Gosh, 3 months since my last entry?? Time seems to fly by faster and faster... Where do I start? Let's do the quick and dirty summary of what happened since April.
May: Highlight was my and Michael's awesome birthday party. Definitely one of the best parties Waiteata has seen in ages. Heaps of people and just a really great night! Thanks everybody!
Otherwise not much going on, mainly getting stuff at uni ready so I could leave in June without having to stop in the middle of my work.
So here we go (pictures as usual on http://picasaweb.google.com/kathiunglert): June 13, heading towards San Francisco. After a pretty exhausting flight squeezed in between some fat dude whose alcohol consumption made him snore like 10 elefants and some chick who decided skiing pants are appropriate gear for a 12-13 hours flight, I was happy to spend an hour or more to get through US customs...
Finally done with all that, Danny and I spent the afternoon driving through SF, stopping at the Golden Gate Bridge of course, getting some food and beer and having some relax time walking around Berkely and the UCB campus.
Monday, June 14: Jason arrives and the 3 of us make the drive down to San Diego. One of the professors of the geophysics program we were going to welcomes us at his house, drives us to the hotel he booked for us, we enjoy some time in the pool there and he invites us for dinner. When we come home around 9, I experience what I hoped for so much: a 5.7 earthquake, close to Ocotillo at the Mexican border, felt widely in the San Diego area. Yay!!
Tuesday, June 15: We meet Chris, so the 4 of us who are going to drive to Santa Fe are there. Along the mexican border, through amazing desert, passing by Phoenix, Arizona, we make it to Flagstaff, Arizona. From our motel there it's "only" two hours to the Grand Canyon. We make it just in time for sunset, sooo cool!
Wednesday, June 16: After a relatively short drive (6 hours...) through Arizona and New Mexico, we arrive at the Santa Fe Indian School, our home for the next 3.5 weeks. The weather is sunny and warm, and we don't have anything to do except for meeting everybody, going to town for a few drinks and party.
Thursday, June 17 - Sunday, July 11:
Work work work and fun fun fun! While the lectures are ok, the talks of people from industry, oil companies, USGS etc are super interesting. Even better, we have 3 field trips to get to see the area of the Rio Grande Rift including some pretty awesome rock formations and the super impressive Valles caldera. Fieldwork is divided into two parts, an archeology site where we are looking for near-surface features like buried building structures etc and the Santo Domingo Basin, were we apply different geophysical techniques to find faults, groundwater etc. The whole area is just amazing, relatively rocky desert with heaps of cacti and almost no shade, wide areas where you can suffer from heat and sun the first half of the day, while you can see thunderstorms building up in the distance, rain that never reaches the ground, awesome lightning and finally super strong rain that turns dry arroyos into flooded rivers. Of course I have to mention, we got 2 days of during these weeks, the first one was used by most of us to go swimming at a reservoir a bit further north, the second one was July 4, pretty lazy with just a bit of walking around Santa Fe during the day and fireworks in the evening. The last week was all about data processing, our tan from the fieldwork before turned into computer tan aka white as we barely got to see daylight during this week ;) Although pretty intense, all of us managed to give good presentations on the last weekend and to finish our reports without too much stress.
Monday, July 12: And in no time (at least that's what it felt like...), the 4 of us are back on the road, on the way to California. The only stop we make on the first day is a meteorite impact crater along the way in Arizona, smaller than e.g. the Ries crater, but a lot more impressive, as it is well preserved.
Tuesday, July 13: Getting up early and driving over the Hoover Dam is pretty cool! Continuing into Nevada and arriving into Las Vegas is even cooler!! A city that doesn't seem real, fascinating and ridiculous at the same time. We get a really good hotel room for basically no money and enjoy the day having drinks, swimming in the pool and walking along the strip in the vicinity of our hotel. At night time it gets even better: Just going through all the casinos, shopping malls etc is just crazy. The Eiffel tower, the Statue of Liberty, Caesar's Palace, the Bellagio with its fountain, the Luxor with the Pyramid and the Sphinx are just some examples of the craziness over there.
Wednesday, July 14: We make the drive from Las Vegas back to San Diego. After stopping at George's house to drop off all the equipment and the rental car, we pay Scripps institute of Oceanography a visit. Really cool campus, right on the cliff next to the beach, I am tempted to go there for my PhD... Meeting up for dinner and some beers with some of Danny's friends, we end the day on the beach.
Thursday, July 15: From San Diego we're headed to the eastern Sierra Nevada. Highlights are the Bishop tuff (ok, I know I'm a geek, but I HAD to see it!) and Mammoth Lakes, a mountain village similar to the ones in the European Alps. Long Valley Caldera, another big one in my list!
Friday, July 16: Last day on the road. Main point: Yosemite! One of the coolest places I've ever seen, definitely one of my favourite spots, in the world!! Driving through was amazing, although there were so many tourists on the main roads and attractions like waterfalls etc, it was totally worth it. Will definitely have to come back and do some hiking!
From there we're on the way back to Berkely, spend the rest of Friday there, pay a last visit to the beach in San Francisco on Saturday and I get back to the airport late afternoon.
Via LA and Auckland, I make it back to Wellington after an amazing 5 weeks that I will never forget. Since then there's not much excitement, mainly work work work and gym, the usual :)
Check out the pics, they're totally worth it (btw thanks to Jessie, Ben and Jason for some of the awesome pictures)!
