Dakota camping trip

I decided my summer 'vacation' should be toward my goal of seeing all 50 states... having completed it, I now have only one state to go - Montana, I plan to see it in October. By 'seeing' I wanted to at least have done something touristy or memorable in each state, not just driven through. Mostly what I was missing was the mid-west, a huge strip of the country, pretty impractical to see in one go... but I had a conference in Omaha, right in the middle - so I went for it :)

Record breaking heat and horrible flooding didn't stand in my way - and I'm glad I experienced both - I feel more connected to our 'heartland' now... I even encountered tornado damage... I have even more appreciation for Oregon now!

Another major aspect of this trip was for me to camp alone. I used to be afraid to sleep outside, even with friends/family. I have changed a lot with age and have been wanting to go camping with the dogs - I figured this was a great time to start camping alone - especially since i'd be going off the beaten path without much of a pre-planned agenda. I am proud to say I sleep like a baby, even if I have no idea what my campsite looks like - though maybe that's not such a good thing for safety's sake!!

Details:

Wednesday, July 27... Somewhere around Tekamah, Nebraska...

Wednesday night I flew into Omaha, getting my rental car around 11:30 pm. I planned to drive an hour north and camp in a park near the Missouri river. Didn't even occur to me that the flooding would still have loads of things closed... After an hours drive, exhausted, and meandering on back farm roads, I came across a 'road closed' sign. I decided to try for the north entrance of the park, only to come a few feet from driving into a washed out road... I caught the shine of the water on my headlights. At this point I had taken a 20 minute detour on dirt farm roads, and had no place to sleep. I found another park (NOT near the river) and after another 30 mins on dirt roads I found - DONKEYS? Yes,

I took a wrong turn, ended up on someone's farm, waking up the

don

ly to find... IT WAS CLOSED! Yep... not my night. I circled thekeys - they looked quite confused! It was nearly 2am a

t this point, I quietly turned the car around - and found the right road... on

whole park on dirt roads only to find they had just mad

e a new entrance right off the main road... oh well!! Nothing like giving the rental car a good test right off the bat??

Here's a sampling of what the roads were like (yes, that's the intersection of 30, GH, and G...???):

I circled the lake inside the park, unable to find the tent area, so I just pulled the car into a field, and used the high beams to LEARN how to set up my tent... slight oversight - didn't have time to take it out of its packaging before the trip... no problem - it didn't take long, but I thought it seemed a bit small - I learned (in the light) the next night how to get the corners more secure... This was about 2:15 am. I feel fast asleep. At 5am I was awoken by fishermen driving past me to the lake. I rolled over, slept until about 11! Woke up to find myself in a very quiet spot, three fisherman on the lake, no one else around. I freshened up, packed, and got on my way.

THE BEST THING I LIKE ABOUT CAMPING - is the fact that once you pick up the tent there is no trace you were there. No one needs to wash sheets, no wasted electricity, nothing thrown away... just a bit of grass padded down in a small square footprint...

When I drove away in the morning I was quite amused by th

e following "no swimming" sign... a posted rule I have NO trouble following in this case :)

Thursday, July 28 - from Nebraska to North Dakota - back roads:

I have little recollection of Thursday. I remember thinking it would be wise to reach a campground well before dark so I could get this tent pitching thing down, and since I slept until 11am, that didn't leave me with a long day. I found a lovely state park for the night, Beaver lake state park near Wishek, North Dakota. It was a lot of driving and I avoided all main roads... There were some closures of small roads from the flooding, and I had to take a few detour

s... One of my detours stopped looking like a road - it was really quite phenomenal. I think it was supposed to be only access for farm vehicles... but it had a regular street sign - how was I to know my reliable gravel/dirt roads would turn into grassland??

The campsite was delightful - my favorite of the trip. Nice park ranger, nice RV folks, quiet, scenic, very clean. I settled in for the evening, watched a movie on my laptop, read some, and had a great night sleep. This felt like a vacation!

2010 1st day school & tweetsie

tire trouble

So when I was dropped me off at home I was supposed to go meet Sophie's breeder to pick her up, but when I went to my car I found I had a serious flat (like rim on the ground flat) - so I called the breeder, and she offered to drop sophie off instead of me meeting her (she's so sweet!). Then I set on the task of changing the tire, only to find I don't seem to have the tire wrench... I couldn't get to my bike (car jammed in the garage pretty tight) so I took my roommate's bike to WinCo. That was an adventure in itself - it was way too short for me, my knees were knocking the handle bars, and I couldn't figure out how to change the gears! Fortunately, the closest store, Winco, had 'fix-a-flat', so I bought it, biked home and put it in the tire, and drove to les schwab to get a patch/replacement. They had a waiting line and said they'd call when they were done. I had a hard time telling the guy which tire, he kept repeating it back wrong. After 1.5 hours of me browsing up and down shops on 9th st, I decided to just go back there and find out how much longer it would be. Turns out they finished a half hour before and didn't call. The tire I had wanted patched looked exactly the same as when I dropped it off (fix-a-flat left it slightly underpressured, and it still looks that way), and they said no charge for the patch but wanted me to spend $600 on new tires and alignment. They told me I could buy a wrench there for $15, and after waiting 10 mins for them to dig one out and ring it up - it was $25, so I didn't buy it (I priced wrenches at 3 stores while i was passing the afternoon waiting for their call). &%$& that... I actually have a rip in another tire - I'll need to replace them, but I'm not going back there. Frustrating afternoon... BUT, if that's the only issue I have coming home after a month away, I'm not doing too bad!!!

Airplane seat-mates

As we've probably all experienced, a good seat mate can make a long flight more tolerable, where a bad one can make even a short flight horrible. I fortunately had no bad seat mates on the unreasonably long trips too and from Cape Town (roughly 35-40 hours even with good connections).

On my way, from London to Cape Town, I sat next to a polite but chatty man - and after only a short while we discovered not only that we were both physics professors, but that he is at Stellenbosch University not far from UCT. He invited me to come give a colloquium, so we exchanged business cards, and I ended up visiting their department, having a lovely time with the students and faculty during my talk, and a very nice lunch after. They were really interested and engaged, and I was very glad to have made that connection. I appreciated meeting him, and was glad he was so friendly - though it was embarrassing for me to be talking professionally with someone after ~40 hours with no shower, and feeling horrible from traveling! (It upsets my stomach, gives me a headache, I feel very conscious about being smelly, and I just want to hide after so long on airplanes!)

On my way home (London to San Fran), I sat next to a lovely lady a few years older than me, from Beirut (though raised abroad and living in the US). She was very excited to tell me about a 24 hour romance she had with a man she met on the beach with amazingly beautiful green eyes. But as she told me more and more about her love-life, it became a conversation i was more and more uncomfortable about having. She wasn't shy AT ALL!! At one point she started using a bunch of cuss words about male and female body parts to explain how upset she was that her 3rd cousin (a marriage option for her) had two kids with his mistress in England. At least it made for a more entertaining trip - and I wish her much luck finding a husband who can afford her but does not want to impose plastic surgery (as the potential one she had just returned from meeting had said on their first 'date'!!)

The haves and have-nots

I finally realized the obvious - why I felt uncomfortable going to expensive places here. Normally I like to pamper myself, a nice spa treatment, a fancy restaurant and so forth. But here, it just feels wrong. I can't stand seeing signs indicating that someone poor will not be let in, or knowing that I was only let through the gate without question because I am white / look wealthy. I don't like going to a restaurant where I know that 3/4's of the city's population can't go, and I don't like the disparity between the waiters and the diners. In the US, so many waiters are working students, or other such people moving ahead in life - here they are the poor - but not the very poor - at least they have jobs. There is over 20% unemployment, and about 25% of the people live in the equivalent of shanty-towns. Some live in worse: "unofficial settlements" where there isn't even running water. Then there are the $20 million mansions. It's disgusting. I'm happy to be living amongst the 'middle class' and forgoing comforts that I could afford here. I know I'm here to help those who do great things. It doesn't feel like enough, and I feel strange every time I post photos of lovely settings without showing the daily reality of life here...

Taken from various pages online:
58% of adults have not graduated from high school
20% of the population has HIV
40% live below the poverty line
over 100,000 'informal dwellings' are serviced by the city (have water/electric)
7% of households have no access to save drinking water
The population has grown by about a million in the last decade (from ~3 to 4 million people) - mostly blacks from other parts of southern africa looking for work. 58% of the unemployed were black as of a decade ago - I can imagine it's only gotten much worse. (Compare to a 3% unemployment rate for whites)
10% of the city's GDP and employment is from tourism
rape, theft, and violent crime are serious issues - no one in middle or upper class lives without bars, gates, electric fences, barbed wire, and security systems (usually most of those things)

Powerful, short videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YV32qz2HJg&NR=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzOmjXpUFG0&feature=related

Cape town is also one of the most multi-cultural cities in the world, and one of the most beautiful. It has a complex history that colors everything even today. To read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town , and a very different view:
http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/destination/news/newsid=1179174.html (perhaps evidence that the "cape flats" are, as I've been told, though very poor, not as dangerous as the more mixed areas, and slightly above poverty line areas)

T-shirts I've seen here:

"Amsterdam"
"Some people are only alive because it's illegal to kill them"
super mario playing soccer (hello world cup!)
"Of course I am in love with you darling" with the I, am, l, y, ing in red (and yes, he had a girl on his arm)
"Good girls are good at lying"

LOVING the intellectual environment

I've given 2 talks so far and am about to give a 3rd tomorrow... I have no idea how it came to be that I could give 5 or so DIFFERENT 1-hour research talks based on my last 2 years of work... Yikes! No wonder I get overwhelmed sometimes :)

But being here, with my focus being on work, and the intellectual environment is amazing... Just this morning at breakfast I listened in on a powerful conversation about the importance of teaching cultural studies WITHIN the culture in question, as explained by a Jamaican scholar. I'm in a dorm with visiting scholars - all here to do research of one sort or another.

Today I'm going to the engineering education research meeting - they'll be discussing things right up my alley. Next week will be visiting the center for higher education - many people I know from past visits, all scholars of similar enough to myself that we can jump straight into the deep end discussions of our work.

Yes, there is a great environment at OSU, but this is like a mini-sabbatical - and just refreshes the brain in ways I can't express...

And oh so much more to do... 1 week nearly done, 2 to go, and a huge list of goals remaining!!!