San Francisco

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Spring American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco. Im sure very few readers of this highly regarded blog care about chemistry so I wont bore you all with the details of the conference, suffice to say that it all went very well. Of course I also managed to squeeze in a couple days of sight seeing. Since I was in the city of cyclists I decided to shun motorised transport and hire a super nice road bike. Unfortunately San Francisco is a hilly city so my sightseeing proved to be quite tiring, but im sure I appreciated the views more.

The Golden Gate Bridge with the city in the background.

I also managed to sneak out of the conference early one day and check out Alcatraz.

On the last day I rode to the California Academy of Science. One of the coolest things was this pendulum that moves solely by the rotation of the earth and knocks down one of the pins ~30 min.

Every trip needs one artistic attempt.

Bryant Creek

Despite the lack of activity on the Blog, the last few weeks have been pretty action packed. Firstly and most importantly, Canada had a stunning victory over the USA in the Olympic hockey final, although it was closer than most Canadians would have liked! I actually think that Canadians are more fanatical about hockey than New Zealanders are about rugby.
This weekend we did an overnight back country trip into Bryant Creek. We obviously had the weather gods on our side as the day before it dumped 60 cm of powder then cleared to blue skies for the days that we were out. The trip was nothing short of truly spectacular! While the deep snow proved to be somewhat difficult to negotiate on cross country skies it did provide soft landings for our numerous spills.

The journey in

Unfortunately a majority of the trip was in trees so afforded limited views of the Mts. But we still managed to grab a glimpse of Mt. Assiniboine, I think.

The view of our accommodation as seen from the dunny.