End of the Canyons Road Trip

A quick post to tell you that we made it back to our apartment in Mountain View after:

- 2350 Miles of driving
- 2 nights camping in the "backcountry" (Grand Canyon and Arches)
- 1 refused backcountry permit (Bryce)
- Subzero temperatures (degrees Farhenheit, i.e. -20ºC)
- Tons of beautiful landscapes
- 4 hours at the Emergencies at a hospital in St George, Utah (Goeric's turn, but nothing serious: don't worry)
- A Cirque du Soleil show as impressive as Vegas is kitsch
- And more ;-)

We'll try to put some albums together and maybe some more details about our trip later!

Goéric

Update from Bryce Canyon

Hi all,

We are now at Bryce Canyon. Yesterday we hiked in Arches National Park, discovering the impressive landscape there. After a cold night, we hiked back to the car this morning and drove to Bryce Canyon through Capitol Reef NP. We took Utah Highway 12, "Utah's first all American road", whatever that means... Really worth driving there! The views are unbelievable. It's now snowing ;-) We will see what we'll do tomorrow. A priori some backcountry hiking in Bryce if it's feasible.

More later,

Marie and Goéric

Canyons Road Trip

Merry Christmas from the Grand Canyon ;-)

We are currently in Moab (Utah): that's our second stop on our "Canyons Road Trip". We left Mountain View on Saturday morning and drove all the way to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon (a looong drive: 770 miles). After one night at a hotel in Grand Canyon Village we hiked half way down in the Grand Canyon (800m down from the Rim) and camped there for one night. After a not too cold night we took down our camp and hiked out. By noon we were back on the road: first further along the South Rim with a few stops along the way, then a very nice drive through the Arizona high desert and later Monument Valley. We also made a nice side trip on a dirt road through the "Valley of the Gods" which is like a miniature version of Monument Valley without people (highly recommended). This morning we drive into Arches National park and we will camp there for one night! Maybe some more news and pictures later...

Goeric & Marie

Del Medio Fire

That's a picture of the apartment that completely burned down in our building this afternoon, but luckily nobody got hurt. Our apartment is on the top floor: the one with the light in front of the door in the picture. This happened ten minutes after MC took off to go Christmas cooking at a friends' place and 5 minutes after Cedric and Maureen went back home (we did a nice biking tour together in the morning). It was really impressive to see how quickly the apartment was completely on fire with huge flames. When I looked outside after hearing people screaming for help there was only a small amount of white smoke coming out of the apartment. I rapidly grabbed our two laptops and our wedding pictures (yes I know this sounds cheesy, but these are fine B&W prints on fiber based paper :-P). When I rushed outside less than a minute later the white smoke had already turned black with big flames. The firefighters arrived only a few minutes later. They rapidly extinguished the fire but we had to wait for one or two hours outside to make sure that everything was safe.

Other than that, we spent a nice evening at Caroline and Daniel's place with Lieven, Frank & Co.

Goeric

Remastered picture and movie galleries

Ever since we started this blog we have been using a lightweight PHP package for our image galleries. A package Romain developed probably more than 5 years ago. We liked it because it had a simple and personal interface. These days image galleries such as PicasaWeb are much fancier: you have a nice slide-show mode, images are preloaded so that you don't have to wait and some even have cool transitions between images. We thought it was time to update to these modern technologies... However, we still wanted to keep everything on our own website, with a simple and personal interface as before. After some searching I found "SimpleViewer": a small Flash-based gallery viewer. The only thing I had to do was write a small script to convert the old galleries to the new format. We also wrote a script that builds a nice interface (at least that's what we think ;-) to our image albums and movies.

Here's how to use the new galleries (remember we have grand-parents and great-grandparents reading this blog :-P):

Album Gallery (also linked in the sidebar): all existing albums are listed. By clicking on either the album title or image you open the selected album. You can also directly access the post(s) linked to each album. As you might notice, some albums have no post linked to them so you might never have seen them!

New albums: The new albums use a Flash interface. There are three ways to navigate through the pictures: -1- by clicking on the thumbnails (and use the arrows underneath to go to the next thumbnail page); -2- by clicking on the arrow that appears when you hover over the image with your mouse; -3- by using the keyboard arrows (you first need to click somewhere on the page).

Movie Gallery (also linked in the sidebar): all movies are listed. As for the albums, the links to any related post are provided. Again a few of them where never linked to from the blog. To download a movie, right click on one of the versions (indicated by the version's size and format) and select "save as" (some movies are "streamable" but due to their large size, it is not really recommended).

Hope you'll enjoy the new layout and maybe browse through our older albums and movies!

Goeric & Marie

PS: For those not having Flash a message should come up when loading an album providing a link to download and install Macromedia Flash. If it doesn't work use the third link to view the gallery using the old interface.

From 3100m (-12ºC) to -86m (+24ºC)

Hey!

2 weeks ago during Thanksgiving, we decided to try to climb Mount Whitney (4421m) via the Mountaineer's route. We left the Bay Area early on Thursday morning, and drove to Lone Pine through Yosemite (due to the lack of snow so far, Tioga Pass was still open). We started hiking around 3pm, and reached the first camp (3100m) at sunset. The climb was hard for me. I also had some altitude sickness: a bad headache that would not go away... After a cold night (-12ºC), we decided that it was more reasonable to turn around. While we were going down, we thought we could as well continue all the way to the lowest point in the US ;-) Next stop thus: Death Valley! We camped in the sand dunes after a short walk lit by the full moon. The next morning, the sun gave another perspective on the landscape. We visited the southern part of Death Valley that we had not seen before. We then crossed the state of California from East to West and stopped for the night at San Simeon (a long drive, but Goéric enjoyed our new car and its cruise control system ;-) On Sunday, we drove back on Highway 1. Even if our trip did not go as planned, we had fun!

Marie-Catherine

PS: The pictures feature our new car :-)