Lots and lots and lots of trees

I'm writing this from onboard a ship, cruising in Alaska. It's the second time that I have been on this cruise -- the last time was well over 15 years ago -- and it'll be interesting to see how the landscape has changed. I heard that the glaciers have retreated quite a bit since the last time I was here.

We flew into Vancouver two days ago and spent yesterday cruising the Inside Passage. Last time when I was here, we managed to catch a pod of killer whales as they hung about the side of the ship for a while, so it was a disappointment to not see any whales this time. The scenery was stunning, though -- miles and miles of evergreen trees lining both sides of the channel.

Today, we're landing at the port of Ketchikan and we're going to try and see some bears. Will try to post pictures of some bears upon my return -- that is, if we're lucky :-).

Cool GPS maps

This will be a quick post because I'm almost falling asleep... having bought a new GPS some time ago, I decided that this last week when I was out of town on a service trip, would be a good time to try it. Here's my first attempts:

Part of the travel route that we took, from Huangshi, Hubei (our destination), back to Wuhan, by bus; then from Wuhan to Hong Kong by plane; and finally, by airport express and taxi part of the way to my home.



In case you are interested in how planes circle over Hong Kong before they land, here's a zoomed-up view of the part over HK...



Finally, here's a geotagged album of a walkabout around Huangshi. I still haven't managed to find a way to superimpose the track of our stroll onto the map, but at least the pictures are there...



Will be back with more details later, when I have a chance to recover...

Oh, the stories they could tell...

I had an interesting experience yesterday with my cell phone. Shortly after noon, I realized that I did not have my cell phone with me. I wasn't alarmed at first; I often leave my cell phone in my office, but I started freaking out after I realized that it wasn't there, and wasn't in any of the places that I remembered going to, either. Considering that we're leaving on a service learning tour tomorrow, it would have been very inconvenient, to put it mildly, to lose the thing at this point.

I made a number of phone calls to my phone, to find that it was ringing, but nobody answered. That gave me some hope that the thing hadn't been stolen but was in fact sitting around somewhere still.

About 10 minutes later, I get a phone call from my mother, who told me that somebody had called home, asking if an iPhone had been lost. My parents arranged to meet the guy and hand over the phone -- bless his heart, the finder refused to take a reward, saying that it was his duty.

The interesting part is this: the finder said that he had picked up the phone in TST East. I hadn't been off campus all day. How could the thing have made it all the way over there? The only thing I can think of is that I dropped it somewhere on campus; somebody picked it up with the intention of stealing, but for some reason left it in TST East. But why that would happen is the question.

I wish that thing could talk and tell me where it'd been. For that matter, I wish I could put some sort of logging onto an inanimate object and leave it sitting around for somebody to pick up. I bet those things have interesting stories to tell.