Summer Itinerary

Some of you asked about the plans and so here goes for future reference.

Thursday is Arizona for Crater - palooza which I believe will be the best blogging of the summer. The professor wrote to Jim O. who cced us and he is exactly who I want to be when I grow up. I have taken the liberty of posting some of his incredible email to Jim (when Jim asked if he would meet Frederick in Arizona). He was a geo chemist but a very serious amateur astronomer as well. I believe he is almost 90. I really may run off with him.


 I just finished leading my 31st raft trip for the general public through Grand Canyon and have scheduled my 32nd for May 2019.  My geology-oriented trip has become somewhat famous and usually fills almost immediately. It isn’t me; it’s the surreal world of the Grand Canyon! I am also on the Board of Directors of the Death Valley Natural History Association and am helping to get more geology and natural history field trip offerings for them.  In fact, I led their first ever 2 ½ day “Geology Discovery Tour” last January and will expand on that this year and in the future. That is an amazing place and I love showing people things there they never imagined.  It is another surreal world. I’m also writing a weird book about a raft trip through Grand Canyon, then by jeep across the Great Basin to the southern end of Death Valley, up its axis to exit at the northwest end, and then on up to climax along the crest of the Sierra Nevada near Tioga Pass.  It’s all about the grand themes of geology (and science) exposed best in those places and what it all means for the human psyche. Probably not publishable, so I may just put it on the internet.  It is something erupting out of me, and I enjoy working on it daily. Other than those 3 places, I no longer desire to travel.  I even just turned down an invitation to visit Macquarie University in Sydney to hang out all expenses 


We were fortunate to have been in the business when it wasn’t business and when isotope geochemistry was young. I’ve been memorizing Shakespeare soliloquies and poems by others to fight off the mental decline everyone says must come. Shakespeare comes in surprisingly handy; I wish I had started earlier in life. I’m also delving deeply into the origins of mathematics and how we try to quantify nature. That is a daily revelation.  That science came to a universe that blew out of pinhead--nay, not so much, not a pinhead…an infinitesimal point, a singularity 13.772 billion years ago (at 4:30 in the afternoon?) and is composed of >90% mysterious, invisible matter and energy….really, there has to be something else.  I’m suspecting these likely erroneous conclusions arose for the same reason the Achilles and the Tortoise paradox arrives at a nonsense conclusion.  But I digress…

Then:
The 25th-30th in London

30th we fly to Portugal, until about the 26th, when we tour LMU in Munich and then meet the Wehlens in Turkey for a float until August 4th. Then a few days in Istanbul; and then we have a week to kill, so I think we may swing by Lech and see those Schneiders...back up to Hamburg for a visit with the old Aunts, and on the QM2 on the 17th of August, home on the 26th.

The last week here was crazy- a lot of parties and then a friend in from out of town whom I love- rushing around showing her and her son SF. I tried to get her to look out the window but we had so much to talk about...Trump, husbands, Lech, the important things.
It always amazes me how close you can feel to people whom you rarely see.

Ok next note from the desert. xxx