Declan's Blog

So, what would you do with a picture like this?:

Here’s my caption:

“Soon after we passed, we were stopped and asked if we’d seen these people:”

Nathan and I are off on a road trip to Austin.

We need these in California:

Gonna have a BIG omelet tomorrow:

I’m legally bound to include a sunset picture.

Click here for more pictures.

December’s a pretty busy month at our house. Nathan’s (the boy) birthday is on the 5th, Elaine’s (the wife) is on the 16th, then there’s Christmas soon after. Because the wife handles most of the shopping around here, I’m just on the hook for her birthday and Christmas gifts. Yes, it’s a little inconsiderate for her birthday to be so close to Christmas, but I can’t blame her for that. I blame her parents.

Anyway, somewhere near the beginning of December, I normally log on to Amazon, check the wife’s wish list, add a few things, and, bada bing, I’m done. All I need to do is collect boxes as they come in and decide which things I’ll give the wife for her birthday and which I’ll save for Christmas. There’s a whole other story about brow beating Erin (the daughter) into doing the wrapping for me, but I’ll save that, or get her to blog it.

So, I fire off my order on December 3rd, and within a week three big boxes show up addresses to me from Amazon. Now, we’re a Midwest family who transplaned to San Diego. At this time of year, there are boxes coming in every day. Since I outsource the mundane business of mail to the wife, I just had the boxes piled up under my desk, planning to select her birthday booty the evening before the 16th. The wife is a crossword freak and had added:

“Excalibur The NY Times Deluxe Touch Screen Crossword Puzzle”
Excalibur Electronics; Video Game

to her Wish List. I ordered that, and, since I wanted to look like I put SOME effort into the process, I added:

“Wordplay”
Chris Astoyan; DVD

a (very entertaining! who knew?!?) movie about crossword freaks. I imagined her delight upon opening TWO birthday presents, ONE of them a non-Wish List SURPRISE, and ANOTHER that’s also on-theme! (And not just a Starbucks card. “Here, you LIKE coffee. Right?”)

So, the evening of the 15th comes and I go hide in my office and pop open the three big boxes, in search of the two crossword related items. Three boxes. Three items. WHAT? There were eleven items in total that I’d ordered for the two occasions. Oh man, I’m screwed… Thankfully, the crossword video game was one of the three, but my masterwork, the accompanying DVD, was not here. In fact, the only items that had shown up were the ones Amazon offered through third parties. All of the other stuff, DVDs and books, Amazon stock and trade, were missing. I quickly looked through my email for the Amazon Order confirmation and was stunned to finally notice this:

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Our hosts:

Gabe show his power move:

Looks like he’s boring Elaine to sleep…

TJ, between poses:

We even got a special appearance by Nathan!

Erin’s got a power move too:

Click here for more pictures.

Thanks to Happy for the idea!

Nathan the Elf!

Happy Birthday, kiddo!

More Pictures Here.

Here are the wedding weekend pictures (medium size):

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3


Here’s a link to Sue’s Hardy’s pictures.

Here’s a link to Matt Hardy’s pictures.

It was so nice seeing old faces and meeting new ones!

I’d like to get everyone’s pictures into one big collection online.  Please mail me at declan@declan.net and we’ll figure out the best way to get your stuff to me.  I can also make DVD or CD copies of the big originals for people if they’d like.

UPDATE

I’m slowly loading the full size, high quality images to Flickr.  Click here to see my sets of pictures.  Look for the ones with “HQ” in the title.  So, if you like one of the pictures and want to make a print for yourself, grab a high quality copy.

Ok, downloading a picture can be a bit convoluted, but it works.

For example, go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigdpix/sets/72157594150754780/ and click
on a picture.  At the top of the picture are some icons, pick the “All Sizes” one.  Then select “Original”.  This will show the biggest image.  There will be a link called “Download the Original size.”  Click that and you can save the image to your disk.

UPDATE to the UPDATE

Sue has pointed out a flaw in my directions!

None of the icons show up on top of the pictures, unless you have a Yahoo account (Yahoo owns Flickr).  I was automatically logged in, so it just worked for me.

So, if you want the instructions above to work so you can download the files, Sign up for a free account from the link on the picture page.  Sorry, it’s a bit of a pain to do this, but it then lets you get to more functions.

I wanted to make a map of the ride that uses real GPS data and would work with just a web browser and not require Google Earth.

Check this out:

http://www.declan.net/wp-content/gpx_loader.html

This uses Google maps with an overlay of the route we took. The data comes from a rider’s GPS device, so it is very accurate.

All of the roads we took are marked and you can zoom and pan over the whole ride. Click on Satellite view or Hybrid to get a neat view of some of the terrain.

He even smiled!

Elaine said:  elaine.fleming@mac.com: was pure happiness, not smart ass or evil

🙂

For me, this was the hardest day. We’re all sore from three days of riding, and the prospect of sitting in a bike again all day just was not a thrill. But ya gotta do what ya gotta do…

Here’s how today started:

And it went on like that for 15 miles, with a killer headwind, for 4 hours. Headwinds are just nasty. They kept our forward pace to 3-5 miles per hour and just wore us out. We kept hearing that the turn on to Route 78 would put the wind more at our backs, so that kept us going.

I don’t have many pictures from this leg of the race as I was too miserable to take any, my battery on the little camera had died, and Elaine was out wandering the desert taking pictures of flora and fauna:

That’s another ocotillo in bloom. Here’s a teddy bear cactus:

Here’s our team of riders on that day:

Erin’s apparently flashing some sort of gang sign. Make a note to look into elementary school gang activity… Hailley’s dad, Damon, joined us this day and we all stuck together for most of the rest of the ride. Here we cross the San Diego County Line:

Erin and I stop to soak up the view of the nuclear devestation the Carrizo Badlands:

By the time we got to lunch, Erin was still in good spirits:

And I was about done:

But there’s nothing like a dry, white sandwich to perk me back up:

I LOVE what that helmet does to my hair. I’d wear it everyday if it would fit into the headroom of the car.

Our next destination was Agua Caliente, which is Spanish for “Crowded Pool”:

We’d taken so long getting across the desert that the pool was just about to close when we arrived. Erin said, “Oh yeah, this is just about the best 5 minutes of my life.” I think she was being sarcastic, but she’s very subtle, like her dad, so it was hard to tell…

Then it was back on the bikes for a few more miles to Vallecito:

Which apparently has a stagecoach house museum thing, which Elaine thought to take pictures of and which I didn’t even notice because I was so tired I wanted to die:

Elaine got a neat shot of the sunset and an ocotillo:

I’m sure someone has a picture of Plaster City. This is my main memory of that day, riding in the blistering heat (95-100F) and avoiding the huge drywall trucks coming and going to the factory there.

For more pictures from Day 4, click here.