Surfin’ USA

East Coast

I’m writing this from my hotel room in Providence, Rhode Island (with free WLAN, yeah!). This morning I flew from LAX to Cleveland and then caught a connecting flight that got me here. Starting tomorrow I’ll be attending a conference at the Rhode Island Convention Center. Actually our complete research group from Irvine came over.
If you are interested, here’s our conference homepage. And this second conference is actually co-located with us, so I’ll try to attend some talks there, too. On Monday aftenoon I have my own little presentation as part of the doctoral student track (which, as the name suggests, is held among doctoral students in the area).
The conference goes until Thursday and I hope to find some time to have a look at the city and the campus of the local Brown University.

Santa Monica Mountains

Lately Teiko and I managed to get some nice, inexpensive outdoor gear in the ongoing summer clearance sales and we decided we’d have to put at least some of it to the test. For now we chose to do only a day hike, so I did some research online and eventually picked the “Mishe Mokwa trail” in the Santa Monica Mountains. The latter are designated as a National Recreation Area and comprise several smaller nature parks and reserves north of L.A. and along the coast of Malibu.

The Mishe Mokwa Trail follows a canyon through the moutainous area and eventually leads to the Backbone Trail. This, in turn, runs up to Sandstone Peak, the highest peak in the Santa Monica Mountains with 3111 feet (close to 1000m). The whole loop is about 6 miles (~10km) and took us 4 hours with some small breaks.

Needless to say, the weather was superb and we had a great time. The views in the canyon and from the mountain range were amazing and hiking and climbing was a lot of fun. But see for yourself: