IRELAND: TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN

 July 12, 2024

Bob and I like to visit famous universities. We've been to most of the biggies in the United States (Think Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, etc.), and we've been to a few overseas (Think University of Heidelberg in Germany, University of Coimbra in Portugal, Oxford and Cambridge in England, Trinity College in Toronto, etc.).  We were excited to add Trinity College Dublin (aka University of Dublin) to our list.  

We started with a guided walking tour of the campus. Modelled after Oxford and Cambridge, Trinity was founded in 1592 by England's Queen Elizabeth I and is now home to 19,000 students. One of Trinity's specialties is English literature, and its program is ranked #1 in the European Union and 21st in the world. Literary luminaries who are alumni include Oliver Goldsmith, Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and Samuel Beckett. Four Presidents of Ireland and four Nobel Laureates are alumni.

Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) is engrossed in his book and hardly notices the many visitors who walk by him near the entrance.  George Salmon (1819-1904), a mathematician and a theologian who was also the college provost for a time, famously said, "Over my dead body will women enter this college." Maybe he felt that way because he had six daughters and Trinity College was the only place he could go to get away from them.

The iconic Campanile was being renovated when we were there.

PORTUGAL: COIMBRA

 June 27, 2022

From Batalha we drove about an hour north-northeast to the university city of Coimbra, where we had a private tour scheduled. We had about an hour before we were supposed to meet our guide and were starving, so we found a parking place within walking distance of our meet-up point and conveniently located near the Café Santa Cruz. We lucked out because this café has been open since 1923 (although the building itself dates back to 1530) and is a Coimbra landmark. 

Photo from here

We arrived at lunchtime and the place was packed. They had a buffet-style set-up, and they couldn't keep the dishes stocked, so the line was moving pretty slowly. We paid 18€ for both of us, and that included drinks, and when we finally got through the line, we discovered that the food was quite good. The tables were full of what looked like university professors and students, and it was fun to be in that atmosphere.

Photo from here

Just outside and perpendicular to the restaurant was a wonderful "trash art" mural of a baby owl by the Portuguese artist Bordalo II. The left side is more or less traditional, its claws digging into an old wall, and the right sight is much more futuristic.

TEXAS, HOUSTON: RICE UNIVERSITY AND THE HOUSTON ZOO

November 29, 2021

Since we were flying home out of Houston, we spent our last day of our Southern Texas trip there and managed to cram quite a bit in.

We began the day with a drive-by visit to Rice University. The average GPA for admission to this elite private school is 4.12. It has an acceptance rate of 8-10% and an impressive graduation rate of 95%, which I would guess is due in part to the 6:1 student-faculty ratio. About 7,200 students attend Rice, with about 55% of those being undergrads and 45% being grad students. Tuition is $51,000+ for undergrads.

In his travel agenda for our trip, Bob noted that every incoming freshman is placed in one of Rice's eleven residential colleges, somewhat like Hogwarts houses, where they live, dine, and socialize. 

Less than a mile away from Rice is the Houston Zoo, a 55-acre park with over 600 species of animals. It is relatively small in comparison to zoos like New York City's Bronx Zoo (265 acres), the National Zoo in Washington D.C. (163 acres), or the San Diego Zoo (100 acres), but Wikipedia says it is the second most visited zoo in the United States, or at least it was in 2017.

Cute door handles. (Can you see Bob in the reflection?)

They already had Christmas decorations up, which added some festivity to our visit:

NEW YORK: ITHACA, CORNELL UNIVERSITY SITES, AND RETURNING TO NYC

 July 28, 2021

We spent our last day of sightseeing in Upstate New York in Ithaca, home to Cornell University.

We started out with a delicious vegan lunch at Maru Ramen.

I love how colorful each dish is. Everything was very good.

After lunch we drove to the Sapsucker Woods Sanctuary, which is part of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. It is a free, 220-acre natural habitat for the study of birds.

Two sculptures are near the entrance. The first is this bronze of a passenger pigeon, almost spirt-like in concept.

I learned a lot from the onsite information:

NEW MEXICO: FROM LAS CRUCES WATER TOWERS TO UTEP

July 3, 2021

We had spent the night in Las Cruces, so after our hike in the Organ Mountains we returned to our hotel, showered, and checked out. We hadn't eaten breakfast, so we searched online for the "Best Chile Relleno Burrito in Las Cruces."  We ended up at a run-down drive-thru called El Jacalito. A jacalito is a small adobe house (which this drive through was not). And if these are the best chile relleno burritos Las Cruces has to offer, I feel pretty sorry for them. We gave them a B-/C+. Very disappointing.

When he was planning the trip, Bob ran across information about a tour of the Las Cruces water tanks, each painted with historical/regional murals. He knows this is the kind of thing I enjoy, so we headed out to do that before driving on to El Paso.

Each of the water tanks is 32 feet tall and contains two million gallons of water. The artistic genius behind the murals painted on the tanks is Tony Pennock, who completed his first water tower when he was still a high school student.

The first water tank we saw was actually painted to honor New Mexico State University, Pennock's alma mater (although he did not paint this one).  Look at that background! The Organ Mountains are really spectacular.

Jornado del Muerto, or "Journey of the Dead Man," depicts the Conquistadors making the the 100-mile journey from Las Cruces to Socorro, New Mexico. This was Pennock's FIRST mural, completed over a six-month period when he was seventeen years old. He used a project and worked at night to transfer his design onto the tank. Pennock revitalized the flaking mural in 1991 and transformed it into La Entrada, or "The Entrance," focusing on Don Juan de Onate leading a procession of settlers and livestock into the American West.

TEXAS, AUSTIN: BLANTON MUSEUM OF ART, UT AUSTIN, AND TORCHY'S TACOS

March 25, 2021

On our last afternoon of the trip, we spent a few hours in the Blanton Museum of Art of the University of Texas. Founded in 1963, it is one of the largest university art museums in the United States. The current building, erected in 2003, was funded in part by a $5 million donation from the wife of James Michener, but then the Houston Endowment made a $12 million donation in honor of its then-chariman, Jack Blanton, and the museum got its new name (although there is a Mari and James A. Michener Gallery Building).

The entry way is designed like an atrium, and hanging from the ceiling is Thomas Glassford's work Siphonophora (2016), which looks like a giant sea creature.

When we were there the Blanton had a special exhibit of artworks collected by Leo Steinberg (1920-2011), a part-time art history professor turned print collector. Over about 50 years he amassed a collection of about 3,500 prints covering 500 years of art history. It is an incredibly diverse collection. Here are a few of my favorites. 

(L) The Holy Face (1649) by Claude Mellan and (R) Haitian Woman (1945) by Henri Matisse:

TEXAS, LUBBOCK: TEXAS A&M, LUNCH, AND THE BUDDY HOLLY CENTER

 March 21, 2021

After our beautiful sunrise drive through Palo Duro Canyon National Park, we got on the road and headed due south to Lubbock, a drive of about 110 miles. 

Lubbock has a population of about a quarter-million and was named after Thomas Saltus Lubbock, former Texas Ranger and Civil War Confederate Colonel. He was also the brother of Francis Lubbock, governor of Texas during the Civil War.

Our first stop was to look around Texas Tech University, founded in Lubbock in 1923 and currently home to about 40,000 students. We enjoy visiting universities and always try to at least drive by or through the better-known ones on our trips.  Bob especially likes to take a look at the football stadiums. Texas Tech has a big one ("Everything's big in Texas"), the Jones AT&T Stadium. It holds 60,862 fans.

West side facade and entrance

Not far from the stadium is a small herd of Texas longhorn cattle. 

Unlike the ones we had seen earlier grazing in the fields, it is safe to cuddle up to these fellers.

CANADA: TORONTO, THE TRINITY COLLEGE NEIGHBORHOOD

September 28, 2018

(NOTE: The only advantage of not being able to travel because of the COVID pandemic is that it gives me some space to go back and catch up on recording some of our previous travels that I had not been able to get to. This is one such trip.)

In September 2018 Bob had a Friday business meeting in Toronto, Canada. I wanted to go along, so we decided to add an extra day, then fly home on Sunday. We took a red-eye flight from LAX to Toronto, arriving at 6:46 am. We had time to check into our hotel and shower before heading to Bob's meeting, which was held at Trinity College, part of the University of Toronto.

While Bob was in his meeting, I had a couple of hours to wander around. I started by going off the campus to see what was nearby. 

1. The Church of the Redeemer is an Anglican Church that was built in 1879. Sadly, the church administration had to sell of some of its land in the 1980s, and a massive Four Seasons Hotel was built on the property. However, the money from the sale allowed the church to remain solvent and to complete necessary renovations.

It doesn't have a particularly spectacular interior, but it does have some really beautiful stained glass windows. They were gifts to the church during the early 20th century.

The central window behind the altar depicts Christ on the Road to Emmaus.

These are the windows on either side of the above window. They show scenes from the life of Christ and parables: Christ and the children, Christ in the house of Mary and Martha, and the Good Samaritan.

MEXICO: XOCHIMILCO CANALS AND UNAM

June 10, 2018

After leaving Coyoacán, we headed south to visit Xochimilco, "The Venice of Mexico." Like Coyoacan, Xochimilco is one of the alcadias, or burroughs of Mexico City. It is best known for its 110 miles of canals, remnants of the extensive canal system built by the Aztecs.

In 2011 Xochimilco was designated one of Mexico City's twenty-one "Barrio Magicos," or Magical Neighborhoods. (Incidentally, the city center of Coyoacan is also a Barrio Magico.)

This is another city that I visited 40 years ago, and in the intervening decades, tourism here has increased dramatically. Dozens of boats were lined up at the dock waiting for passengers.

Victor purchased our tickets and we boarded our boat, "Puros Cuates," which I think means "Pure Friends" (Pals? Chums?)

Many of the boats are named after girlfriends or wives: Adriana, Lupita, Victoria, Julietta, Carmelita, Andrea, Conchita, Maria Cristina . . .

FLORIDA: TAMPA

June 9-18 2017

The only benefit I can see of being grounded from travel because of COVID -19 is that I can catch up on posting about some of my previous travels that I have never gotten around to writing about. This adventure happened three years ago--a trip to Tampa Florida to score AP English Composition exams.

I've posted before about the experience of scoring AP exams for the College Board, so I won't go into that very much this time. My focus will be on Tampa, a city of about 400,000 people on the western/Gulf of Mexico side of Florida.

I shouldn't have been too surprised by all the lakes/ponds, but I was!

The College Board always books nice rooms for us, usually in a Sheraton or Hilton or Marriott.  I can't remember which hotel I was in, but I had a nice view from various hotel windows.

The hotel was within a few blocks of the Tampa Convention Center, where I spent eight hours/day for the next seven days.

ENGLAND: A SHORT VISIT TO CAMBRIDGE ON OUR WAY TO SOUTH AFRICA

In May and June, we took a trip to five countries in Southern Africa. Our journey began with two very long flights: a 10 hour 35 minute flight from Los Angeles to London, and an 11 hour 30 minute flight from London to Cape Town, separated by a layover of 11 hours 20 minutes. All told, if you include the two hour drive to LAX and the three hours in the airport before take-off (we always leave early because LA traffic is so unpredictable), we were on the road for 37 hours 25 minutes.

And we hit the ground running.

This is what our trip looked like on a map. First, our flight to Cape Town via London:

And then, from South Africa to Namibia to Botswana to Zimbabwe to Zambia and back to South Africa for our flight home:

 AND we did it all with a 24" duffel bag and a backpack each.

But before we started the African journey, we had that 11+ hour layover in London. We are not good sitters, especially if it is sitting in between two flights that are themselves each 10+ hours of sitting. If we have a long layover, we opt for an excursion away from the airport. (See our seven-hour layover in Hong Kong, for example.) There seemed to be plenty of time on this trip for a side trip to Cambridge, and since I have a niece who lives in London who was willing to meet us at Heathrow and join our adventure, we got ourselves a rental car and headed north to Cambridge, a distance of about 50 or 60 miles. Unfortunately, our plane had come in about an hour late and we had spent forever in a customs line (14 rows in the turning ropes), so we didn't have quite as much time as we had planned for, but it was still more than adequate.

TURKMENISTAN GHOST TOWNS: ANCIENT NISA AND MODERN DOWNTOWN ASHGABAT

On a cold, blustery day we visited Old Nisa, an ancient fortress built in about 250 BC and, as of 2007, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Located about 10 miles southwest of Ashgabat, it is just over the border from Iran.

This area was a major world power between the 3rd century BC and the 3rd century AD and formed a barrier to Roman expansion while at the same time serving as a major crossroads and trading center.

A barren, desolate place, it is hard to imagine a thriving trade-based community here. Heck, we weren't even seeing tourists other than those in our own group. (Of course, that's how it was no matter where we went in Turkmenistan.)