Deception Pass is a narrow channel at the north end of Whidbey Island, near Seattle.

Early on a summer evening the light is fantastic, a platinum sheen on the water, bright bright in the westering sun. The lines of the currents weave towards the cleft in the cliffs, drawing lines on the mirror-smooth water. Fishing boats pass by, drawing their own lines.

Zoom in on the reflections, on the white gold ripples...



Whidbey Island, Washington
June 2009

High above the Kona coast, in the cloud forests that rise up the slopes of Mauna Loa, the climate is just right for growing coffee. The bushes rise up above the twisting Hawaii Belt Road, disappearing into the mist that shrouds the slopes.

It was pouring with tropical rain when we visited Greenwell, one of the many coffee growers on Big Island, where you can watch coffee move from cherry to bean, and then taste the final roast. It's one of the oldest coffee farms on the island, and the bushes grow tall and strong.

The coffee cherry is ripe when it's red., but the green fresh cherries covered the bushes in a riot of embyronic caffeine.



Captain Cook, Hawaii
June 2009

Just a few impressions:

• Flying in over blue blue waters.
• Airports built around the trees.
• Deep valleys full of viridian verdance.
• Spinner dolphins leaping from a silver sea.
• Slow turtles in warm rock pools.
• Slinky mongoose in the hedges.
• Goats on the golf courses.
• The sound of rain on a tin roof.
• Flowers everywhere.
• Pink guava sweet bread.
• Bright bright fish skittering across the water.
• Moray eels sinuous in a floodlit pool.
• Organic coffee high in the cloud forest, on the farm.
• Decaying theatres.
• Looking up at Mauna Kea and seeing the white dots of the observatory through a gap in the cloud.</i>
• Eating the sweet flesh of a coffee cherry in the rain.
• Red red birds.
• The smoke rising up from the caldera of an erupting volcano.
• Turtles basking on black sand.
• Fine dining in down market shopping malls.
• Green green geckos with electric blue eyes.
• Phil Spector's Wall of Frog on a warm Hilo night.
• Papaya and lime at breakfast.
• Black crabs on black lava.
• White coral beaches.
• Twisty roads and single lane bridges.
• Yellow yellow birds.
• Nene crossing signs.
• Tourists jumping from cliffs into the sea.
• Stopping at roadside fruit stands for fresh juice .
• Black lava just being colonised by plants.

I've still to take any photos off my camera! One thing I know for sure - I do want to come back to the Big Island.

One of my favourite novels from the early days of the cyberpunks is Bruce Sterling's first book, Involution Ocean. Set in a universe he returns to in The Artificial Kid, the world of Nullaqua is an airless desert of a world, where unimaginable weapons have gouged out a 70 mile deep crater, full of air. Now the home of a rerpressive theocracy, Nullaqyua is a primitive place, where sailing ships go out across the fine powder of the crater in search of drug secreting dustwhales. The final harvest takes place as Sterling brings us a homage to Melville and Conrad.

Standing on the rim of Crater Lake, looking down the cliffs at the water far below I couldn't help but be reminded of Sterling's book.

Crater lake may not be 70 miles deep, but it's still an impressive piece of geography. Formed nearly 8000 years ago by the collapse of a volcano, the deep waters of the lake fill the empty caldera. Looking at the waters it's hard to imagine the 3 kilometre high mountain that once stood here. A thunderstorm was rumbling its way around the rim, signalling the summer thaw that would soon open all the roads in the area.





Crater Lake, Oregon
May 2009

One of the regular stops on our journeys around the US is Future In Review, a futurist event held in San Diego. It has a long standing relationship with the CalIT2 group at the University of San Diego - and the result is usually a tour of their facilities. Each year we see something new, and often something truly amazing.

This year's highlight was CalIT2's work with NASA. It's developed an open specification for a multiscreen wall, where off the shelf hardware gives you a relatively low cost multi-HD display. NASA is using it to help plan missions for its Mars rovers, with a 1:1 view of just what the rover is seeing, in order to help planners decide where to send the rover next.

We had a feed from one of their images servers:



It's just like looking out a window, a window that opens out onto the rolling hills and plains of Mars. It's an empty cold place, but beautiful.



Have I ever said that I love my job?

San Diego, California
May 2009

I love looking out the windows of aircraft. High above the world you watch the ground slide by: mountains, rivers, towns, roads, fields and forests.

Sometimes you see something incredibly beautiful, something you'd only see from 36,000 feet above the ground. This photograph is a good example, taken as we flew from Orlando to Cincinnati last week. High over the deep south we passed a storm cloud that was sitting on top of a mountain ridge. The falling rain was catching the sunlight, and we got a most unexpected view of a rainbow - from above.



May 2009

We've got some vacation time set aside as part of this US trip, and we're wondering if folk out there have any recommendations about places to stay on the Hawaiian islands - along with things to do and see (and eat!)?

We'll be flying from either Seattle or San Francisco early in June, and are thinking of staying around a week. I'm currently thinking about either Oahu or Big Island - though we're happy to go elsewhere! We're happy to go low budget and motel it, and we're not fussed by resort hotels. Scenery a plus, along with interesting places to visit.

Thanks!

If you want to see sea otters in the wild, close up, there's really only one place to go.

That's Moss Landing, a little fishing port halfway down Monterey Bay. The home of the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Research Institute, it's also the site of one of the bay's largest sloughs, full of birds and young fish. That's where the folk at MBARI release rescued otters, and a sizeable raft use the slough and the harbour to shelter from the wilds of the sea.

Turn right (or left) at the big power station to cross over the causeway to the harbour. It's worth stopping here, as this is where you're most likely to see an otter close up. There' s bed of oysters and mussels at the base of the causeway, and usually one or two otters sculling around, basking in the calm of the sheltered waters.

That's where this chap was, taking his morning ablutions on a hot California spring day. We'd stopped off as we headed down to Big Sur for brunch to celebrate marypcb's birthday at one of her favourite restaurants, and there he was, close in - washing himself and sculling his big strong tail to keep in place.







The cut3n3ss...

Moss Landing, California
April 2009

Week two of the latest US trip finds us in a hot and humid Florida, where we're attending BlackBerry manufacturer RIM's annual conference.

It's been a busy couple of weeks so far - first in Silicon Valley for the 6^th birthday of AMD's Opteron processor, and then on to Las Vegas for a week of deep dives into system management tools and techniques at Microsoft's MMS event. Things have been made even busier with the arrival of the Windows 7 release candidate and the resulting multiple machine installs, and long articles full of screenshots. Even so we found time for a little relaxation on the way - a trip down Big Sur for marypcb's birthday, and a visit to Ka, one of our favourite Cirque de Soleil shows, in Vegas.

We've also managed to see friends and family along the way, hanging out with folk in Silicon Valley and spending time with Mary's sister in Ohio.

And so, it's back to work. Copy to deliver and not much time to do it in.

Photoblogging from the last couple of weeks to follow.

Aten't ded yet.

...the travel gods are on your side.

Yesterday didn't feel like one of those days at first. Our taxi to Heathrow was late as it had been having trouble with traffic. What none of us knew was that the Hammersmith Flyover had been closed and south west London was in total gridlock. What was meant to be a 45 minute journey to the airport ended up taking nearly two and a half hours.

Two and half extremely stressful hours as we crawled through the leafy streets of Barnes, Mortlake and Chiswick.

We left at nine, and our San Francisco flight was scheduled to leave at 11.30.

The airline knew we were stuck, as we'd phoned regularly, and the staff at the end of the line told us we'd be definitely able to get rebooked on to the 3 o'clock LA flight (there are some advantages to gold frequent flyer status!). When we finally made it to the airport we went straight to the ticket desk to get rebooked. After all, we'd definitely missed the flight - and we'd been told that 10.40 was the last time possible time to make the flight.

It seemed a little odd that the girl at the desk picked up the phone instead of typing away at the keyboard. However it quickly became clear...

Fog earlier in the day had meant that the plane that was due to fly the 11.30 flight had had to land at Gatwick, as it was coming in from Miami, and it had only just made it to the gate. There was still enough time for us (and our luggage) to make it. We had boarding passes, we had a gate, and we were off.

It was still a rush through the warren of Terminal 3.

Finally we were on the plane, and 10 or so hours later we were in a hot and sticky airport waiting for our luggage. Two cases had come through, but the third was missing.

Finally we found it, on the wrong belt.

Ooof.

Still, we're here, and ready for the next batch of conferences and meetings.

The San Andreas fault slashes down the San Francisco Peninsula, dividing the towns and cities of the Valley from the low rolling peaks of the Santa Cruz Mountains. An unexpectedly deep valley, paralleled by the 280 freeway, it's where the Bay stores its water. Fed by the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct the Crystal Springs reservoir runs down the valley in the space between the 280 freeway and the mountains.

If you just go up and down the freeway you'll miss places like Filoli and the Pulgas Water Temple.

"I give waters in the wilderness and rivers in the desert, to give drink to my people "

The Pulgas Water Temple is one of those uniquely Californian places, built to celebrate the end of the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct that brings crystal clear water from the edge of the Sierras to San Francisco.The water used to flow through the tunnel under the Grecian temple, but the pipes have been moved elsewhere, and the deep tiled chambers are empty. Even so, the temple has recently been restored and stands among immaculate gardens.

We stopped there on the way to the airport on our last day in the Bay in April.

It's a strange place, like something from Les Bergers d'Arcadie dropped into a landscape that screams California. It's strange seeing something that should be in a Poussin painting in amongst the rolling hills of the Peninsula. With Poussin's links to the Rennes Le Chateau "mystery", I'm surprised the Water Temple hasn't turned up in a Tim Powers' novel yet.



Well worth a visit - though it's only open on weekdays (unless you can sneak in to a weekend wedding!).

Crystal Springs, California
April 2009

...someday you'll get to play with the really BIG Legos.

Take these sea defences on dunes at Twin Harbors on the Washington coast. Huge concrete blocks with very familiar nubs on the top. It's a pity I wasn't able to check out the underneath, but they have the makings of a very nice Duplo set...



Twin Harbors, Washington
March 2009

One thing about a childhood full of National Geographics: there are places and things that seem so natural, so right when you finally see them that you almost mistake it for deja vu. Call it "deja geo" for want of a term.

The deep tidal coves of the Oregon coast were part of that world of printer's inks and glossy paper, they became flesh and rock and shell, and now they've turned into the digital pixels of the modern memory machine. It's a metamorphosis of sorts, a transmigration between the realms of thought and memory.

Let's start with the starfish.

The cold waters of the north Pacific are fertile places, full of algae and plankton. The waves crash on rocks, rocks that are covered with sea anemones, barnacles, mussels and limpets. Their predators cling to the rocks too, bright starfish, holding on with the suction of a myriad tiny tubes. As the waves wash in and out you see them: red, brown, orange and purple. These aren't the stereotypically arrayed dried corpses of the souvenir shops - they're twisted and contorted as they hold fast to the rocks.

They stand alone, or knotted in groups.



You watch the waves roll over them, expecting them to be dashed away.



Others hide in the cracks, their purple flesh patterned by white bony dots.



Oregon Coast
April 2009

Driving down the Oregon coast, on our journey from Seattle to the Bay, we stopped at an overlook south of Lincoln City to watch the waves.

Some one was feeding some seagulls, and a crowd of birds was hovering and diving for the crumbs. I pulled out my camera, and started to take some photographs. One was particularly successful, a gull caught moments before it snaffled a piece of bread out of the air. Its tail feathers were spread wide, as it used its feet to make the final adjustments to its course.



Another hovered, feathers almost transparent against the bright spring sky.



Boiler Bay State Wayside, Oregon
March 2009

One of the good things about visiting the Bay Area is going out wine tasting with spikeiowa. She knows the wineries and winding roads of the Santa Cruz mountains intimately - but there are always new wineries to find and new wines to taste.

This time we went south on Summit Road, to find two wineries we'd been meaning to explore. Burrell School's old school room sets the backdrop for its educationally themed wines. Then it was up a twisty mountain road to the summit at Loma Prieta. The eponymous winery is a fantastic new construction, with beautiful tasting rooms (and a rather scary easter-themed deer head), and some very pleasant wines. The journey is worth it for the view, which looks though a gap in the mountains all the way across Monterey Bay.

We popped in at old favourites David Bruce (where we got a lesson in how not to rinse out a glass between tastings, along with a couple of bottles of an old favourite) and Byington (where the view and the wines work together so well, and the gardens were showing all the signs of spring). Then it was time for a run through the redwoods and Bonnydoon's new tasting rooms in Santa Cruz. They're not alone - we first tasted at Vino Tabi (with entertaining winery dogs) and then sneaked in at the end of tasting at the Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard's Quinta Cruz rooms, where they specialise in Iberian wines.

Finally we settled in at Bonnydoon for a tasting and a quick snack in the winery café. A small girl became fascinated with marypcb's braids, and her mother brought her over to find out more. As we chatted it turned out that she was the Boonydoon founder and winemaker Randall Grahm's partner, and she offered to introduce us to him - as he was having a meal with friends to celebrate his birthday. He was pleased to meet fans of his wines from the other side of the pond, and we chatted to him for a while. It came as something of a surprise when he poured us a glass of his 1992 Syrah, which he said was the best wine he'd ever made - and one that would never be repeated, as it was the last gasp of a field of dying vines.

The dying vines had concentrated everything into one last throw of the dice, and the resulting wine worked wonders, ending up with an excellent mix of flavours unlike anything else I've ever drunk, or can even start to describe. If you ever see a bottle, it's one you need to try. It's the best wine I've ever tasted, and one that let you savour its flavours for a long time.

Many many thanks to Randall for letting us share.

The long sandy beaches of the Pacific Northwest go on for miles and miles, great curves of sand that reach from horizon to horizon. Up where the sands meet the dunes are the drift trees, great logs that have floated down from the wild mountain rivers, into the sea, where they're thrown on to the beaches by the winter waves.

Walk along them, and you find smooth pebbles, worn down in the angry waves of a hundred thousand winters. Down in Oregon the sands are golden brown, while up north in Washington the volcanic beaches shine black ink in the morning sun. It's on the sands you'll find them, the grey-white saucers. They've landed from the sandy ocean floors, the skeletal remains of bottom dwelling echidnoderms: sand dollars.

The tube feet are lost, and they rest there, empty, waiting to be smashed by the next angry wave, broken into the small change of the beaches.



Twin Harbors Beach, Washington
March 2009

So we drove through Forks.

The Olympic Peninsula is beautiful, wild, and deeply and densely forested. You drive for miles through the forests, past waterfalls and lakes, over the twisting turning Sol Duc River, heading west from Port Angeles. It's an hour or so before you come to a gap in the firs, and find Forks, an old, slightly decayed, logging town that's seized upon its new-found fame. The motels advertise themselves with slogans like "Vampires Welcome" and "Edward Cullen didn't sleep here". They're slogans that seem to work, as on a wet March Saturday they all seemed to be open and they all seemed to be full, nothing but car loads of teenage girls.

A handful of shops all seemed to be selling Twilight tatmemorabilia, while all around mist swirled through the thickly wooded mountains. The old steam locomotive in the centre of the town is sponsored by one of the biggest logging companies in the area, and you get the feeling that if it hadn't been for one fluke choice of town name for an unaccountably popular novel, there would be very little there, an almost ghost town that flickers through the windows of the car as you slide on past down the 101. You'd flash past the logging museum and be gone, heading on for the rain forests and the rest of the National Park.

The undead, or undead. Those seem to have been the choices. As much as I dislike the novels, I can't really fault the choice the town made. Stephanie Meyers wrote it a blank cheque, and Forks is cashing it - right when it needed it most.

So, let's start with a ferry and see where we get.

After all, we don't have to be in San Francisco until Wednesday morning, and the Oregon Coast is looking most tempting.

Hmm. Forks. Now where have I heard of that town?

(Somewhere out there is a Blues Brothers quote with my name on it, involving sunglasses, fuel and Chicago.)

March is the best time to go to Death Valley. It's not too hot, and the desert flowers are at their peak, nodding clusters of yellow and purple and pink. We drove through the Panamint Mountains on Monday, part of our road trip from the Bay to Las Vegas. As we drove up the slopes above the salt flats the flowers appeared, more and more the higher we climbed above the stifling hot desert floor.

We pulled into a turnoff to photograph the desert primroses, which were catching the light of the setting sun. As we focused in on the flowers we saw a blur of wings.

Was it a hummingbird, come to feast on the spring nectar?

No, it wasn't.

It was the largest and most brightly coloured hummingbird hawk moth I'd ever seen.

It blurred its way from flower to flower its wings in constant motion. As it hovered over a flower I managed to capture its image...



Panamint Mountains, Death Valley, California
March 2009

I was trying to plan a route in Google Maps on my iPhone this morning, only to discover that even though I'm in the US, I can only get distances measured in kilometers...

After some googling I discover that there's a bug in the 2.2 and 2.2.1 OS releases that treats the UK regional settings as metric (not as a mix of metric and imperial). It's an odd approach, and not one I'm happy with. Surely mapping conventions are to use the distance measurement prevalent in the country that's mapped, not the regional preferences of the user?

What I want is a mapping application that uses kilometers where they're used on the roadsigns, and miles where they're used. After all, it's those roadsigns that will help me make the actual journey.

Is that too much to ask?

Ah well, the Windows Mobile device we use as a GPS is charged now, so I'm going to use a real mapping tool. Time to fire up CoPilot.

Travelling to Barcelona for MWC last week I has the misfortune to fly Iberia. In the past I've not had a bad word to say about them, but the new seats and seat layout that they've put in their A320s make travelling on the tube at rush hour with luggage seem positively palatial.

I'd heard reasonably good things about the latest generation of Recaro seats, but what I hadn't realised was that the extra leg room the new cut-in seat backs offered could easily mean an airline using them to pack more and more seats in. I'm glad I'm just about average height - any taller and I would have been extremely cramped. The knee cut-in means that the seat back is in your face - and that there's only a fixed plastic folder at eye level - with no room for a decent sized paperback, let alone all the in-flight magazines and paperwork the airline leaves in for you...

Here's what it looks like:



Except of course when the plane is full, it's a lot lot worse...

What's happened is, of course, that the airline has taken the new lighter, thinner seat, and reduced the actual seat pitch to take account of the increased leg room - and managed to squeeze in an extra row or two of seats (so less luggage space per seat, and more people trying to squeeze down the narrow aisles).

It's like travelling Easyjet - only not as comfortable.

Pup time at Piedras Blancas is a noisy experience.

Sea elephants aren't the quietest of creatures at the best of times, but at the end of January the big bull males are just coming ashore, while the females struggle to wean their pups. It's a dangerous time to be a pup, as the males don't pay any attention to the struggling young seals, often just days old. If dominance need to be asserted, well, nothing gets in their way. Sadly that can mean the end of a short life, crushed under the hefty bulk of a bull sea elephant.

It's no wonder that the turkey vultures are on patrol, cruising up and down the dunes, skimming to spot any young seals that will never make it to sea.



Piedras Blancas, California
January 2009

One of the best known features of Monument Valley are the Mittens, two eroded buttes that look like hands reaching up to the sky. At sunset they glow yellow red, the bright stone of the Arizona and Utah deserts catching the sunlight.

Things are very different on a snowy cold day, from down on the valley floor. A dirt track takes you around the many monoliths, winding through the rocky desert floor. In summer it's crowded, in winter, almost empty. Pulling over at one of the view points you're on your own, bundled up against the elements and skidding on the desert snow.

Under a heavy sky the Mittens wait.



Monument Valley, Utah/Arizona
January 2009

There are classic views out there, views you'll see again and again on the covers of travel brochures and in travel magazines. You've probably seen them yourself: Wyrms Head from Rhossili, Mount Rainier over the Seattle Skyline, Grand Canyon from Mather Point, the White Cliffs over Dover.

One of those views is the view from US-191 as it climbs away from Monument Valley, heading towards Mexican Hat. We pulled over at the top of the rise, and waited for a gap in the traffic to leap out into the centre of the highway^* and take our versions of the iconic image. marypcb had been taking photographs in black-and-white using her pocket camera, and I'd been doing the same to mix and match with colour images from my DSLR. And, hey, there's something about the American west that brings out the wannabe Ansel Adams in all of us...

This time I rather think it worked.

The towering buttes and mesas are small in the distance, the road running off into the heart of the natural beauty. Overhead the winter clouds threaten more snow to whiten the red red desert.



Monument Valley, Utah
January 2009

^*Not that there's much traffic to worry about in the dead of winter - and with a long straight to the Monuments, and another on the other side of the rise, there was plenty of warning of oncoming SUVs and RVs...

The southern Utah stretch of US-191 is a spectacular road.

The long run from Monticello to Moab runs past two major mountain ranges, and across plains ridged with eroded red sandstone ridges. In winter the bright sun reflects off the snow, sharply defining the horizon and outlining the peaks of the La Sal mountains.

It's hard to keep to the speed limit as you glide down the long hill to the plain.



The straight road runs past the lone monolith of Church Rock, a giant stone beehive - straight off the state's road signs - that dominates the plain.



There's nothing to tell us what the mysterious cave at its foot contains.

A few miles further and you're threading through gorges and over rolling hills. Suddenly a red rock bridge is at the side of the road, with a waiting turn off. This is Wilson Arch, a sign of the erosion that's shaped the land over millions of years.



US 191, Utah
January 2009