[Click for a larger version of the picture.]

Jenny & I took a day-trip to Yosemite yesterday. It’s a little too far away to only spend one day there (360 miles or 580 km round trip from San Francisco), but definitely worth the effort. We went on a hike on the western edge of the Yosemite valley — this picture is taken near Inspiration Point (aptly named!). We didn’t quite make it to Inspiration Point, because the sun started setting.

The waterfall is Bridalveil Fall.

Jenny and I went up to Oregon’s Crater Lake this week. We decided to camp at a state park 40 miles south of Crater Lake, since there is no camping at Crater Lake this time of year.

That should have been our clue.

When we got there, the weather was beautiful: high 60s, a light breeze, sunny. Perfect camping weather. By nightfall, however, clouds started blowing in, and soon it was raining. It never really stopped. My hand-me-down tent was slightly leaky, so that didn’t help matters.

The next morning, we drove up to the lake. On the way there, things got snowier and snowier — at the visitor center, snow was piled nearly ten feet high next to the road. At the rim of the caldera, there was a bona fide blizzard. You could barely see the lake (see picture above.)

We did, however, get to see the Rogue River gorge, which was absolutely awesome. In the course of a few miles, it goes from being a small mountain stream to twenty-foot-tall waterfall to underground river. Wouldn’t want to go for a swim there.

The forecast for the next night was even worse, with freezing temperatures and snow showers at the campground — so we called it quits and decided to get a motel at Mount Shasta. As we were leaving Oregon on I-5, however, we were hit with yet another blizzard.  It feels like Oregon chewed us up and spit us out.

We’ll give it another shot come July.

We started off the day at the Wellcome Collection, a museum displaying an “unusual mixture of medical artefacts and original artworks exploring ‘ideas about the connections between medicine, life and art.” We spent most of our time in the ‘History of Medicine’ section, which, despite its stolid sounding name, was actually very interesting and interactive. The main exhibit concerned four themes, including obesity, malaria, and ‘The Body,” exploring medical imaging.Two displays caught my eye, in particular. One had the entire human genome in book form, taking up an entire book case and approximately a hundred volumes of tiny 5 pt text. The other was a sculpture about obesity. Check out the pictures below.

After lunch, we went to the National Gallery, a huge museum on Trafalgar Square. Just like the Wellcome Collection, admission is free. The museum’s collection is staggering: it has multiple paintings by Van Gogh (including the famous Sunflowers), Cezanne, Monet (including two of the Water-Lily Pond series), Michelangelo, Rubens, and Van Eyck (including the photo-realistic Arnolfini Portrait). According to the museum, these paintings “belong to the public,” which is why admission is free. I definitely got my money’s worth.

On Trafalgar Square, just in front of the museum, there is currently a different sort of art going on. For 100 days, starting on July 7th, randomly selected people have been allowed on to the square’s Fourth Plinth, a large empty pedestal, for one hour. Participants are allowed to do whatever they want and are not allowed off until their one hour has expired. When we were eating lunch on the square, a young woman was downing a bottle of wine. After we left the museum, another woman wearing some angel wings had turned on a bubble machine. Apparently, participants have not been particularly creative with their hour in the limelight. I suppose it’s only a matter of time before somebody gets naked or starts throwing water balloons at the audience below.

We spent the last three days with Jenny’s aunt Sally near Portsmouth before we headed back to the US. It was a nice respite from traveling before jumping on yet another airplane. We visited HMS Victory, Nelson’s ship during the Battle of Trafalger, among other things.

Anyhoo–here are some pictures!

The trip back was very smooth, no problems at all. I’ll post some pictures of England tomorrow, but for now it’s bed time!

The trip there was kind of harrowing: there were four different modes of transportation, the first three of which–subway, train, airplane–had some mild snafu along the way. The flight, in particular, wasn’t very pleasant: we flew Ryanair, Europe’s low-budget no-comfort cattle-car-with-wings airline. At least they got us there without crashing.

Once we got to Norway, however, things got much better. We rented a car at the airport, where a friendly portly Norsk named Knut helped us out. The drive to Oslo was absolutely beautiful: water, mountains, and trees everywhere. Oslo is a fairly small city–at 600,000, it’s smaller than Austin. On our first night there we visited Hovedøya, an island where some monks founded an abbey in the 1100s. It was abandoned in the 1500s, but the ruins are still there.

Later that night, we had some dinner–and we were introduced to Norway’s only real negative aspect: the absolutely ridiculous prices. We spent 330 kroner (just about 50 bucks) on dinner at a ‘budget’ restaurant. I had a burger, Jenny had some pasta. After dinner we went to a grocery store, since we figured those might be cheaper… but no. Lunch meat: $10/kilo. Water: $3 for a liter. Bread: $4 for a loaf. Cheese (the cheapest, sliced variety): $15. We settled for potatoes and apples, the only affordable things in the entire damn store.

After that particular financial kick in the gonads, we went to Vigeland Park, a large park in western Oslo hosting 212 sculptures by Gustav Vigeland. Nearly all of them are of human beings, mostly couples, in all kinds of poses. Most entertaining are the statues of babies being flung about. There are some fairly disturbing ones, too, including several husbands beating up their wives, and at the center of the park stands a somewhat phallic pile of bodies. Nevertheless, the park is very beautiful and could give Central Park or London’s Hyde Park a run for their money.

The next day, we made a giant loop through central Norway by car. We drove to the largest national park in Norway, Hardangervidda National Park. Driving in Norway is pretty slow; there is only one freeway in the entire country, and all other roads are simple one or two lane roads with no divider. The speed limit is generally 80 km/h (50 mi/h), and you really can’t go much faster. Honestly, I didn’t want to drive any faster because the scenery was simply mind-blowing. Just check out some of the pictures.

Our goal was to get to Kalhovdfjorden, an very stark looking area completely devoid of trees. To get there, we had to go down a 20 mile, one way only gravel-paved road with tons of blind curves and sheer drops. Our efforts were definitely rewarded.

On the way back to Oslo we visited a stave church, a medieval wood-framed church. Most of these were built in the 1200s, and only about 30 are left. Only one example exists outside of Norway.

That night, we went back to Oslo, walked around the main drag.

Today we visited the Norwegian Folk Museum, a collection of several hundred buildings showcasing traditional Norwegian architecture. The second stave church picture you see is from the museum.

To sum up: Norway was awesome. The people were incredibly friendly, and every single person we spoke to spoke English. Although prices for everything are absolutely preposterous–we’re talking $12 Big Macs here!–the scenery is so incredible you almost don’t mind. This is one of the more random places I’ve visited, but it was absolutely worth it. I can’t recommend it enough.

Looking at European infrastructure with a critical eye–especially after having worked at Grantworks for a few years and having graduated UT–I have to say I’m extremely impressed with what I’ve seen. Without a doubt, Europe’s experience proves the viability of a rail-oriented strategy to curb congestion and sprawl. Booking a trip on the Eurostar was actually more difficult than I thought it would be: the service is so popular that even with an 18-coach train leaving Brussels for London every hour of every day, tickets still sell out more than a week in advance. Air travel has suffered greatly as a consequence: Air France, for example, no longer offers air service between Paris and Brussels, and KLM no longer flies between Amsterdam and Brussels.

High-speed trains have numerous benefits. First and foremost, using electricity instead of fossil fuels is highly beneficial for the environment. France, especially, has employed a carbon-neutral strategy because it produces the majority of its electricity with nuclear reactors. Naturally, there are severe drawbacks to relying on nuclear power—mainly the danger of placing a reactor in a densely populated country and the difficulty of properly disposing of nuclear waste—but, arguably, continued reliance on fossil-fuel-hungry air transport for medium-range distances is much worse for the environment.

Another benefit of relying on train transport is that it is relatively easy to increase passenger carrying capacity. Expanding a highway is an incredibly costly affair: first, the right of way must be secured, which in dense urban corridors is nearly always a nightmare. Construction costs are also liable to be enormous, and existing traffic will necessarily be disturbed. Finally, the addition of a lane will probably induce more traffic: in other words, more people will be tempted to use a car to travel to work once they realize an extra lane is available. However, when a train such as the Eurostar becomes overcrowded, managers can simply add an extra car or increase frequency of service.

Driving back from Leuven to my grandparents’ house on Thursday, we were stuck in a nightmarish traffic jam on the Brussels beltway: in an hour and a half, we crept forward six or seven miles. Belgium’s well-designed public transportation network is barely coping with the daily flow of people to and from the capital. Apparently, tens of thousands of people still find it beneficial to climb into their cars every morning and drive to work. At the end of their cost-benefit analysis, these people still find it easier to drive rather than to take the train. No amount of government inducements and employee benefits is enough to convince them to take the train.

That then, is Europe’s challenge. I’m afraid America has a very long way to go before it ever gets to this point.