 😉

I didn’t stay at home in Cumberland that night because my parents went back up to Two Harbors again for the weekend. Instead I went over to my brother Nathan & Laura’s house for dinner and a game night, but not before loading up some old clothes from my closet and books from my bookcase into my car. Since my parents are planning on moving at some point in the next year or so, and since I had the room in my car to transport them this time, I figured I may as well. Now I’ve just gotta figure out what to do with all of it back here in my apartment! Anyway, that night we played a 6-player game of Settlers: Cities and Knights (me, Nathan, Laura, and three of their four kids, Miriam, Rebecca and Andrew). The game started at 8pm, but was a marathon event that didn’t finish until quarter to 1am! Scarcity of wood for everyone will grind progress to a halt in that game, for sure. It was good to spend some time with all of them too. But with my parents gone, and with me starting the drive back to PA the next day, I chose to spend the night there.
I hope you all enjoyed the preponderance of photos in this post! I’ll leave it there for now, and soon I’ll put up Part 3 about my fun with funnel clouds on the way back to PA! That deserves a post all its own, after all. 🙂

I just got back to State College on Sunday from a fairly short but fun-filled trip to Wisconsin and Minnesota. I did a lot of solo driving too: around 2900 miles in 10 days! I didn’t spend more than two nights in any one place, either. I’d best get started with a recap.
On Thu 27 May I packed up my car with Alex’s keyboard and some of my stuff and hit the road. I didn’t get pulled over in Ohio on the Turnpike this time, but I did hit a board and a semi tire. The board seemed to be a jagged end of a 2×2 or something like that. It flew off a truck, hit the road in front of me, bounced off my right fender, and then I caught sight of it again in my rear-view mirror bouncing around on the road. And then the semi tire was the outer tread, rolled out and laying completely across my lane. To my left was the shoulder, and to my right was a semi, so I said to myself, “Well, here goes nothin’.” [KAH-THUNK, KAH-THUNK] For a few miles I kept an eye out for a trail of liquid behind me, but my car wasn’t the worse for wear, fortunately.
I got to Chicago (Carol Stream, technically) in time to go to dinner with Ryan & Sarah. They took me out to a place called Portillo’s, which features Chicago-style hot dogs and Italian beef (last time I visited them they took me to a place that had Chicago-style pizza). So I dutifully got a Polish sausage and a Chicago hot dog. The hot dog had all sorts of fixins on it, including a full pickle spear and a hot pepper of some sort. I’m kicking myself that I didn’t take a picture of it.
After dinner we went to a nearby mall so that I could buy a Brett Favre jersey. I had called the four sports apparel stores in that mall the evening before, and found one that had a Favre jersey in stock. The one jersey they had was a white Vikings jersey (I had envisioned a purple jersey), but it was embroidered (instead of screen-printed), and a great fit on me. $80 is kind of pricey, but it was a well-made jersey. The guys at the store said the purple Favre jerseys just didn’t sell very well down there, but the white ones sold quite well. Interesting. I wonder if it’s because a white jersey goes better with lots of things, whereas a purple jersey is, well, an awful lot of purple. 🙂 In any case, it was a Vikings Favre jersey, which meant it’d do the trick at the wedding rehearsal at Lambeau! I was also much more willing to buy a Favre jersey after he had the ankle surgery, which indicated he’s a virtual lock to come back for another season. I didn’t want to get a jersey of him if he was just going to retire.
That night we had planned on playing a game of “Settlers” (of some variety), but instead they introduced me to the first four episodes of “Arrested Development” (they own season 1 on DVD). I’d never seen the show before, but heard a lot of friends rave about it. I loved it, it was so funny! Even though it’s a comedy, it’s definitely a show that you need to watch in order, otherwise you won’t know what in the world is going on. I haven’t seen anything beyond those first four episodes, and I’m already sad that there are only three seasons of the show.
On Fri 28 May I drove up from Chicago to Green Bay. Before I left Chicago though, I went to a Jewel to buy an I-Pass. I’ve been meaning to buy an I-Pass or EZ-Pass for years now, but I never would remember until the week of my trip, which wasn’t enough time to mail in an application for one. So when Ryan & Sarah told me I could buy one at a grocery store near them, I decided to take care of it and finally buy one. They’re essentially free ($10 deposit), aside from the money you put into your I-Pass/EZ-Pass account (which I activated immediately), but then tolls are usually half price, the discounts are good across all the Eastern states that have electronic tolling, and you can save a lot of time at toll booths by not having to stop to pay cash. It’s a no-brainer. I’m disappointed in myself for not having done it earlier. It’s totally worth it even though I only go on toll roads a few times a year, either when I go to Ann Arbor or when I go home to Wisconsin.
Ryan & Sarah also suggested a place for me to stop for lunch on my way to Green Bay: Kopp’s Frozen Custard off of I-43 in Glendale, a northern suburb of Milwaukee. I did, and I wasn’t disappointed. I ordered a double cheeseburger and a banana cream pie custard sundae, which was enormous. It was a “large” (3 scoops), but since it was less than a dollar more expensive than a “small” (1 scoop), I decided I may as well go for the full experience. And I was not disappointed! I had no idea the large was that large, but I still dug in and ate it all, after driving to a nearby park overlooking Lake Michigan (Atwater Beach in Shorewood). It was a beautiful spot for lunch, and a very cliché, fattening Wisconsin meal, with the cheeseburger and sundae. It was good to be in my home state again. 🙂

I got to Lambeau Field in Green Bay about 45 minutes before the rehearsal was set to start, so that I could work with the event staff to get the keyboard up to the right place and all set up before the rehearsal began. When I was unloading the keyboard from my car, I was wearing just a plain yellow shirt, and had my new Favre jersey tucked away in a bag with my music that I was going to haul up to the stadium. Anyway, Ashley (the bride, who I’d never met before), was standing nearby, and recognized me (probably because of the keyboard), and came running over and jumped into my arms, excited to see me. (I later found out through the grapevine that Mike had told Ashley how conservative/straight-laced I was, so she may have been trying to have some fun with that. I was fine with it though, hehe.) She was happy that I was just wearing a yellow shirt, because she’d seen my facebook poll of what I should wear, and was pleading with me to compromise with a plain green or gold shirt. But then after I got the keyboard set up in the stadium, I put on my Favre jersey. Pretty soon everyone else came up, at which point Mike & Ashley saw me. Mike said, “You didn’t.” Ashley said, “I bought you something as part of our gift to you, but because you’re wearing that I’m going to have to take it back!!” And they really did withhold part of the gift, lol. During the rehearsal dinner (which was just in front of a concession stand in one of the concourses around Lambeau), Mike gave me my gift bag, and then asked if there was a third thing in it. I said no, and then he laughed and said Ashley really did take it out. A few minutes later Mike made Ashley give it to me: a Vikings cousy. For the members of the wedding party who weren’t Packer fans, they gave a cousy of their favorite football team. There was another Vikings fan and a Bears fan, but they both “played nice” — the Vikings fan was forced by his girlfriend to leave his Vikings jerseys in the hotel, so he was kind of upset at her when he saw me with my Favre jersey, and the Bears fan just wore his Bears stuff underneath, I think. But yep, I was “that guy.” Mike, who’s a very good friend of mine from high school, said he knew I was going to pull something, but he just didn’t know what. They were all fine with it, though. 🙂

Anyway, it was interesting to see the event staff and the officiant butting heads in a power struggle during the rehearsal. I mean, there were disagreements over exactly where people should stand, where people were coming in, that sort of thing. Apparently that happens for almost every wedding at Lambeau (that officiant, Gloria, does most Lambeau weddings because her uncle is in the Packers Hall of Fame), and has been going on for years. You’d think they’d have it worked out to a science by now, but apparently not. Anyway, the Lambeau event staff aren’t always the greatest communicators either. Initially they told me a few weeks ago that I’d be hooked into the house sound system, before retracting that and saying I needed to bring my own amp/speaker. Then they said they’d have a couple speakers if mine weren’t big or loud enough, but when I got to the stadium they said they didn’t have any other speakers available (fortunately Alex’s little amp was sufficient). They also told Mike & Ashley a few months ago that there wouldn’t need to be a recessional, because beer hawkers would come in right at the conclusion of the ceremony and hand out Miller Lite, pop or water to the whole wedding party and then everyone in the crowd. So I didn’t practice a recessional, because that’s what Mike told me would happen. But apparently they told Gloria that the beer hawkers would come in after the wedding party exited during the recessional. So when Gloria said, “Okay, now play the recessional, Jared,” I stood and blinked, basically. When neither Mike nor Ashley corrected her that there wasn’t a recessional, I assumed that meant there really was one. So I quick started digging through my other music binder, and eventually found the recessional I played at Dan & Kerrie’s wedding. Mike later told me that he was just as surprised as I was when Gloria asked me to play the recessional, and knew exactly what was going on when he looked over and saw me madly flipping through a binder. So while it looked like I wasn’t prepared, it wasn’t my fault! It was all cool though, and fortunately I had something ready enough to use for a recessional, that I had played only four weeks earlier!
Playing a recessional wasn’t the only unexpected thing I did for the wedding, either. On Sat 29 May, the morning of the wedding, Mike told me that one of Gloria’s friends had passed away the night before, and so Gloria wouldn’t be able to stay for the reception, as she needed to head straight to Appleton for the wake after the wedding ceremony was done. Mike asked if I’d be willing to do the unity candle ceremony and the dinner prayer at the beginning of dinner, since Gloria could no longer do it, and I said I’d be willing to do that. Gotta be willing to be flexible and step up and help out if needed! The unity candle ceremony was indoors at the beginning of dinner (after everyone was seated but before being dismissed to the buffet), because it just wouldn’t work to do it outdoors in the stadium bowl during the ceremony because of the wind. Gloria had given me a sheet with a blurb to read for the unity candle ceremony and the prayer; I went with what she wrote for the unity candle ceremony, but I went with my own prayer on the fly.
The wedding ceremony itself was short and went well. It was also really hot, with sunny skies and temps in the 80s, plus the added effect of all the cement and metal seats in the stadium bowl re-radiating heat. We were all sweating bullets! Did the Miller Lite right after the wedding ever taste good! I also played nice and wore a green shirt for the wedding. I’m not that big a jerk to wear something Vikings or purple during their actual wedding ceremony. 🙂 The wedding wasn’t distraction-free, however. First there was a tour group that visited the opposite end zone, and when they all got down to the bottom of the stands they shouted “Go, Pack, Go!” And then there was another wedding party that entered the bowl below us and got to go down onto the field itself (apparently because one of them was an employee). They were being rather loud though, and saying things like, “Oh, look! Another wedding!” And then while they were all on the field, that whole wedding party did a Lambeau Leap, going [THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD] against the padded wall. Very distracting and disrespectful of the wedding actually taking place. But maybe all that is par for the course for a wedding booked in a stadium?? I don’t know, because this was the first time I’ve been to a stadium wedding before.

The reception was also in Lambeau Field, up in the Legends Room. The wedding party all had identifiable glasses that entitled them to free drinks at the bar all night, which was nice. I didn’t get carried away though, because I needed to drive my car back to the hotel (I had to load my keyboard back into my car after the wedding, so I didn’t take a hotel shuttle to the stadium). 🙂 In order to get Mike & Ashley to kiss during the reception, clinking glasses wouldn’t work. Instead, they had a Wii set up with a home run derby. If you hit 6/10 pitches for home runs, then they kissed. If you failed, then you had to kiss at least two people on the way back to your seat. Many tried, but the only person who I recall successfully hitting 6 home runs was a little kid. 🙂 That was kind of a neat way of handling the glass clinking. It was a fun evening, but there actually weren’t that many people there that I knew, really only a couple people I knew from high school were there at the reception.

I called it a night at about midnight and went back to the hotel. Some people invited me out to the bars, but I declined because I was tired and I knew I needed sleep before a seven-hour drive the next day. I knew I made the right decision in the morning too, when some people showed up to Mike & Ashley’s gift opening kind of bleary-eyed, having been up partying until 6am. I definitely would not have done well being up that late, I’m way too old for that!
Anyway, I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d ever spend ten hours in Lambeau Field in any single day as a Vikings fan. It was pretty cool, even though I was in enemy territory! I’m grateful to Mike & Ashley for inviting me to have the opportunity to play at their wedding and experience that. And then of course before I left Green Bay I had to get a photo in my Vikings Favre jersey in front of Brett Favre Steakhouse. 🙂

So this Part 1 post of my trip was mostly in Wisconsin, but Part 2 coming up next will be about my time in Minnesota. Stay tuned!

This news is about a month old by now, but I figured I’d mention it on here anyway. About a month ago I was sitting in my office in the Water Tunnel Bldg, when Trina came in and gave me an envelope that had arrived in the mail for me. It was from the American Meteorological Society. I was immediately curious, because I don’t normally receive mail at ARL. Then I remembered that the only other time I ever got mail at ARL was a year ago, when AMS sent me my Third Place Student Oral Presentation award. That got me even more curious.
So I opened the envelope, and I was honestly blown away: it was an award for Best Overall Presentation at the 16th Conference on Air Pollution Meteorology at the 90th AMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta this past January!! And a check for $250!! After I gave my presentation in Atlanta I was really happy with it, and while I thought there was a chance I might be in the running for a student award, I didn’t really expect to win anything. And last year when I won the 3rd place award, AMS notified me in late March. So this year when April came and went I just assumed that I didn’t win anything.
I was really excited that I won, though! I told a few people about it right away, and then the Department of Meteorology wrote up a blurb about it for their website. The cash award will really come in handy (or maybe already has) for my traveling this summer (Wisconsin/Minnesota last week, Colorado next month, or Australia in August). When I told Alex that I might put it toward rent/lodging while I’m in Boulder in July, he told me, “Don’t you dare put it towards rent. Award money is supposed to go toward something FUN.” 🙂 Fair enough, although once it’s in my bank account it’s all the same to me, whether it’s for airfare, rent, fixing my car, a Brett Favre jersey, a Muse concert, or whatever, hehe. In any case, it’s a really nice award, and I’m honored to have won it!

I’m playing piano at a wedding on Saturday at Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The attire for the rehearsal is “Packers jerseys and apparel.” Should I sort of play along and wear a neutral green or gold t-shirt (but not a Packers shirt), or should I wear my Cris Carter jersey, or some other Vikings t-shirt? Or should I really twist the knife and try to find a Vikings Brett Favre jersey somewhere along the way to Green Bay? Please vote and discuss. 🙂 I should add that one other member of the wedding party, who’s a Bears fan, has been “banned” from wearing Bears gear, so will supposedly wear a Bears jersey underneath a Packers shirt so that the Packers shirt doesn’t burn his skin, lol.
Also, if anyone by some slim chance knows of chords/music to “Skol Vikings” for piano/keyboard, please let me know. I’ve been Google searching for them but coming up empty!

Last Thursday night I bought plane tickets to Australia for this August!! I’ve been talking about going pretty much every summer the past few years, but things would just never work out. It got to the point that some of my friends like Walter said they wouldn’t believe that I was going until I actually bought the tickets. Anyway, the way that this worked out is pretty cool.
For a year and a half or almost two years I’d been hoping to go on a three-week vacation with Alex, and for awhile before I met him I had hoped to make a trip work with my cousin Jonathan. Those plans just never got off the ground though. When I visited Alex in Ann Arbor in April, I asked him how interested he really was in going to Australia someday. He said he was interested, but not interested enough to spend a couple thousand dollars of his own money to do it, at least currently. This summer was already totally booked up for him anyway, with three months at NCAR in Boulder and one month at UMBS in northern Michigan. I was disappointed to have that door shut (for now), but on the other hand it’s good not to keep hoping and waiting for something that’s probably not going to happen.
Also, the weekend before I went to Michigan is when I had my dreams about my expired passport. So I filled out the application, got my photos taken, and mailed in the renewal application the day before I left for Ann Arbor. I mentioned in my blog post about my passport dreams that I wondered if God had something planned for me a few weeks down the road, a reason for which I’d need my passport. I was mostly joking with that, but in the back of my mind was honestly wondering if anything might come about.
The Thursday after I got back from visiting Alex, I went to Hollemans in the evening for the usual PSCG hangout time. When I got there Ash told me that he and Tracy were planning to go to Australia in August, and asked if I wanted to join them. I basically stopped in my tracks. Dreams about my expired passport, then a week later being told by Alex that he doesn’t really want to spend the money on traveling, and then being presented with the opportunity for this trip, all within a two-week span. I pretty much became convinced that it was not simply a coincidence, but that God was working on closing one door for me while opening another.
Here’s the other reason that I was so surprised when Ash asked me if I wanted to go with him & Tracy in August. This trip has been talked about for quite awhile, and back in the winter they asked if I wanted to go with them. At that point they were thinking of tagging along with a group from Campus Crusade for Christ to do some ministry work at universities in Melbourne; that trip was slated for June or July, and so by sometime in January or February I had to give them an answer. At that point I was still really hoping to go with Alex, and wanted to do more of a sightseeing trip as well, so I told them no. I thought that was pretty much the end of it, and hadn’t really heard anything about it again until Ash mentioned it that night. That was the first I really knew that they’d totally changed their plans and pushed them back into August, and were still hopeful that I would come.
I told Sue about the trip the following week and she was alright with it, especially since I’m planning to arrange to give two or three seminars about my research, hopefully at Monash University, the University of Melbourne, and at the Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre in Melbourne. It’d be nice to get my name out there a bit and get a feel for whether I’d be interested in applying for a post-doc at any of those places when I’m finishing up at PSU in about 1.5 years. By giving some research seminars, it’ll at least help cover for me missing 3 weeks of work. I should make those contacts soon to let them know that I’m coming, and to see if they can fit me into their schedules… Anyway, with those upcoming seminars, that’s really lit a fire under me to make some herculean progress on my research project in the next couple months, so that I can have a nice piece of work to talk about. That would be a main reason why I’ve been putting in some really long days in the office lately (12 hours yesterday, after having been gone from the office for only 10 hours the night before, ugh). It’s good to be making progress though.
So what are we going to be doing, you ask? The primary impetus for the trip is to investigate the feasibility of helping to start or coming alongside a Christian graduate student ministry at the University of Melbourne. Ash has been in contact with a Campus Crusade staff member at the University of Melbourne, and they’re interested in trying to get something started. UniMelb is in the process of changing their enrollment structure, and they’re planning to have an even larger focus on research by having grad students be 50-60% of their enrollment. The University of Melbourne is one of the top 15-20 most prestigious universities in the world too, and certainly the most prestigious university in Australia. One possibility we’d be looking into would be to encourage some of our members to try to get post-docs down there, and help out with the ministry while they’re at Melbourne; it certainly wouldn’t harm one’s resumé to spend a couple years there. 🙂 So we’re planning to talk to a lot of professors and grad students down there, and just try to get a feel for how to do ministry to/with grad students in Australia, since its culture is different from the U.S.
For me, in addition to the ministry opportunities, there’s also the huge draw of being able to see so many of my old friends that I made down there during my semester at Monash University in 2004. I’m really looking forward to that! My friend Paul has already said he’d organize a group of people and get us tickets to the Geelong Cats-Collingwood Magpies footy match at the MCG on the night of Sat 7 Aug. That’ll be sooo sweeeeet! I need to send an email out to everyone soon too, and start trying to figure out who I’m going to stay with on what nights (I’m assuming that I’ll be able to stay with any number of my friends, while Campus Crusade folks will be able to host Ash & Tracy). And then when Ash flies back to the States (he can only stay for two weeks because of family obligations), Tracy & I will be doing some independent traveling for a few days — Tracy to Auckland, and me to Perth. I decided to go to Perth because my friend Bob from here (he currently works at AccuWeather as a forecaster) has accepted a job as a forecaster at the Bureau of Meteorology in Perth, and in theory will be moving down there in late June (when his work visa is accepted will determine that). I figured there might never be another time when I’d be down there and know someone in Perth who could show me around a bit. Regardless of how much time he can get off, I plan to rent a car and do some exploring, as I’ve never been to Western Australia before. I tossed around the idea of trying to fit in visits to two new places in the few days I had, but in the end decided that since I was spending the time and money to fly to Perth, that I may as well take the time to see as much as I can over there. There are a lot of cool national parks and things to see over on that side of the country (Kalbarri NP was highly recommended to me while I was studying abroad, a 7-hr drive north of Perth), but Perth is just so far from anywhere that it’s kind of hard and expensive to get to (it’s closer to Singapore than Sydney, and not exactly close to Singapore). So that’ll be my “new place” on this trip. As great as Melbourne is, and as many friends as I have there, I at least wanted to go see one new destination at a minimum.
So the three of us booked our flights through Qantas a week ago. On Mon 2 Aug we’ll all take Ash’s car down to DC and fly out of IAD (Washington Dulles). We’ll have one 6-hr stopover at LAX (Los Angeles), and from there it’s a 15.5-hr flight to MEL (Melbourne), which lands on the morning of Wed 4 Aug. Then on Mon 16 Aug we’ll all depart Melbourne, Ash back to the States, Tracy to AKL (Auckland), and me to PER (Perth). I’ll be in Perth from that Monday afternoon until very early morning on Sat 21 Aug — my flight leaves at 1am local time, and arrives back at IAD at 5:30pm local time also on the 21 Aug, but after 29 hours of travel (layovers in MEL and LAX). Tracy & I will be on the same flight from LAX to IAD, and after we land we’re planning to rent a car one-way to go back to State College. So, factoring in the driving, that’ll be roughly 34-35 hours of traveling on the 21st of August. Talk about a long day!!
So I have my new passport, and I’ve officially purchased my IAD -> MEL -> PER -> IAD itinerary for $1600! I’m going back to Australia, for real! It’s going to be fun planning (if my research push doesn’t kill me), and then even more fun going!