"Hi Celeste,

I am delighted to let you know that your submitted photo
has been selected for inclusion in the newly released
second edition of our Schmap Florida Guide:

Florida Aquarium
http://www.schmap.com/florida/parks/p=186370/i=186370_10.jpg

[...]

Thanks so much for letting us include your photo - please
enjoy the guide!

Best regards,

Emma Williams,
Managing Editor, Schmap Guides"

It's not even a particularly good photo. But still nice to be chosen. :)

I'm back from Tampa now, thankfully. I ended up needing to work late on Thursday night, so I didn't get to go to the Salvador Dali museum as I had hoped (Thursdays are the only night it's open late enough for me to have gone.) But fortunately, we had moved through the labs fast enough that my Novell training let out a little early, and I had the opportunity to do one touristy thing yesterday - go to the Florida Aquarium. (If you've been reading this blog, you'll know that I love aquariums and zoos.) So at least that.

The Flickr set below contains pictures which have improved a bit with Mom's low-light instructions, but which still aren't where I'd like them to be yet. I am hoping to take a digital photography course this spring which may help things improve further.

There was a nice sea dragons exhibit, and a particularly friendly puffer fish that seemed to want to be friends. He followed me around his tank and seemed to be smiling and wanting his picture taken, so I took about ten of them. Only 4 are included. I've started to realize that repetitive pictures in my sets don't get looked at. ;)


Click for the Flickr set

Ok, this is a really long rant, and it just shows how travel makes me anxious. It brings out my control issues.

I'm in Tampa, FL for training, and it's been a bit of a nightmare, Monday in particular. I arrived around 1:00 pm, picked up the rental car (which, fortunately, I'd gotten a GPS for), and drove off to my hotel, which was near the airport and the training center. Well, this place was foul. My room was filthy, and the entire hotel reeked of some very potent carpet fresh substance. Also, I didn't know this when I made the reservation, but Extended Stay hotels only clean your room once a week - more often if you pay for more. I had the feeling that if I stayed there I would get bedbugs. I immediately went downstairs and cancelled my reservation, which they did, grudgingly. I will never stay at an Extended Stay hotel if I have any option.

I then called our wonderful admin assistant C. to help me arrange another place to stay. She asked me if it mattered where it was, and I said no, as long as it was clean. She asked me, would north Tampa be okay? I said, sure, that sounds great. So she booked me in a very nice Wingate Wyndham, and gave me the address, which I plugged into my GPS, and made off.

It was taking an awfully long time to get to the hotel, and I kept expecting the GPS to direct me to an ending. But it didn't. And didn't. The GPS doesn't give a miles-to-destination when you plug in an address or en route, so I had no idea where this place was. Then I went over some bump in the road and the GPS fell off of the windshield and wound up on the floor of the passenger side where I couldn't reach it. As I was on a highway, I was going to have to pull over to put the thing back up.

Then, at the next exit, there was a sign for Wingate, so I took the exit, thankful that I'd finally found the hotel. It was a lot further out than I wanted, but I thought it was doable to get to the training site the next day if I got up early enough. On the other hand, the highways to get there had been very crowded, and it wasn't anywhere near rush hour. I could see it being a lot worse the next day.

The hotel was very nice inside, which was good, but I decided I was going to have to find something closer in to town. I went to the registration desk and explained about my reservation, and that I would need to cancel because it was just too far away from the training center. The receptionist was very nice, and looked up my reservation. But it wasn't there. With a little more poking around, she discovered that my reservation was for the other local Wingate, which was even further away. It turns out that "north Tampa" was actually "North Tampa", which is an entirely different town, about 45 minutes away from Tampa during non-rush-hour. My spirits sank further.

The receptionist offered to call up the other hotel and cancel the reservation over the phone, which I happily agreed to. She called the hotel and asked them to cancel my reservation. Then she got a serious look on her face, and said to me, "They'd like to talk to you," and handed me the phone.

It turns out that C. had made the reservations through Travelocity, and they were non-refundable. I asked the person on the other end of the phone, "You mean, if I cancel then I will be charged for the entire stay?" The lady on the other end said, "That's right, ma'am." I held onto the phone for another minute spluttering to myself and trying to figure out if there was any way out of this, then giving up, I thanked her and handed the phone back to the receptionist. The receptionist looked at me with such pity that I nearly burst into tears right there. I started to wish I had risked the bed bugs.

I took a breather when I got back to the car to calm down.

I plugged the address of the BFE Wingate into the GPS, and it turns out that that was the one it had been directing me to when it fell onto the floorboard, and I had simply by luck been near the closer Wingate. I proceeded down the highway to another highway, where there was a serious accident, and I sat for about 10 minutes without traffic moving at all. It must have just happened, because when I finally got past it, I saw three cars piled up, a motorcycle where, fortunately, the motorcyclist was walking around even though the bike had been laid down, and emergency crew all over both sides of the road. There were a couple more cars further down the road that also appeared to have been involved.

Finally I pulled up to the ludicrously-far-away Windham. I had determined that the best way to address my problems with them was to just be very honest and humble and appeal to their sense of pity. I approached the front desk, hat in hand, and told them about my day, and how far away this was from where I needed to be. I asked them if there was any possibility of canceling my reservation, and that I would stay the one night but needed to cancel the others. The staff were very understanding, and went and looked into their cancellation policies and what could be done for me. As it turns out, the reservation could be canceled, but I'd need to do it through Travelocity. They gave me the 800 number, and even recommended a couple of hotels closer to the airport, where I needed to be. I thanked them profusely, and took my stuff upstairs.

The room was clean and inviting, one of the better hotel rooms I've stayed in over the past couple of years. Between the customer service, the rooms, and the price value, I will definitely stay at Wingates in the future.

I got on the phone and called Travelocity to cancel the rest of my stay. After being on hold forever and dealing with someone on the other end whose accent was too thick to understand well, I understood that I could in fact cancel the rest of my reservation, if I had the Trip ID. Which I didn't.

It was getting towards the end of the business day, at this point, so I wasn't sure if C. would still be in, but I gave her a call. She answered. Thank goodness for C! I explained the situation and told her that I could fix it if I could have the Trip ID. After a little searching around, she gave it to me and I was able to call Travelocity and cancel the rest of my stay. Phew!

Then I had to find a new hotel for the next three nights that was closer to the airport. The first several I tried had no availability. (It is approximately peak tourist season, I realized.) After a while of searching, I finally found a good place - the Hampton Inn at Rocky Point, which looked close enough to the training center, and was close to the bay, as well. I finally went to get some lunch / dinner, and then spent the rest of the night working on some design plans I need to get done by Monday.

The next day, I got up at 6:00 a.m., since I needed to be on the road by 7:00 a.m., I figured, to ensure I had plenty of time to find the training center. I actually ended up leaving closer to 6:45, and it's a good thing I did. The traffic was horrid - the worst I'd seen since I used to commute around the D.C. beltway in the mid-90's (although I'm certain that commute would be much worse today.) It took me 1.5 hours to get to the training center. Now, I may be spoiled by my 15 minute morning commute, but spending 3 hours in the car every day is outrageous to me. I was very glad that I got to change my hotel and not face this for the next three days.

I'm even more glad today, since the 50 car pile-up which killed at least three people this morning was on the very same stretch of road I went through where the ~6 car incident was that I witnessed. I would have been stuck in that back-up until lunchtime if I'd had to make that commute this morning.

The Hampton Inn at Rocky Point is a nice, clean hotel, not quite as nice as the Wingate, but very nicely located, and right next to the Bahama Breeze restaurant where I ate dinner last night, and finally got a glimpse of the bay. I snapped a few shots of it last night.



All in all, I'm looking forward to being home in a couple of days. I'm going to have to get C. a present of some sort for helping me with all of this mess.

Addendum: It turns out, according to this morning's papers, that the big pile-up was actually considerably east of where I was, but it was on Rt. 4. It looks like it was even worse than originally reported, with 75 cars involved and at least 4 dead.

More scrapblog experimentation below:

I love zoos in general (part of being a Zoologist by degree, I expect) (and yes, I have a Computer Science degree as well) (but anyways...) but the San Diego Zoo is one of my favorites. When I was living in San Diego, I wanted to get a job there - but I discovered that you have to have a Ph. D. to clean cages. So much for that.

I made time during the Internet2 trip to go over there. I got as close as I am ever likely to get to a Panda, saw a magnificent male Black Jaguar as well as several other large cats, and saw a neat show with an Arctic Wolf who howled for us very nicely, and that also featured a Cheetah that was brought in from the wild and was in the process of adjusting to his new environment with the help of his roommate - a very friendly dog.

I think my favorite part was the Skyfari Aerial Tram, which let me get a couple of good shots of downtown San Diego and Balboa Park. As I said, I like airborne views.


Click for the Flickr set

Unfortunately, by the time I got back, I had a raging headache and a sore throat, and I was worried I was coming down with something. As a consequence, I didn't get to have dinner with my friend Jopsy. :(

The conference has been very good so far, although I am sick and tired of meetings all day. Wednesday afternoon we got to do some more exciting stuff. We went to the UCSD campus where we got private tours of the CALIT2 facilities. The 4K and Persistent Portal stuff (described at the bottom of the CALIT2 link) was pretty frakking awesome. Also, I really enjoyed the Stereo Visualization stuff and the TeraShake visualization of a potential earthquake on the southern San Andreas Fault that would affect both Los Angeles and San Diego, and a good deal of surrounding areas. Scary stuff. The data to do this used TeraGrid, a Grid computing framework, and generated over 43 TB of data in just over four days. Yeesh!

I took a bunch of shots over the past few days without blogging them, so here goes. Click on the pictures for the photo stream, as usual.

Shots of the Town & Country Resort, where I'm staying. It's actually very nice, with roses and other flowers all over the place, gazebos, benches, fountains, etc.



A few shots from the UCSD campus, including this stone bear:



Some nice fishies from the Birch Aqaurium, where we had our Gala Event, including this Queen Angelfish below:



I took far, far too many shots of the beautiful sunset over the Pacific as seen from the Birch Aqarium patio. This was a special treat.

I'm out in San Diego for the Internet2 Fall Member Meeting. It took all day Sunday to get there, so I only took one photo yesterday of the view from my hotel room balcony.



I will have to jump into that pool ASAP. Which is unfortunate for my hair, since there is NO HAIRDRYER in this hotel. I haven't seen a hotel room without a hair dryer in an age. This is going to suck.

I restrained myself from taking a bunch of from-the-airplane pictures since no one actually cares about those views except me, and the airplane window always dulls the effect. I just love airborne views for some reason. I always get a window seat and stare out of it a good deal of the time. I think it's probably that my dad is a pilot and I've always flown a lot, even once with him at the helm. I don't have his spacial awareness, motor control, or sense of direction, but I do share a love of the view.

I was asking some friends online recently what superpower they would have if they could have one. (I've been watching too much Heroes lately.) I would definitely want flight. I dream of flying all the time, and although sometimes it's frustrating, like getting caught up in some power lines or having to dodge things or whatnot, for the most part I'm really good at dream-flying. I realize this means feeling the urge to escape or a fear of commitment or something, but some of my most joyful dreams involve flying.

What would your superpower be?

I took Friday off and had a two-night visit in Annapolis with Mom and Mel this past weekend. I got to do lots of nifty things, even though it was a very short trip.

First I got to meet my new kitten-siblings, Westley and Buttercup:


Ain't they cuuute?

We hung out and had steamed crabs at home, and boy were they yummy!



I cuddled with Westley and Buttercup most of the night until they started pouncing on my feet and I had to kick them out. Then in the morning, Buttercup and I had a nice wake-up cuddle session - I totally felt like I was cheating on my Zootie with a younger woman! I feel a bit guilty.

On Saturday, we went to the Maryland Renaissance Festival and had a great time, and some great food.



In particular, we saw Johnny Fox, Sword Swallower. He's my favorite act and I try to catch him every year, but this is the first time Mom and Mel had seen him. We all enjoyed the show - he's hysterical.



I wanted to see Maggie Sansone, but Mom and I ended up getting Henna tattoos instead.

On Sunday, on my way out, I went to go take photos around downtown Annapolis before driving home, since they're about to do a huge renovation to the dock area and it will be inaccessible for 6 months or more.

I was sad to see that Oceans II on Main Street, my favorite record store growing up, is finally going out of business. I talked to the owner, and he said, "If you can give us $45,000 of business a day, then we'll stay open! No? Didn't think so." Ah, well. I bought a copy of Blue Sunshine by The Glove as a souvenir.


As usual, click the pictures for the Flickr sets (and more historical info about Annapolis)
For a better idea of how downtown Annapolis is laid out, look at this map

All in all, it was a great weekend. The only downside was getting stuck for 2.5 hours in this mess on the way home, which caused me to eventually take the Route 54 to Route 301 detour discussed in the article (but which I had to figure out for myself.) It made a usually 5 to 5.5 hour trip into 8 hours. Ugh. :P

I flew home yesterday after my week in Portland, and boy, was I glad to get home. A week is a long time to be gone from my kitties.

On Friday, after the conference ended, I managed to get over to the Portland Art Museum and saw the Rembrandt exhibit and some of the Asian art collection. Then the group had sushi (well, two of us had sushi, two of us chickened out and had teriyaki) at a complete hole-in-the-wall restaurant called Koji that was close to our hotel and had been recommended by the info desk. The sushi turned out to be passably good.

On the return trip, I took a controlled number of photos from the airplane this time. In fact, I wasn't going to take any shots at all on Saturday, and subsequently missed some really nice shots of downtown Portland in the sunrise. Silly me. In any case, I'm glad I got some good shots of Mt. Hood from the plane.

I went to the morning sessions yesterdaym during which I was feeling icnreasingly out of it. At lunch time I decided to go take a quick nap, but after I lay down my head started throbbing worse and worse and WORSE. I realized I was in a full-blown migraine, and was going to call my peers but when I got up to do so the pain was WORSE STILL. So I just lay back down and covered my head with a pillow and didn't move for 6 hours.

This was only my second migraine ever, and by far the worst. I wasn't sure that the first one was a migraine, but with this one there was no doubt. Mom gets them from time to time, so I presume it's just a function of getting older. On the other hand I've had both more coffee and, bizarrely, more pineapple this week than I can remember having, ever. Maybe it's a reaction to one of the other of those.

Today I feel much better, although still not 100%. I hope to go to the Portland Art Museum and get some sushi this afternoon/evening, but we'll see how that turns out.

Today was a very long day, even though we had half a day off from sessions. I led a group of four people to the Portland Zoo and the Rose Garden in the afternoon, and then came back for an unscheduled Grouper session which was very intense, and in which I met a lot of people which are involved with this work. So it's after midnight PST, which means coming back to the east coast will be that much more difficult.

In any case, here are my photos from the Portland Zoo and the Rose Garden, without much comment. I hope that they're enjoyable anyways. I really like Portland - it has a small town, friendly feel, and the traffic is remarkably light for the west coast. I wish we had gone to the zoo when it wasn't nap time, but it worked out okay.



I split out the Rose Garden stuff into a separate Flickr Set:

Today I took the technical track for the eduCause sessions, and I found several small items that we need to check on / document on the technical side, and also a few good ideas from other institutions for when we start doing entitlements / provisioning for services. So it was a useful day.

We went to dinner at the Heathman Hotel Restaurant, which came highly recommended as the chef is renowned. The food was quite good, especially the Dungeness crab salad, but the service was terrible. Nothing like a server who is both stingy and has a snappish attitude to put you off your food. It was too bad, because in general I give servers a lot of leeway since a lot of my friends are in the food industry, so I can sympathize with their hectic jobs. In any case, the general consensus was that South Park Seafood Grill was better on Sunday night.

One of my co-worker friends had a bit of a breakdown over dinner - this is something that had been building up for a while, clearly, and it finally came bubbling up. I could totally sympathize with this, having been there myself before. I can remember a couple of times in the .bomb era when I was under a lot of pressure and had impossible deadlines and was working 80+ hours a week when a negative comment or an immovable object would arise and I would go to the bathroom and sob my heart out. Then I would try to calm down and collect myself, and go back out and continue to try to slay the dragons. It's never easy to recover from those episodes, but sometimes they happen. And the best thing is to recognize for yourself how much stress you are really under and learn how to let off the steam earlier before it either explodes or implodes. I hope my friend will be able to use this situation to make some changes in her life, to help her cope better and enjoy life more.

Remember, there's more to life than work - stop and smell the roses once in a while. :)

The first day of the eduCause Shibboleth CAMP (and introductory seminar) went well.  It was completely exhausting, but in a totally different way from the JavaOne conference.  I wasn't busy absorbing tons of technical material, but in this case coming up with new ideas for how to approach our Shibboleth environment and potentially use it to solve some of our internal Identity Management issues as well.  Later in the afternoon, it was a fairly rude awakening to realize that we are really not very far along in our path to use Web SSO as fully as it should be used.  They had us go through a worksheet and say what we had and had not already done in our environment, and, well, there were a lot of NOs on that worksheet.  Finally, we had a 2.5 hour dinner (which was excellent, and the first time I've had steak since I started cheating on my pesce-veggie diet [on which I lost 10 pounds, so I better get back on it]) in which we discussed the issues we have with Grouper and its performance and user interface, and how several universities and the Internet2 group are going to collaborate to get things changed.  It was the biggest example of inter-institutional politics I have been part of to date, and at one point during the conversation I thought that it was going to fall flat on its face and dissipate.  But it looks like it will move forward, although time will tell the truth of that.

Anyways, I got back to the hotel room at about 8:30 PST, tooled around for a short while, and then crashed hard asleep.  After which I had a series of dreams which involved me riding on a bus that was being driven by my dad and had Nick Rhodes and John Taylor of Duran Duran as co-passengers.  [I don't even want to talk about the Freudian implications of that one.]  That dream was fairly involved, but suddenly I found myself in a dream where I was sitting in a room surrounded by a bunch of female friends.  I realized suddenly that they were here to visit with me because I had found out I was pregnant.  They were there to loan me their maternity clothes and such. I felt very confused and angry at myself for having gotten pregnant in the first place, realizing I must have done something foolish about birth control.  I felt that being a single mother was going to be a huge burden, and that I wasn't sure I could afford to have a child, either.  Then I started to wonder who the father was.  I knew immediately who it must be, but I couldn't think of when we had had sex.  But somehow I still knew it was his.   I pictured telling him about it and knew that he would be very displeased.  Then I woke up.

This is the first time I have ever, in my life, dreamed I was pregnant (that I can recall, that is.)  It was not a happy feeling.  I felt confused and trapped and in some way like I had done something shameful.  And yet, for some reason, I was quietly pleased about it.  Hrm.  I'll have to think about that.

I haven't analyzed several of the past few dreams I've had, but I'm planning to get back to them when I get some spare time and give some more analytic details about what they mean.  So please bear with me. :)

Today I got very little sleep before flying out to Portland, Oregon for the eduCause Shibboleth CAMP and Advanced CAMP that I'm attending this week. Since I have a lot of trouble sleeping on planes and I was tired and punchy from getting very little sleep last night, I took over 100 photos from the airplane. That, and I love the southwest. I have very fond remembrances from seeing the Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert, the Cliff Dwellings and the crater at Winslow, Arizona from when I was 8 and we were living in Coronado, California. When I drove across country in 1995, New Mexico struck me even more as a beautiful, hard landscape, that was made softer than Arizona by the colors of sage, a dark pine sort of scrub brush, and the reds and whites of the sand. If there's anywhere I would live other than Durham, it would be Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The colors didn't turn out very well in the photos, but it was wonderful to see these places again from the air.

Once in Portland, I was struck by how lush and green a city it is, and how clean it seems in comparison to most big cities. The group from Duke had a lovely meal at the South Park Seafood Grill and Wine Bar and the conversation flowed nicely with the delicious entrees and excellent Oregon Pinot Noir we had. Ammendment: the wine was from Cristom Vineyards.

Click the Flickr stream for a slimmed-down version of all the pictures I took. Yes, I really did leave some out.



    "Patriotism swells in the heart of the American bear." - Fozzie Bear

Yesterday at JavaOne the sessions I attended were almost a complete loss. There's a fine line with these things where it can become total marketing, use my solution because I say so, or this will never apply to my situation kinds of talks. I fell into a lot of them on Thursday.

I did get to have dinner with my pal slemons, though, who was here for a Tivoli conference. So many conerences going on in SF at the same time this week!



It began to bother me more and more that there are so few women at this conference. I'd say there's maybe 10 percent women, and of those, my guess is the majority are Asian. I'd like to see the stats on the gender and race percentages of the population.

This became even more apparent at the After Dark bash during the evening. They had a lot of neat things, particularly Battle Bots, and games and bungee jumping and segway races and such. But then, as a half-time show of sorts for the Battle Bots, they brought out Grinder Girl, which is close to being a strip show. This woman dresses in a metal outfit and then uses a sander to shoot sparks off of herself in the most private of places. See the Flickr stream for the gory details.

I am really shocked and appalled that this is what a business conference devolves to. This is discriminatory against women or, basically, anyone who isn't a heterosexual male. (Although, I suppose lesbians might find it appealing too - search me.)

This whole week has gone a long way to prove to me that *nothing* has changed in the workplace as far as women's equality is concerned. Either we're not educating women properly or there's some other barrier to women entering the technological sector.

Today was a bit different from yesterday - I went to a couple of great sessions on Java Server Faces, Spring, and Hibernate; and Open Source SOA. I also got a chance to go to the Java Pavillion trade-show thing and also look around the neighborhood more properly.



I forgot to take a shot of the folks at dinner - I got to meet sto, and see hlf and bc and see how they're ajusting to the west coast. Rob and moose were also there, and we had a good time. We also ate some excellent sushi at Sanraku, and some locally-brewed beer at The Thirsty Bear. Yum!

Yesterday was an interesting day - for the most part. It was really very humbling to be in a sea of 15,000 uber-geeks, each of which could have been in my middle school gifted classes, and most of which are far smarter than I am about Java-related stuff. On the other hand, I was surprised to see how much more I know about Ruby on Rails than most of the folks who attended the JRuby session that I went to - I was explaining to my neighbors what Ruby is, what Rails is, and why it's useful. So at least I didn't come out of the day feeling like a complete moron.



The opening general session was really interesting, in my opinion, and very well done - it was hard to detect the marketing hype most of the time. I also really like the Chairman of Sun, Scott McNealy - towards the end when the Keynote speaker, EVP for Software Rich Green, was getting a bit too Marketing-sappy, ain't-we-great-for-sacrificing-our-best-profit-seeking-interests-for-worldwide-good, Scott said "Should I pull out a lighter?" and waved his arm around in the air. I appreciate that sense of humor. :)

I mostly attended the Web Services / SOA - oriented seminars, and found them to be very EJB-oriented - which is understandable. But since my department just uses Plain Old Java and not EJB, I'm not sure I'll be able to use much of it - we may have to go with an EJB solution if we want to do Web Services. Hrm. I'll have to do some more research on that.

I went to a local Chevy's for dinner, and immediately started to feel ill afterwards. I had a couple of hours until my evening sessions, so I started walking to the hotel and half way there felt like I was going to lose my dinner. I ended up buying a $5 cable car ticket so that I wouldn't have to walk uphill the extra 4 blocks to the hotel, and then the cable car guy acted like a royal jerk when I told him I was sick and needed to get off at Post street but needed some help figuring out how to get off the cable car at the right spot. My recommendation: AVOID SAN FRAN CABLE CARS AT ALL COSTS. Jerks.

I felt too ill to go to my evening sessions, and fell asleep in the middle of American Idol while trying to wait for House to come on. I feel much better today, thankfully.

Tonight's plans: eat sushi with bc, sto, hlf, rob, and moose. Should be a fun time. :)

I'll be really busy this week and won't have much time to write these up, but here are a bunch of photos I took yesterday on my travel day out to San Francisco for JavaOne:



The best part of the day was my visit to Pixar where my friend Moose works. He gave me a behind-the-scenes tour of the place that unfortunately I couldn't photograph due to industry privacy, but let's just say there are some really creative folks over there, and it looks like a fabulous place to work. Moose and I had a good time visiting, and hopefully we'll see each other again later this week.

I also got to see my former college roommie Leila and her new husband Gavin. Leila is very pregnant at the moment so it was really great of her to make the effort to come into town to see me. :) I liked Gavin a lot - they seem like a good couple.

Off to the rest of my rigorous schedule!

This week the second season of Twin Peaks on DVD arrived in the mail, as I had pre-ordered it. It reminded me that I need to continue moving bits from my old web site to this blog. In particular, it reminded me that I have a bunch of pictures from when I went to visit the area just east of Seattle where various scenes from Twin Peaks were filmed. So here goes...


Click the Photo for more pictures and descriptions.

I had a wonderful experience just before my 27th birthday, in early December 1997: I went on a business trip to Seattle, and had enough time to find my way through the real Twin Peaks! It's amazing how close together most of the sites are, tucked away in the woods about 45 minutes from Seattle. If you enjoyed the show, and you ever have a chance to visit, I highly recommend it! I was particularly fortunate in that it didn't rain a drop the entire time I was in the Pacific Northwest, which is rare, particularly in the beginning of December. It was gloriously sunny and crisp for the entire visit. If Seattle were actually like that most of the time, I'd move there in a heartbeat. I have always been a Peaks Freak, although I haven't participated in the news group discussions. While in college, my entire dorm became devoted to the show, and we were bitterly disappointed when it was canceled. I was able to relive those times and enjoy the incredible beauty of the area during my visit.

Most of Twin Peaks was filmed in the town of Aurora, Washington. The Double-R Diner is actually the Mar-T Cafe, and the exterior of the Great Northern Hotel is actually the Salish Lodge at Snoqualmie Falls. I am told that the interior was filmed at a Lodge over on the other side of the Puget Sound from Seattle, but I didn't make it out that way. There were plenty of other sites in Aurora, however: The high school Laura went to, the Sheriff's Station which is actually the business office of the Mill, the railroad trestle Ronette wanders over, a great big log featured in the opening credits of the pilot, the train cars where Laura and Ronette were taken, and the stoplight used symbolically throughout the series. I'm told that Big Ed's Gas Farm can be seen in those parts too, but I didn't find it. And most of all, the Twin Peaks themselves, and the long view of them where the Twin Peaks welcome sign stood in the intro.

My mother had tagged along to do some sight-seeing in the area, and in fact I owe most of the trip to Twin Peaks to her, since her birthday present to me was footing the bill for the venture. We had such fun!