Well, since I had such success with this blog, I decided to start another ;-) (No, really..)  I justify it in the "I'm moving to Seattle, which is kind of like travelling, so maybe it will be a good way to keep in touch" sort of way.  We'll see. 

Why not just use this blog, you ask?  Because it didn't work for me.  I haven't posted since September ;-)  I got a livejournal account and since it pulls me to the page to read all my friends posts, I've started to post a little bit myself.  And so we say goodbye to msn spaces.

Check it out: jfk06.livejournal.com

Pictures from the trip are up! For more details, IM/call me and I can walk you through them (if you're in the area, we should have dinner or something too :-))

http://web.mit.edu/jfkane/www/pictures/UKtrip/

Enjoy

I made it back safely, which means this blog will probably die again.  If you want to know more about my travels, feel free to get in touch (phone, email, IM) and I'll be happy to tell you waaaay more than you wanted to know!  For now, I'm going to enjoy public water fountains, paper towels and cars driving on the *correct* side of the road :-)  Oh yeah .. and the 424 emails in my inbox that have to be dealt with (post spam deletion ... I only had 11 when I left! :-/)  For pictures, check my website (http://web.mit.edu/jfkane/www/pictures/) -- hopefully I'll find the time to post some soon :-)

Well, my good intentions of posting were spoiled by shared internet time (when 17 people are waiting in line to use the computer after you, taking the 10-15 min to post to a blog just seems rude..) and Microsoft. For reasons I don't understand, I can't sign out of MSN spaces, and while it would be fun to allow a random string of people all over the UK to be me, it seemed like a bad idea...

Anyhoo, I've made it to Cambridge and DPS (Division of Planetary Sciences -- the meeting I'm here for!) has started. Cambridge has been amazing so far. I'm staying in St John's College, one of the older colleges here. Our room is huge and is in a very old, very gorgeous building. Dinner last night was in the formal "Hall" -- very Harry Potter :-) Add flying ghosts overhead and it would be an exact match. We sat at long tables in a room with a huge ceiling and portraits of important dead guys. While amazing, dinner takes almost 2 hours. It's nuts. The first night here, we went to the Eagle, a pub where Watson & Crick apparently celebrated discovering the double helix. We also walked through King's College and saw the porters all dressed in their purple robes. More Harry Potter :-) (Libby *hates* it when we compare anything to Harry Potter!)

Quick review of the trip: Dublin was nice (I think mostly because I feel like I should like Ireland ;-)) -- we saw St Patrick's Cathedral (that was in fact beautiful) & Trinity College & passed near the zoo were the lion who roars in MGM stuff lives. We also did a half-day trip to the Wicklow Mountains and saw some Avorca weavers and an old Abbey. After that, we stopped in Edinburgh for a day and a half -- Edinburgh was *awesome*. We saw the place where JK Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book (I didn't know she was Scottish!) and went to Edinburgh Castle, Holyrood Palace, a graveyard, some kirks (churches) and Mary King's Close. We also tried some whiskey liquers :-) Edinburgh was also the only place we actually hung out with people in our hostel -- we met a few guys from Australia, Canada and S. Africa and talked with them for several hours. It was great fun! After that, we stopped briefly in Newcastle for some lunch and a castle and then finished our travels in York. York was also really neat (Yorkminster Cathedral is amazingly huge) and went to a Viking museum!

Anyway, it's time to go practice my talk (wish me luck! I'm giving it Thursday afternoon...) Hopefully, I'll put up a more detailed posted for each leg of the journey and eventually, a few pictures of the highlights :-)

Well, we made it! :-) After figuring out how to get from the airport to London proper (and how to get our bags stored for the day), we explored a bit. We saw the Tower of London (Angela got her fish and chips!) and the London and Tower bridges... Then, we did this walking tour that was kinda boring at the beginning -- until we got to Shakespeare's Globe (about half way through). After that, we got into a more exciting part of London: people being statues and street-performing and painting these detailed, gorgeous pictures on the ground! We saw the London Eye, but didn't have the courage to go on it (nor did we want to wait in line). Instead, we walked past Big Ben, Westminster Abby and Buckingham Palace. All in all, I'd say we walked a good 4-5 miles yesterday on little to no sleep. Craziness.

Anyhoo, after that, we hopped a boat to Greenwich. It was a guided tour, but Angela and I both slept for the hour we were on the boat. We did however learn that WHARF stands for "Warehouse (at or and) river frontage". Very, very random. There are a LOT of converted wharfs on the Thames into luxury apartments these days... and the tour guide pointed out them all.

The highlight of our day was a stop in Greenwich (well, for me -- I'd seen *most* of the stuff we saw the last time I was here). We saw the Royal Observatory and stood in both hemispheres :-) I saw a bunch of attempts at making accurate clocks, but sadly, never found the one that worked. They also had this really cool dark room set up that was reflecting an image of the Queen's house onto a table. At first, I thought it was like a movie, but then when we were back down to the town, we saw the same couple sitting on the bench as had been on the bench in the image.

After a very full day, we hopped a train to Holyhead, where we met up with Libby (yay!). She cooked us a "traditional" English meal, made fun of us for being American and then put us to bed by 9pm (4pm EDT). Now, we're up bright and early (6am here -- 1am back home) and heading to Oxford for the morning. After that, we're spending the night in Holyhead Wales and catching an early morning ferry to Dublin. Wish us luck :-)

I leave for the UK tomorrow!  My talk is done, my bags are packed .. I'm ready to go.  Travel plans: London, Harlow Town, Oxford, Holyhead, Dublin, Edinburgh, York, then Cambridge for the conference.  Should be fun.  As time permits, I'll try to update my blog a little so people can know what's going on & maybe even post some pictures :-)

It is very unlikely that I will ever post another blog entry. But at least I have a "space." *Phew* -- crisis averted.