Here are my notes from the trip we made to Canada in celebration of my 50th birthday! Links are to our photo albums of each city. (Historical note: This trip took place during a US government shutdown, so the federal security & air-traffic-control staff in the US airports had not been paid for almost a month.)
A bit of background: we initially planned to take this trip in 2023, but with one thing and another postponed it to 2024, which is our 15th anniversary. We started planning months in advance, since we had only two weeks to work with, we wanted to fit in all the activities we cared about while leaving some flexibility. I booked the flights and the campervan rental, and Jessie booked the hotels and car rental. I mention these details because they are relevant later.
In spring of 2003, I visited my uncle Carl on the big island of Hawai'i. Here are my photos from the trip.
My grandparents retired to Arizona around 1990, and we went to visit multiple times in the 2000s and 2010s. Here are my photos from Tucson as well as Biosphere 2, Meteor Crater, and the Sonora Desert Museum.
In 2002, I bicycled from Minneapolis to Grinnell, Iowa and back (a distance of 700 miles) on a speaking tour for World Population Balance. Here are my photos from the trip.
In 2000, my parents and I went on a road trip to the Grand Canyon. Along the way we saw some sights in New Mexico. Here are my photos from the trip.
In April, 1997, I took a bus from Grinnell to Aspen, CO to attend the first annual conference of the short-lived Alliance For Community Networking (AFCN), an organization that aimed to "bridge the digital divide" with public computing centers nationwide. The conference itself was pretty forgettable, but I had a great hike up Aspen Mountain and took a few photos.
Spring break of my senior year of high school (1994) I went to visit my friend Javier and his family in Mexico City. Spring break of my junior year of college (1997) I returned to visit them again, this time in Uruapan and Michoacán. Here are my photos from the two trips.
In August of 1993 I went with my parents to Japan. We traveled with my uncle Carl, who was living there at the time, visiting Tokyo, Tokushima, Hiroshima, Osaka, and Kyoto. See an album of my photos from the trip.
In the summer of 1993, I was the delegate from Oklahoma to the Department of Energy's Supercomputer Honors Program ("Superkids") at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Because I wasn't allowed to bring my camera into the lab, most of my photos are from the off-site banquet at the end of the two weeks.
