Destinations

This morning I'm back at JP Licks trying to get back into the dissertation groove, but since I have just a few minutes left before my battery goes dead, I'm going to take moment to post on my trip to Costa Rica. In typical fashion, I've been waiting to write a longer description of the week, to capture the essence of the experience in vivid description and poinant reflection, but all this does is prevent me from posting anything until it all has lost it's sense of timeliness.

So I'll just throw up a quick note here saying that it was a great week, and now it all seems a long ways away after several days of biking in cold rain. For most of the week the eight of us traveling together were in the small town of Puerto Viejo on the Caribbean coast, tucked away near the border of Panama. We spent our time surfing, swimming, taking hikes the rain forest, and eating great food. Here's a photo gallery to give you a sampler of the week until I have time to write more. 

We'll, this is fairly late in coming, but I guess I should post something about our trip to Yosemite a week ago. I think I've been avoiding this post because it's so hard to know what to say about such a fantastic place. Perhaps I'll just let the photos speak for themselves, though they don't really do justice either.

I will say that we were lucky to be there when we were--the weather was good, the crowds were relatively thin, and the waterfalls were at peak. We had a nice mix of activities--a stay in the Wawona Hotel, a visit to the giant sequoias, three nights car camping in Yosemie Valley, three days backpacking out of the Valley, one afternoon horseback riding, and a bit of time on either end in San Francisco.

Perhaps I'll have more to say as I get further from it, but for now here are some photos to give you a taste of how we experience this incomporable place.  

Yosemite Galleries

	Mountains	Water	Trees	People

Picasa Gallery - slightly larger versions of the same images

I've spent most of my day today in the Peter B. Lewis Building, a Frank Gehry building which houses part of the Wheatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, OH). I'm here for the New Media Consortium Conference, and I've taking advantage of the wireless connection to finish my presentation. But over lunch I got outside to snap some photos of the building, a nice addition my growing collection of Gehry pictures  (L.A. Philharmonic building, MIT Stata Center).

More photos