We spent most of our time in Asheville visiting the Biltmore, a French chateau style mansion built by a Vanderbilt descendent (with way too much money on his hands). The architecture was quite impressive, and we did both a self-guided tour and the Architect’s Tour which took us to the balconies and rooftops for extra views of the property. The home was built in the 1890s at the height of the Gilded Age, and really shows the splendor of the nation’s wealthy at that time.

It was interesting to see the technology in the house; it was built on the cusp of the electrical revolution so it has a mix of old and startlingly modern features (e.g., an elevator and indoor swimming pool). The gardens and wooded grounds around the house are also quite pretty, and we ended up coming back for a second day to see the gardens. A storm thundered through just as we headed to lunch, and we barely made it inside before the worst of the downpour (it even briefly took out electricity in the restaurant). Later we stopped by the Biltmore vineyard to sample some of their wines.

We spent our other days in Asheville wandering the streets and browsing the stores and cafes. It was quite a lively town and seems to be going through a nice artsy revival. Hopefully we’ll head back someday!

See also: Part 1 and Part 2. Or more photos.

Our next night was to be spent in Asheville, but we had a long ways to go first. We were reaching the end of the Blue Ridge mountains, and we made a stop at Grandfather Mountain, highest of the Blue Ridge. Grandfather is a privately owned mountain, and feels a bit like a tourist trap. They have a fudge shop to fatten you up before you visit the animal enclosures where you can see bears and a cougar. The animals watched us hungrily.

Near the summit is the “mile high” bridge that stretches from a parking area to a large rock outcropping. It was fairly crowded and touristy, but all that doesn’t detract too much from the views off into the Blue Ridge, which are the real reason to go up there. We were pressed for time, so we didn’t get to do any of the hikes to the true summit. This was probably just as well, because just as we crossed back over the bridge, a cloud rolled in and made the whole place disappear.

We continued on our journey south, stopping at overlooks when the weather permitted (rarely). We were clearly being followed by storms, so we were unable to do some of the hikes we’d hoped to do along the way (Linville Falls, Craggy Gardens, and Crabtree Falls). Eventually we reached Mount Mitchell, highest point east of the Mississippi, and hoped that the weather would stay clear as we headed up.

We pulled into the parking lot to the sound of thunder. It did not feel wise to be quite literally the tallest thing on this half of the country during a lightning storm, but luckily the rain held off. We practically ran up the half mile path to the summit where an observation platform gave us a magnificent view of clouds, but not much else. We’ll have to go back some day.

We continued our drive on towards Asheville, NC. After an hour or so, we finally escaped the storms and got the first sunny view of our trip!

More pictures here, or see the previous post.

We started our honeymoon by heading south on the Blue Ridge Parkway from Roanoke. The Parkway is a winding road that goes from Virginia down to Tennessee, and passes not only through the Blue Ridge mountains, but a number of other chains as well before ending in the Smokies outside of Gatlinburg, TN. The parkway can be amazingly scenic, with frequent overlooks providing beautiful views. Or so I had been told. Our first day on the Parkway was spent in the clouds and we could barely see ten feet in front of our car as we drove.

We ended up exiting off of the Parkway early to take some roads at lower elevation. This turned out to be a good idea, because we got to drive through picturesque farm country rather than a dull haze. We spent the early afternoon in the town of Floyd, VA, a small town trying to keep up a lively arts and craft community image. We looked through a few galleries, but the town was mostly dead since it was a Sunday.

Late in the afternoon we checked in to our first lodging: Miracle Farm B&B. We had a very quaint cabin beside a small creek. We were the only guests for the night, so we had the B&B’s 25 acres of woods and farmland all to ourself. It was amazingly peaceful and quiet–a perfect spot to rest after being busy with the wedding for so long.

The next morning the inn keepers left a basket with breakfast on our door step. We enjoyed delicious omelets made with many ingredients picked from the farm, as well as freshly made juice and jam. Later in the day we took a tour of Chateau Morrisette, one of the older vineyards in Virginia. Older doesn’t mean that old though–it was started in the 70′s, but at the time most of Virginia’s vineyards had long since shut down and switched to growing tobacco. The tour guide was informative and showed us the various steps of the wine making process before leading us in a tasting of a number of their wines. Quite a few of them were very good, particularly the sweeter whites.

The next day we continued our trip south on the parkway, and were relieved to find that the clouds had taken the proper position of being far above us, rather than all around us at the overlooks. We stopped at a scenic mill and many of the overlooks. We did several short hikes, but the weather still didn’t give us great views. The walk around Cumberland Knob was particularly disappointing, but later on we got a nice view of some cascades.

More pictures are here and here

My trip was to start with a flight from Hartford to Philadelphia and then a flight on to Dublin. I’m used to things going terribly wrong at some point during my international flights, so I was less than surprised when while sitting in the terminal in Hartford, sirens started going off and the loudspeakers informed us of a “critical situation” requiring us to evacuate the building. People gradually got up and headed towards the exit of the security area. There, everyone seemed to be milling around, unwilling to leave the area since then we would have to check back in through security. Weighing the risk of a fiery explosive death against having to take off your shoes is quite a difficult decision! Just before I was about to give in and leave the building, the sirens stopped. There were no further messages or explanations over the intercom, but we all assumed that this meant everything was fine and we were allowed to go back to our gates.  I suppose the sirens also could have stopped because the terrorists finally reached the control tower and disabled the alarm, but fortunately it appears to only have been a false alarm.

In the end my flight left more or less on time and we reached Philly with plenty of time for me to buy an overpriced slice of pizza and head to my gate. I was happy to see my plane already at the gate almost an hour early, and naively predicted an on time departure. Naturally that was foolish of me, and we ended up leaving about an hour late. Luckily I had no other flights to meet, and I ended up reaching Dublin only a little later than expected.

Once in Dublin I wasted time looking for an ATM (it turns out there was only one as the other two were out of service). At first I mistook the ATM’s line for the line to a Disney World ride since it wrapped around and around the terminal. Realizing this, I simply I changed $20 at a currency exchange and bought my bus ticket to go downtown.

I didn’t dally in downtown Dublin as I was anxoius to get rid of my luggage. I took the next bus to University College Dublin (about 20 minutes outside of town). On the bus I saw someone vaguely familiar carrying a Dell laptop case, and I sucessfully guessed that he was also going to the same conference. In fact he was a Rutgers student, and the following day I discovered he had actually been my TA for the Parallel and Distributed Systems course while I was an undergrad there the previous year.

We eventualy found our way to the registration area for the conference. We checked in, but didn’t go to any of the day’s tutorials. Instead I headed over to the dorms where I was to stay. There I discovered I had not been put on the list for a room, so I spent two hours sitting in the shade of a very nice tree waiting for the residence manager to return.

Eventually my housing was resolved and I dropped off my things and took the bus back downtown, as it was still only early afternoon. After a brief stop at an internet cafe, I walked down O’Connel Street to Trinity College.

Trinity has a very pretty campus full of old stone buildings and nice green lawns that you are not allowed to walk on. I stealthily followed a tour group about for a bit, and learned about the residences of a few noble laureates and other trivia. After an unsuccesful search for free wireless, I settled down on the main green where the students seemed to be gathering for their evening beers. As I said, you aren’t allowed to sit on the grass, so they were restricted to about a 15 foot zone of grass sourounding several acres of pristine grass. Somewhat strange, but I guess it adds to the social atmosphere.

After taking a brief nap on the lawn (I was jet lagged!) I headed back to UCD for an early bed time.

The next day I was up fairly early for the conference start at 8AM. The talks had mixed levels of interest. Most of the keynotes were industry speakers with high level talks about broad system automation that weren’t overly interesting. The later talks were better. I gave a 10 minute talk on the self-managing storage system I was presenting on behalf of a former student in my lab.

I ended up leaving the poster session early to go to dinner with some researchers from HP and IBM. The guy from HP had terrified me earlier in the day when he came up to my poster and immediately began complaining that we had “mischaracterized Jason’s work.” Since I had no idea who Jason was, I had some difficulty responding, although I must have placated him enough as he paid for my dinner later on! We went to Eden, a rather fancy restaurant downtown. Afterwards we went to a fairly touristy bar in the Temple Bar area and had some Guiness. It was interesting to talk to them about life in Industry.

At the end of the day, the conference banquet was at Johnny Fox’s Irish Pub… the highest pub in all of Ireland. Also sure one of its largest tourist traps! We sat at long tables on little benches and drank Guinness while waiting for our food. I had the rack of lamb, which was actually quite good. Very tender. The desserts on the other hand were less exciting.

After another long period of sitting around, the night’s entertainment began. There was a group of traditional Irish musicians who were probably a little disappointed by our complete lack of knowledge of the lyrics to the Irish songs that they kept trying to make us sing. The volumes on their microphones was poorly set up, so we couldn’t hear what they were singing at all. This was followed by some traditional “hooley” dancing. Two men and three women jumped around on stage in a tap dancing style show.

When this was over, it was nearly midnight. We had expected dinner to only last until 9, so people were itching to leave. After all, there were talks starting again the next morning at 8 AM, and we had a 30 minute ride back to the hotels! Just as we all got up to go, the announcer told us that the band was about to return for another performance. In an extremely awkward moment everyone looked around and then continued their way out the door. I’m sure the band was a bit surprised when they returned to an empty hall!

Thursday was the last day of talks, and they went by pretty quickly, although it still lasted until around 6pm. I was tired so I headed back to my dorm and relaxed for the evening.

Friday morning I was finally free, so I headed into town. It was Bloom day (for James Joyce’s character in Ulysses), so I went by the pub on Duke St which is supposed to be one of the main stops. I was a little disappointed – there were a ton of people standing around, but none of the street performers or reciters which I had heard about. Perhaps I came at the wrong time.

Next I headed to the Natural History Museum, although once I was inside I discovered I was actually in the National Museum instead. That was also on my agenda for the day, so no big problem. They had interesting exhibits on Viking and Medieval history. Next I went a little further down the road and made it to the actual Museum of Natural History. They have something like 10,000 animal specimins on display. Some were very interesting, including skeletons and antlers from Giant Irish Deer – a long extinct creature which made their moose specimin look tiny.

After this I headed to the National Art Gallery which has a mix of classic paintings and a large Irish section including the work of the Irish impressionist Yeats.

And that seems to be all I wrote down.  The following day I took a nice trip up to Glendalough where I took a slightly rainy hike through some amazingly green scenery.

Later in our trip we returned to Nelson County (for more gluttony) and witnessed a spectacular sunset. There are always nice views from their front yard, but the wide glowing sunset really showed off the mountains!

When we first arrived, there was far more snow in “tropical” Virginia than in Massachusetts!

We also took a ride up into the hills around their house so we could see what real farm country is like.

Thanks to Monika for the extra pictures!

I just got back from a conference in Big Sky, Montana. The conference hotel was up in the mountains at a ski resort, and although they were starting to get their first snow of the season, the slopes weren’t quite ready yet. The scenery was quit breathtaking (especially for someone from New Jersey), but unfortunately I only got to walk around and take pictures during one of the cloudy days. The conference itself was quite interesting. It was much busier than any of the others I’ve been to. I met a number of new interesting people, and got to see a few other familiar faces which was nice.

We spent our days relaxing on the beach, and our nights at Sweetwater Forest Campground, which had decent size camp sites that were reasonably separated. One afternoon Bobby fished in the pond near our campsite, and caught us two small sunfish… better than the guy near us who only pulled in weeds. On the Fourth we made our way through the crowds of men in muscle shirts to see the fireworks in Provincetown. Megan and I spent part of our last day biking along the Cape Cod Rail Trail, which was a very nice ride. We also zipped through some of the more hilly trails in Nickerson State Park, before returning to the more leisurely CCRT.

It didn’t rain on us too much, but it was very cloudy and gray. I’ll add some more of the pictures that Megan and I took later.

This is the third installment of excerpts from the travel diary I kept during my trip to Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand in 1999. The previous posts covered Singapore and Kuala Lumpur and Penang. Present day thoughts are in italics — after Penang I didn’t keep up with my journal very well, so the remaining posts will be mostly annotations.

Bangkok

Bangkok is full of amazing temples – it often seems like there is one on every other block. The Grand Palace was also amazing and truly spectacular. It is huge and covered in gold. Other than that though, Bangkok wasn’t too interesting. It is dirty, full of smog, and has terrible traffic. We went on a boat tour mainly through the outskirts of the city. The guide was an interesting lively guy, but he kept us how extremely happy and content the people that lived in little shacks along the river were, which seemed a bit of an exaggeration. They let us off at a snake farm where we saw an impressive show. Men grabbing poisonous snakes with their mouths, stuff like that.

I may not have liked Bangkok too much because I got sick during our first or second day there. Having an upset stomach while in the country with the greatest food in the world is a terrible misfortune, so I can’t have been too happy.

It was neat to explore the ancient buddhist temples and imagine what the lives’ of their safron robed monks were like. Many of the monks were very young – barely teenagers. It is common in Thailand for kids to spend a few years at a temple. How would that experience change the life of an American teen?

The Grand Palace was an incredible place. Since this trip I’ve been to a number of European royal palaces, and while they are obviously majestic in their own right, none have the level of detail exhibited by the exquisite carvings and statues everywhere on the palace grounds. Not to mention the fact that literally everything seemed to be covered in gold.