1. They live here. You don’t.
2. If you don’t want their hair on your clothes, stay off the furniture. That’s why they call it furniture.
3. I like my pets a lot better than I like most people.
4. To you, they are animals. To me, they are adopted sons & daughters who are short, hairy,walk on all fours and don’t speak clearly.

Must have been a great sabbatical – just finished this paper for Supercomputing 2010, and it was the least painful paper I’ve ever written.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xe_xA2FYM0

We did brave the weather for a trip to the Bayous, and it was possible one of the most adrenalin filled days of the road trip so far. We flew in a four seater sea plane from Belle Chasse just ourside New Orleans for a guided tour of the city, the on to Kraemer in the heart of the Louisiana swampland for a much closer view of the crocodiles in the swamp, guided by a local Cajun tour guide. The thunderstorms moving through on the tour really added to the southern atmosphere in the swamp.

The food in New Orleans was amazing – I had the best cheese on toast with pear butter at Green Goddess and some really authentic white beans at the Gumbo shop. Topped it all off with coffee and beignets at Cafe Du Monde.

Leaving Louisiana, the call of Florida’s Emerald coast beckoned, and we decided to whisk through Mississippi & Alabama and make a bee-line for St. George’s Island, on Florida’s forgotten coast. We really fell in love with the sandy, white beaches and crystal clear green-blue sea on this tranquil island.

Next we headed across the Texas pan handle to Fredericksburg, San Antonio (for the Alamo and river walk) before heading over to Austin. This whole area is so beautiful and the people are so friendly – Donna and I are really loving the Lone Star State.

Our first stop on arriving in Houston was to tour NASA’s Johnson Space Center – well worth the visit once you get past the Disney reception center. We took the tram ride to see the spacecraft simulators used for astronaut training and a real life Saturn V rocket.

Yesterday, we drove out to Galveston Island to give Becky and Daisy a good run on the beach, and they loved it. The island is a little run down, and many of the properties have not been repaired after the hurricane of 2008 – maybe it is just the recession, or maybe we have learnt enough to stop fighting mother nature on this one.

Heading east again today – should get to New Orleans tomorrow – we can’t wait!

From the old London Bridge at Lake Havasau to Flagstaff and Sedona then on to Phoenix and Tucson and finally Tombstone, Arizona has presented such a diverse persona’s that it is almost impossible to form a coherent opinion. The mountains, the cliffs, the desert are all so beautiful and of a scale that still boggles my British derived preconceptions. If I have a reservation, it is that popular sites such as the town of Sedona wear such an obvious Hollywood/Disney sheen thats sits at odds with the natural surrounding beauty. Our few days in Arizona have only whetted the appetite for this state – for now we must move on but we will return.

What an amazing weekend – after checking out the shows and boutiques in Las Vegas, we took an aerial sightseeing tour of the Hoover Dam and the west rim of the Grand Canyon. Then we descended the 4,000 feet from the top of the Canyon to the valley floor by helicopter for a wonderful boat trip on the Colorado River.

I new that our road trip would take us to some weird and wonderful places, but I didn’t expect it to take us to the planet Shakari at the center of the universe – yet here we are. We’ll actually these are the Trona Pinnacles in the California desert, but they have been the backdrop of many sci-fi movies and television series including Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Battlestar Galactica, Lost in Space, and Planet of the Apes.

There are many word to describe the Pacific coast – rugged, desolate, stunning but I think the best description for the last two days should be bloody windy! We were buffeted by driving rain all the way from Reedsport to Mendicino. The sea at Port Orford gets so rough that the boats have to be lifted out of the harbour by crane to prevent the high winds from smashing them against the jagged rocks. The weather doesn’t look like it is going to get much better for a couple of days, so we turned inwards after chilling out in Mendicino to head into Sonoma for some great wine tastings, then blast down California’s central valley to warmer weather.

What a beautiful day to start our trip – a short drive down the Willamette Valley took us to Silver Falls State Park, Oregon’s largest, for a pleasant walk with the dogs in the afternoon sun. Then onwards southwest to the coast for our last night in Oregon for many weeks.