www.jeffthefish.com

It took forever, but I uploaded all of my vacation photos to photobucket.  Here’s the album.  I dare to look at all of them.

Day 12: Phoenix

After we left White Sands, MN, we headed toward Phoenix, where we saw cool lizards:

Then we went to the home of my coworker, Chris Warren, who used to live in Seattle but now works remotely from Phoenix. He has the nicest dog on Earth!

We left Casa de Warren in the early afternoon and headed toward California. The landscape west of Phoenix is wonderful! We saw tons of dust devils too!

Day 13: Joshua Tree National Park

We woke up in Banning, CA and decided to visit Joshua Tree National Park. We loved it!

I found this pile of bones and scat drying in the desert. I think the bones must be vertebrae, but they’ve been weathered smooth and round by the harsh environment. The scat contained tiny bones!

Then we saw this adorable ground squirrel! I bet the bones belonged to his relatives!

Then there were more Joshua Trees. Blah blah blah.

And a bunch of cholla cactus.

And then we headed to Riverside, CA to hang out with our pals the Marianos!

Day 14: La Brea Tar Pits

So we did some hanging out with the Marianos, some of our dearest friends on Earth. Greg had to work during the day, so Jen and I headed to La Brea Tar Pits in the middle of downtown Los Angeles!

The first pit I saw was this tiny fenced off one! Litter makes me angry!

Here’s a video of me getting angry. This is a different pit with trash in it.

Here’s the biggest tar pit, which you may remember from The Last Action Hero starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s actually a lake / tar pit, thanks to miners in the early 20th century. Thanks, humans!

We had to check out the museum before we finished looking at the tar pits, because we got there 50 minutes before the museum closed. We always do that. Here is a sloth:

I don’t know why I didn’t take a picture of it, but there was one display that took up an entire wall that was a grid of 400 dire wolf skulls found in the tar pits. You could clearly see the variation in the skulls, and it was a nice lesson in evolution. I also bought a book about dog evolution, but for some reason it made me feel cool instead of nerdy.

Then we went back outside and looked at more tar pits, including this teenerz one:

And this one that had a pair of boots stuck in it. I guess the guy didn’t die.

And this one was bubbling enthusiastically!

Day 15: Huntington Beach

First we ate lunch at Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles, which Leanor recommended to us.

I was under the impression that it was going to be chicken wrapped in waffles. I mean, it was good like it was, but not really the kind of thing I normally eat from restaurants.

But then we went to Huntington Beach to hopefully catch Ray Comfort doing his street preaching thing. I had no plans to engage him, I just wanted to see him “live” and possibly get my picture taken with him. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard him say that he preaches at Huntington Beach every Saturday. I watched a video on YouTube and asked the Marianos if they knew where in Huntington Beach he was. This is the one we watched. Note the Subway in the background:

Well, here’s that Subway, but no Ray Comfort:

There was an information booth manned by a lady, so I asked if she was familiar with street performer with a moustache and a New Zealand accent named Ray Comfort. “Is he with a church?” she asked. I said that he was. She told me that he only shows up some of the time, and he hadn’t been there yet that day, but that I was in the right place.

Oh well. We hung out for about an hour, just in case, but he didn’t show up. I did find a booth that had a totally cool fossil mackerel shark tooth, about 30 million years old, and for a good price. I gave that to Greg. He thought it was really cool.

And then over the next two days we drove back to Seattle! That’s the end!

Day 9: Roswell, NM

There’s a good Mexican restaurant in New Mexico Roswell, but otherwise there’s really only one thing to do: The International UFO Museum and Research Center, which half-heartedly tries to present the case for an actual spaceship crashing near Roswell in 1947. It’s done at about the level of a high school science fair project, and I can sum it up in one sentence: “These guys couldn’t possibly be wrong!!” One big argument from personal incredulity. How creationist of them.

Here are some typical examples. They had a wall dedicated to an archeological dig that was done at the alleged crash site in 2002. What amazing things did they find?

OK, so what was this “stratigraphic anomaly”? The museum never tells you.

So what the hell were these supposed HMUOs? Again, the museum never tells you. I understand the need to step back and study your findings, but this was in 2002! It’s been six years, and that’s all you’ve got? But it gets better!

SO HOW ABOUT A PHOTO OF THE ACTUAL MANDELBROT SET!!!!

WHAT THE EFFING EFF!! DO THESE MARKINGS RUN AWAY OR SOMETHING??? Why would you draw it instead of photograph it? Oh, right, IT’S ALL MADE UP.

I had never looked at it in a skeptical light before, so I think I held out a little hope, somewhere in my lil heart, that the Roswell Incident actually involved extraterrestrials. Thanks, International UFO Museum and Research Center, for showing me that you are all delusional.

Day 10: Carlsbad, NM

Carlsbad Caverns is just some cave. Blah blah blah, big deal. The cool thing about Carlsbad is not the cave itself, but the fact that you are walking IN A 250 MILLION YEAR OLD REEF. Holy cows.

But here’s the cave entrance:

It was hard to get pictures inside the cave, on account of it was dark, but here’s one:

Day 11: White Sands National Monument, NM

This was another place with really interesting geology. Exposed gypsum from nearby mountains is dissolved by snow- and rain-fed streams and carried down into the Tularosa Basin, from which there is no way out. With no way of escape, the water evaporates, leaving behind deposits of gypsum, which is eroded by wind until you get a small region of pure white gypsum sand dunes with its own unique ecology:

Day 6

Denver Museum of Nature and Science! It was awesome! If you are ever anywhere near Denver, say, if you are in the Western Hemisphere, you need to visit this place! We didn’t even have time to see it all, because we got there at 2pm and they close at 5. We are kind of dumb. Also, it’s kind of dumb for anything but an office to close at 5! I think. But it was absolutely fantastic. They had the actual glass thing used in the Miller-Urey experiment!

There were also tons of awesome dioramas. Most showed modern animals in dioramas of their natural habitats, but the Journey Through Time exhibit had incredible dioramas of ecosystems long vanished, like this one from the Devonian, I think. I should have taken notes. Could be Cambrian, but were there belemnites / ammonites in the Cambrian?

And in the gift shop, I bought a cast of a raptor claw! GO TO THIS MUSEUM.

Then we headed south, on our way to New Mexico. On the way, we passed the Focus on the Family Visitor Center!

Fortunately, they were closed.

Day 7

We just drove and took it easy. And watched WALL-E. Frealz. We ended up in Santa Fe, NM.

Day 8

Walked around in downtown Santa Fe. It’s really neat. Everything’s made of adobe! I had an excellent locally made beer at a brewpub:

Which reminds me: I love Mexican food now. At least how it’s made in New Mexico. I srsly cannot get enough.

Then we headed south some more, through the desert, where we saw awesome and powerful storms, the kind you just don’t see in Seattle:

Finally, we arrived in Roswell.

And that is where I am now, writing this up on Day 9. And let me tell you, there is a lot of woo in Roswell. Not just the “aliens crashed here” woo. That’s fine.  That’s what the town’s tourism industry is built on. I’m talking about the kind of woo that puts books called “UFOs and The Death of Marilyn Monroe” written by a guy with a PhD in store front windows. I can’t remember if it was Dawkins or Gould who said not to trust someone who flaunts their degree on the cover of their book. It was probably Dawkins.

Here’s the thing:  I am pretty tired right now, so I won’t be posting many pictures today, and I’ll be even briefer than usual.

Yesterday we visited Dinosaur National Monument in eastern Utah.  It was cool / hot!! We got to see some actual fossils embedded in actual rock in actual formation. Three of them belonged to Diplodocus!  Here is one of them:

Then we headed west to Denver, saw some pretty views, and slept!

Today we hung around downtown Denver and met up with Jeff the Girl, formerly of Five Iron Frenzy, my favorite band from college days.  She and her family are really nice!  And we ate some of the best Mexican food I’ve had in a long time! Thanks a lot, Leanor, Stephen, and progeny!

Some grownups taking a picture as a baby looks on

Oh, and then we returned to the campground to find that a storm had ripped our tent off its stakes and filled it with water, soaking parts of our bed sheets.  Oh well.  I have a microbrew in the ice chest.

Here’s the thing. I don’t really expect to do an update for every single day I’m on the road. That would be wasting everyone’s time. But right now, I’ve got some to waste. I’m sitting at a campground picnic table typing on my laptop. Yay the great outdoors (GOs).

Today we pretty much just drove and then went to the appropriately named Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum in Vernal, UT. It was small but awesome enough to make me want to be a paleontologist more than anything else ever maybe.

Then we went to our campground where I made a lil friend:

Speaking of campgrounds, I want to show you what we’re working with:

It’s nothing special, but I think it’s cute and it makes me happy.

I also learned something about my wife:

Then I saw and heard a chipmunk, and now I’m about to cook!

There is one thing anyone should know about Utah.  It’s flipping hot.

We left Brigham City and headed toward Salt Lake City.  On the way we stopped at Antelope Island, which is in the Great Salt Lake and which was really the only thing I wanted to see in SLC.

Barn swallows nested in the roof of the visitor’s center on the island.  I had never seen barn swallows before!

Here’s something that may interest you. We pulled into a parking lot so we could walk around and look at nature, but there was this minivan full of people I don’t like playing LOUD Spanish language versions of American pop songs on the stereo.  I don’t know if you can actually hear the music in this video, but that’s the minivan in the background:

But something happened that made up for that.  I can now die a happy man.  In fact, I might. For the first time in my life, I saw BRINE SHRIMP IN THE WILD!!

Why is that one guy so orange!  I don’t know!  But here’s a video of them!

The other animal that lives in the lake is the brine fly.  The beach was covered with the discarded skins of brine fly larvae.  That’s the brown trail you see here!

Welcome.  We left Seattle around 8:30am PT and arrived in Brigham City, just north of Salt Lake City, around 11:00pm MT. We were tired!  And then we discovered that the campground we’d planned to sleep at didn’t have our reservations waiting for us!  We were a little annoyed, so we decided to just picked a campsite and sort it out in the morning. Turns out, they had our reservations all along, but some other late night camper took ours, despite the fact that their name was not Brunet.  I had to apologize for our rude voicemail and note…

But the trip itself was uneventful.  Well…almost.

As you can see, my ponytail got WAY CURLY.  Other than that, it was just the usual:  desert bases, rock formations, and sunsets.  *yawn*

Now it’s time to check out the Great Salt Lake and head toward Dinosaur Monument.