Travel – Page 50 – David Kotz

Flying Seattle!

I usually get to altitude by climbing mountains, but yesterday I had the incredible opportunity to fly around the Seattle area with my former student Jon Howell , who now has his pilot’s license and loves to fly. After crawling through Bellevue rush hour we arrived at the Renton airport and went through pre-flight checks on the little Cessna Skyhawk II. The plan was to fly up to Friday Harbor in the San Juan islands, for dinner, but the clouds meant he would need to fly IFR (instrument) rather than VFR (visual) rules. Jon is qualified for IFR but there one of the lights was out and there were reports of something flaky in one radio… discretion being the better part of valor, we instead took a VFR spin around Seattle under the cloud deck, cruising at 1500′. Quite exciting! Nice views of the city and lakes and sound. We even flew right over SeaTac airport while jetliners landed below us. Wow. Check out the photo gallery.

And for dessert, we picked big juicy blackberries along the access road.

Thanks Jon!

A week in the Lake District of England

map showing location of Ambleside in UK — Ambleside is in northwestern England

[see SmugMug gallery for more photos]

Every year I attend the MobiSys conference; this year it was held in the beautiful Lake District of northwestern England. I had heard so much about this area – a walker’s paradise, people said – so I decided to go early and to bring along my son John. We flew from Manchester to Manchester (NH to UK, that is) and drove to Ambleside, in the center of the Lake District. It was pouring rain, but the rental-car agent assured us that it wouldn’t last (more on that later). Continue reading “A week in the Lake District of England”

Welcome to my new blog site!

With the demise of MobileMe hosting of iWeb sites, I decided to give WordPress a try. I’m sitting here with my son in the Philadelphia airport just about to head out on our latest adventure: 10 days in the Lakes District of western England, including a visit to my home town – literally, my birthplace, near Manchester.

dave

Back to Bangalore

I was back in India to attend COMSNETS conference and the NetHealth workshop.

I have been fortunate to return to Bangalore every January, since we left there in May 2009. The main reason is to attend an important conference on computer networks, an opportunity to meet researchers from my field. But I always take the opportunity to visit old friends and favorite places. Read on!

Scotland

A one-week flash tour of cities, castles, lochs, highlands, and trails.

Although we only had a week, we had a great time and we saw an incredible amount. We started with two nights in Edinburgh, where we stayed with my oldest friend – that is, my first ever friend, who was born just four days after me. Then we drove northwest through highlands to the lochs and bays of the western coast, with two nights around Glen Coe. Then northeast along Loch Ness to Inverness, and down through Cairngorm national park to Scone and then St Andrews, where we spent two nights. Off to Glasgow for a night. Then an early-morning flight out of Edinburgh allowed us to have lunch in Paris before returning home. Whew! Read on.

An afternoon in Hamburg

Hamburg is a beautiful city, full of trees and parks, crisscrossed by canals, a river, a lake, and the third-busiest harbor in the world.

I had to present a paper at the ACM WiSec conference. Because of constraints back home I could only stay at the conference long enough to present my own talk, but I arrived in Hamburg at noon the day before and spent an enjoyable five or six hours strolling around the city. Read on!

Purana Qila, National Museum, Delhi

A few sights that I had missed on previous visits to Delhi.

I had an extra day in Delhi so I decided to see two of the many sights that I had missed on previous visits: Purana Qila and the National Museum. Read on!

Bada Darwaza = west entrance; Purana Qila, Delhi

Qutb Minar

Finally, a visit when I can actually see the historic tower.

On my first visit to Delhi, in December 2008, I was disappointed by our visit to this monumental piece of history. It was, as so often happens on December mornings, densely foggy. We could barely see higher than our own heads, and thus the towering minaret of Qutb Minar, 73m in height, was virtually invisible. Today I finally got to see it! read on…

Port Townsend

The Olympic Peninsula of Washington state is a magical place.

I was in Seattle for a workshop and decided to stay for the weekend so I could go out to the Olympic Peninsula and visit my advisor, Carla Ellis, for the weekend. What fun it was to see her and her new retirement home. It was a gray and even drizzly weekend, but I had fun taking some photos from a state park where we went for a stroll.

Olympic peninsula – even the trees are covered in green growth.

The Olympic Peninsula of Washington state is a magical place, which in its low slopes is much like a rainforest. Here, near Port Townsend, is a fantastically moss-green forest, quite a sensory experience coming from snowy NH. Above is a shot of the eery, mossy woods in the park. The peninsula gets a lot of rain and fog, so the woods are green year ‘round.

At right is a close-up of the bark of a madrona tree, which sheds its bark annually.

See the photo gallery.

This post was transferred from MobileMe to WordPress in 2021, with an effort to retain the content as close to the original as possible; I recognize that some comments may now seem dated or some links may now be broken.

Bangalore again

I was fortunate to be able to visit Bangalore once again, to attend the COMSNETS conference.

It is so nice to be back in India, in Bangalore. I came so I could attend COMSNETS, a computer networking conference, at which I had organized the NetHealth workshop. Those were great, as was an afternoon spent visiting Microsoft Research. What was best, though, was a chance to visit some of my favorite places, including MG Road, Cauvery, Infinitea, Sampige Road, the IISc campus, and friends in our old IISc neighborhood. Read on…