Feckoff.net

*twitch*

I watched The Hangover in preparation “Some guys just can’t handle Vegas!”

Also, my direct, 2 hour flight to Vegas is costing more than a 3-hop day long trip all the way to Wisconsin for work next week! I suspect it will be considerably colder up there than in New Mexico and Vegas.

I’m still in America, and this weekend just past was their Labor Day holiday, which meant a 3-day weekend for me. I ended up going on a nice road trip with a few other Irish ex-pats here, it was fantastic. We went from Clovis to Ruidoso, where we stopped off for some food and watched a few horse races. After a couple of hours there we went on to the White Sands National Monument (and, er, missile range). This is the single most surreal place I have ever seen in my life. The white sand in question is not actually sand, but fine gypsum powder. It is unique to New Mexico. Here’s a photo:

And another for good measure:

We then spent the night in Las Cruces, New Mexico where some drinking was done. The following morning we continued south to El Paso, Texas, which is right on the Mexican border. From there we stopped by Fort Hancock, Texas – the place where Andy Dufresne sent his postcard back to prison before crossing the border after he escaped in The Shawshank Redemption. Despite not crossing the border, we got stopped by the US Border Patrol about 20 miles north of the border as we were heading back towards New Mexico. If we hadn’t got our passports with us that would have resulted in hours of waiting around while they verified that we are allowed to be in the country.

A few hours later we arrived in Carlsbad, New Mexico, but by then it was too late to go into the famous caverns. We did get to watch about half a million Mexican free-tailed bats exiting the cave for the evening though, which was pretty spectacular. We spent the night in Carlsbad and returned to the Caverns in the morning. It took a few hours to tour the caverns but was well worth it. The caverns are both a US national park and a UNESCO world heritage site.

Next stop was the Bottomless Lakes state park outside Roswell. Another beautiful spot, and the closest thing to the seaside you’ll find in landlocked New Mexico.

After that it was finally time to head home, after 3 days and approximately 850 miles. Good times! Lots more pictures on flickr.

Finally I’m here. American Airlines’ two hour delay out of Dublin didn’t help. I travelled via Chicago O’Hare airport. I was only ever in the international terminal (T5) there before and always thought it something of a dump with absolutely no food available once you go airside, and the only shops are a few poxy kiosks selling booze/smokes/cosmetics. I transferred to T3 today for my domestic flight to Dallas. Lo and behold, lots of shops and a proper food court airside! Why do they leave the international terminal in such a crappy state?

The transatlantic flight was on a pretty old Boeing 767 with an antique inflight entertainment system. The onward flight to Dallas was on a much nicer and more spacious Boeing 777. I also won the seat lottery on that one with an aisle seat in an emergency exit row with acres of legroom! The final leg to Lubbock was aboard a cramped Bombardier CRJ regional jet but the flight was mercifully only 45 minutes long

Now I sleep after being on the go for over 24 hours.

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I leave for deepest darkest New Mexico bright and early tomorrow morning. Work is sending me there for about 3 months. Got a visa and everything sorted out for me last month. That said, I only have a one-way flight ticket! Its going to take about 24 hours and 4 airports to get to my destination. There’ll be some jet lag into the mix on top of that (its 7 time zones away from home), with a net result of me being shattered for a week or so.

I am looking forward to the weather there (averaging 35 degrees celsius daily) after the last few weeks of miserable downpours and floods in Ireland. I hope to take a few photos and stuff to put up here when I’m over there. Roswell is apparently only about 100 miles away! Sadly, Vegas is a bit further away at 800 miles.

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Spent some time messing about with the D90’s video mode some more last night. Here’s the result. I would embed it here, except that Vimeo disables hi-def when you embed. I didn’t bother uploading it to flickr since they seem to compress the crap out of video. Also, all that muck you can see is on the car, not the lens

(Sigma 10-20 @ 20mm, f/8)

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I probably should have mentioned earlier that I’m away traveling for work again. I’m in Twin Falls, Idaho at the moment. Getting here was a pain in the ass, and took 23 hours including driving to the airport. My route was Dublin > Atlanta > Salt Lake City > Twin Falls.

I exhibited pro skillz by losing my laptop just after going through security in Atlanta. I didn’t notice it was missing until about an hour and a half later when I was on the other side of the utterly massive airport. Fortunately the TSA guys found it and returned it to me when I showed up back at the original terminal again. How nice of them to not destroy it, given that it was abandoned in a secure area. That was a fun way to kill time between flights.

I eventually got in to Twin Falls at about 10.30 last night. I picked up my rental car, which turned out to be a hilariously massive Buick Lucerne with a 3.8 litre V6 and a shitty 4-speed automatic gearbox. Well, it beats the Fiat Idea diesel I had last time in Germany

Today’s a public holiday in the US, so I took the opportunity to go take a few photos of local sights. There’s a small selection of them up on flickr.

I’ll be heading home on September 19th. Until then there’s work to be done! Also, free and fast wifi in the hotel rocks.
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