Loose ends: June

June was a very exciting month for me.

On its very first day, after a regular day at work, I headed to O'Hare to meet Mum and Dad, freshly arrived from Sydney. I was very happy to bring them back to my spacious apartment: I had been anticipating it since the day I bought three sets of crockery. Also, I now finally have a photo of my apartment (my phone takes photos, but I can't work out how to transfer them to my computer).

Actually, this photo was taken a few days later (at sunrise).

We spent Tuesday morning exploring the campus and Hyde Park. Mum had a couple of comments that I agree with. One is that Chicago is a very pretty city. The grass and flowers are in full bloom (as my nose knows!), and the streets are just calm and pleasant. People don't always realise that this is what Chicago is like. Second, the UC campus feels like a very different kind of university from MIT. MIT is a place with a buzz of technology, progress and solving the problems of the modern world. UC is more like a retreat and a place for contemplation. Two different ideas of a university!

After lunch we wandered up the lakeshore, enjoying the sunshine and admiring the view. One of these days I'll have to get on my bike and explore to the ends: it is a nice place to spend some time!

I had to spend a little time at my office on Wednesday - some work, but mostly making sure I was prepared for several weeks out of town and for Tom's upcoming trip - but Mum and Dad were able to amuse themselves at home (and at a nearby coffee shop that quickly became a favourite). Then it was time to go back to O'Hare and on to Boston! It was great to catch up with Patrick and hear a little about his plans for the next little while.

Thursday was the doctoral hooding ceremony. We heard Mike Massimino tell us about his time as a grad student at MIT. Particularly, he urged us to show the same encouragement to students that he received from MIT faculty when he was struggling and considering dropping out. It's very much a family ceremony: the graduands' seats are on the floor (of what is, in winter, an ice rink) and the family and friends are in the bleachers. It makes it very easy to spot loved ones. I was very happy to be in line right behind Jimmy, and we were able to wave hello to each other's families.

After some photos and a visit to say hello to Martin and the group, it was time for the MIT graduation Mass, back in the chapel where I spent around 1% of my time at MIT. I sang with the choir and it felt very familiar!

We met back up with Bede and Sally and had dinner at the Asgard, followed by a long walk (not quite five minutes, but almost) to Toscanini's for ice cream.

Friday was the graduation ceremony itself. I happened to catch up with Jordan in the Infinite Corridor (I guess, given that I started behind him and was walking faster, it was certain that I'd catch him eventually), so we chatted about how things have been in recent months. He seemed relieved to have made it through his PhD: his experiments hadn't all gone according to plan but I think his hard work made up for it.

There was a long procession to Killian Court for commencement: we were walking for close to an hour. I think one of the problems was that some people stopped to pose for photos, not considering that hundreds of delays of a few seconds start to add up. The graduands' area was pretty restless during the whole ceremony.

The speeches were fine but not as good as Dr Massimino's, and then the reading of the names began. It went on for hours, of course, and I was pretty close to the end. I did have a few names to watch out for among both bachelors and doctors.

After champagne at the Muddy Charles, we went to the physics department reception, then on to the esplanade, where I had arranged to picnic with friends. It was lovely to catch up with so many at once, though I didn't get to talk to anyone for as long as I would have liked.

The evening continued with games back at "my" place.

On Saturday, we set out for our long trip west, following approximately the route shown below.

I can't possibly describe everything we did, so most things will only get a sentence: comment if you want more.

We stopped by Walden Pond to see where Thoreau spent time in retreat from the world.

We drove around Greenfield for an hour trying unsuccessfully to find a nice park at which to eat lunch, before settling for an above-average median strip.

We drove another 15 minutes or so before passing into Vermont, with its beautiful welcome center, chairs and tables, school bake sale, etc.

We enjoyed the special breakfast at The Marina for Brattleboro's Strolling of the Heifers weekend (though in fact we ate the regular buffet, in honour of our youngest brother/son).

We visited two very interesting and very different farms. The first was Deer Ridge Farm, a small family farm specialising in cut flowers. Jerry, who owns and works the farm, is fairly shy but seemed sufficiently at home among his plants to give an interesting tour. The tiny scale of the farm (not much bigger than Mudflower) and frequent crop rotation helps keep down pests. And turning from berries to flowers helped make such a small farm financially viable. Jerry doesn't seem to have grand plans: he just farms!

Scott Farm is very different. Zeke (who runs, but doesn't own, the farm) has a much more academic approach: actually, he seemed to me like the Sid Nagel of apples (Sid tells me he actually spent his summers in the Brattleboro area). He has obviously put a lot of thought, planning and observation into building up the orchard as a home of heirloom apples that you can't find in supermarkets. He is also far more of a talker than Jerry!

We visited the Estey Organ Museum, seeking to identify the organ Dad bought second (or more) hand some years ago.

We wandered around the Brattleboro Retreat Trails, and also around the streets of Brattleboro.

We dashed onto the Appalachian Trail for a few minutes while the rain slowed.

We examined the ruins of the forts at Crown Point.

We enjoyed surprisingly delicious pizza and terrible fries from a little restaurant in Wilmington NY that, on doing research online, I was surprised to discover opened only in 2009 (last dusted in 2009, I could believe!).

We started walking up Whiteface Mountain. The early part of the walk was rather difficult, because it was extremely wet and muddy as well as quite steep. There were two subsidiary peaks we hit: Marble Mountain and Lookout Mountain. We enjoyed nice views from (and banana sandwiches on) Marble Mountain before continuing, and reached Lookout Mountain for lunch and two disappointments. The first was that it was very badly named: we could see very little. The only other hiker we saw that day suggested that it was named while still a ski resort, when trails were cut through the trees, leaving room for views. Since Whiteface has been skied, the others have been closed and the trees are growing back. The second disappointment (or worse) was the abundance of tiny biting flies. I tried my best to ignore them, before realising their biting nature upon discovering many tiny spots of blood on my legs. Almost two months later, I still have the marks! We weren't feeling up to completing Whiteface, so we hiked back down. The aforementioned hiker told us the way he came up, and it turned out to be significantly easier: at least as steep, but with less water.

We explored some flatter walks around Lake Placid.

We finally got a chance to walk on the Appalachian Trail, in Tuxedo NY, on a very short section that the guidebook claimed was easy but in fact turned out to be steep up, followed by almost vertical down, followed by very steep up (then reverse).

We went to Fordham for my friend John's ordination. Once we finally found the way into the Fordham campus, we felt very welcomed. Little things like giving us a free parking spot (maybe this isn't such a little thing in New York City) and presenting us with a bag of snacks as we checked in really made a difference. And our rooms, which were described to me as very, very basic, were spacious and comfortable. I think "very, very basic" means no TV, so we watched about five minutes less TV than any other night (i.e. we used our iPad to check the weather instead of The Weather Channel).

I was especially glad that we could join with Christina and Nik, two other of John's friends from the MIT Catholic Community, to celebrate. It really is marking the fact that an ordination is an important event for the community, not just the ordinand. After Mass, lunch and an afternoon in Bryants Park with Bede and Sally, we went to dinner with Fr John and his family near Times Square. He certainly seemed happy to be surrounded by his family. Mum mentioned to me later that he seemed like a very exuberant man, but I wouldn't say so: he's more or less the archetype of the quiet studious type (with glasses to match). But I know well how being surrounded by loved ones brings out a more vivacious side in many people.

On Sunday, we went to Fr John's First Mass. It was a much more intimate occasion, as the crowd had divided roughly into four (the others had gone off to other cities for theirs). After lunch we headed for Watkins Glen in the Finger Lakes.

Where we discovered that the day after a huge storm is not the right day to visit if you want to look at the waterfalls!

We did see one large waterfall (Niagara) as we continued on, particularly enjoying the boat ride towards the bottom of the falls.

We admired Kinzua Valley from an old railway bridge that was converted to a skywalk after half of it fell down.

We enjoyed delicious meals in Bradford PA and Sandusky OH (I would write more about them were I not a month and a half behind on my updates).

We eventually found the Sorrowful Mother Shrine, and visited the statues of many famous saints.

We wandered around the University of Michigan campus briefly, before I boarded a train back to Chicago.

From Chicago, I flew to Dublin, on my way to a conference in Amsterdam. I was in Dublin simply to take advantage of cheaper flights, but I thought I'd make the most of my day and see the sights of the city. It's a relatively small city: the historic part is pretty walkable. I saw Trinity College, went to Mass at the Pro-Cathedral, visited the National Gallery of Ireland, walked through Dublin Castle and stopped by Glasnevin cemetery. You don't get much feeling for a country in eight hours, but I enjoyed my day.

Arriving in Amsterdam, I had a little trouble finding my hotel, but wasn't too concerned because despite being almost 11 pm, it was still light outside! I found the conference interesting and useful, though given that my next post will be about a summer school on mostly the same subject I won't bore you with lots of details! I did find that my most useful conversations were with Sid Nagel, who works one floor above me in Chicago. The conference dinner was unusual: we took a bus to a boat to a cafe for appetisers, then took the boat to a restaurant for main course, then had dessert on the boat back to the hotel. After the conference finished, I had just one hour to explore Amsterdam on my way to the train station, whence I took a train to the airport to head home, spending a night at a Dublin airport hotel on my way through.

My aim in setting up my return flight that way was to get back to Chicago in time to spend almost a full 24 hours with Mum and Dad. It was certainly nice to get off a plane (well, off the bus that follows the train that follows the plane) to a home-cooked meal! The next day, after coffee and brownies at Mum and Dad's favourite Hyde Park cafe, we went to Mass at St Peter's and then explored the 606, a park built on an old elevated railway.

Mum and Dad had some difficulties getting home (due to bad weather in Dallas and missed connections), but for me it was just catching up on hundreds of emails, then back to work on Monday!

Coming up next: Colorado in July.