Kirk Kittell

A week ago, I was forced to go to Sacramento for a business trip — forced, as in “don’t fling me in dat brier-patch.” Seriously. Have to leave Houston to go to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada? There are many, many worse things in life. I’ll write more about the trip later. I’m still fussing with a .kmz file that shows my travels on a map. You know me: I’m obsessed with maps.

In the meantime, I wanted to show a few photos that I took in Trona, California. I tell people that I grew up in the middle of nowhere in Fulton County, Illinois. Trona is… maybe at the end of nowhere — the end of the world, right before you fall off into the abyss. In other words, it’s a pretty cool place.

It’s hard to describe the Mojave Desert in photos in the same way that it is hard to describe central Illinois in photos: the place is wide open, expansive. If you focus your camera on the so-interesting horizon, you often end up with a so-disappointing photo. It’s maddening. That squarish rectangle that your camera captures does not capture what it feels like to be in the wider landscape.

The way around this is to capture a panoramic view of the landscape. I have been taking panoramic photos since I got my first digital camera in 2004, but I have never tried in earnest to stitch them together. Finally, with this batch, I mustered the impetus to try it.

So, I picked up a copy of hugin 0.7.0 from SourceForge to create the panoramas.

It was fairly easy to use. There is a feature to create the panoramas automatically, but I set the control points — the points common to multiple photos that would be stitched together — manually. It looked better like that because I could do some quality control on each point, plus I did a more thorough job picking control points in the common areas.

Click each photo for a link to its page on Flickr. Welcome to the desert. Let me know what you think.

Trona Pinnacles:

Trona Pinnacles, from on top of a pinnacle:

Panamint Valley, from CA-178:

If you’re impatient, you can see all of the photos from this trip on Flickr before I write about it: California, October 2008

Trona Pinnacles: blm.gov/ca/st/en/fo/ridgecrest/trona.html

I returned to Nassau Bay on Wednesday morning. There is no damage at my building. However, here is no electricity here, though on the same block as us the hospital parking lot and the Lockheed Martin building are both teasing us with their electricity. So, it’s urban campout time.

Yesterday morning, I went for a bike ride with my camera around Clear Lake, which is only about 100 meters from my apartment. The lake has receded to its pre-Ike level, but not before flooding, smashing, or otherwise causing havoc around its shores.

I have posted all of my photos to Flickr: Hurricane Ike, September 2008.

I felt like a jerk riding through other people’s misery, so in most cases I shied away from taking personal photos. The folks in Kemah, on the coast of Galveston Bay at the mouth of Clear Lake, got hit hard. I know that people on the Gulf of Mexico coast were hit harder. The photos below, and the full set on Flickr, are just a small part of what I saw there. Tomorrow I’m going to see if the Red Cross can use a pair of hands — much more useful than snapping photos, though I wanted to share with you that aren’t here what it looks like in my neighborhood.

Now that the storm has passed, Clear Lake is serene again. It’s eerie to consider how different — how powerful — it can be when it is sitting there so silently.

Compare:

[Photos from the trip to Banff posted to Flickr: Banff National Park, 29 August 2008.]

First of all, despite any indications below that might seem like I had an entirely cruddy time in Alberta over the weekend, let me before I dive in say that it was an excellent weekend. This past weekend was the first time I had seen Megha since May, thereby giving this weekend a grade of “excellent” in spite of the weather’s attempts to dampen everything.

Disclaimer done, let me whine that I waited three years to get to Banff National Park and now that I finally got the chance, it rained nearly the entire time that I was there. Bloody weather…

The first time I thought about going to Banff was on my return trip from Mojave to Illinois in spring 2005. My ultimate road trip home, i.e., what didn’t happen, was a 30-day trip from Mojave via Portland, Missoula, and Bismarck, with one leg of the trip through some of the Canadian Rockies national parks: Banff; Jasper; Mount Revelstoke, Yoho; Kootenay; Glacier — especially Banff and Jasper. In the end I scaled it back to a 19-day trip, minus the Canadian portion.

Well, you can’t choose the weather. It was 10C and rainy most of the time that Megha and I were in Banff. She was tough, not at all complaining about our fortunes, but the following photo captures the essence of the trip: soggy and huddled for warmth. She’s almost smiling here. +10 for her. If I were her, I might have tossed me in the lake.

It was still excellent to see Megha and good to be in the mountains. Sure, the mountains were often hidden behind the clouds — and if you want to get really deep, Megha is Sanskrit for cloud — but now I’m back in Houston and have neither mountains nor Megha. So it goes. Here are my photos from the trip. They’re not my best — often hurried due to the rain — but they’re nice memories, nonetheless.

This photo of Lake Minnewonka is my favorite photo from the set. It’s mysterious, feels like a gateway to a someplace hidden and guarded further.

Overlooking the Bow River

Lake Louise

Lake Minnewanka and Two Jack Lake

On 17 May to 22 May 2008, Megha and I drove from San Antonio, Texas to Calgary, Alberta in a U-Haul truck with her car on a trailer behind us. It was a bittersweet trip: the 1-year Optional Practical Training extension to her F-1 visa had expired, so she had to move to Canada — legally, she’s a Canadian resident — and leave her job in the United States. (”Oh, you’re an honors student in aerospace engineering? Please get out of our country and go work as a competitor in another country.”)

It’s a really bad deal for both of us, of course, but this post is coming at you from a different direction than that: she’s an excellent road trip partner. Second-to-none. Despite 6 days and 3500+ km in the same truck cabin, we had a great time together. She learned to navigate a road atlas on the fly and I learned to take directions. Accentuate the positive, etc., etc.

The first installment is Day 2, 18 May 2008, Amarillo, Texas to Fort Collins, Colorado.

View this map in Google Maps.
View the whole trip, San Antonio to Calgary, in Google Earth.

Photos on 18 May 2008:

I have already uploaded all of the photos from the trip, so you can see them before they are posted on the map. You can see the photos on: Flickr; Picasa; Panaramio; or Facebook. If you like the photos, please add me as a ‘friend’ on any of those sites.

Day 0, Houston to San Antonio (view in Google Maps), was driven alone by me on 16 May. Day 1, San Antonio to Amarillo (view in Google Maps), was driven mostly in the dark on 17 May. In either case, these two days have no pictures, so they don’t get their own post.

See this photo on Flickr.