RPI Fall 2012

Taking seven classes while playing field hockey and doing the job hunt thing was a little brutal this semester.  Despite the courses, though, the rest of the semester was pretty fantastic.  I arrived back to the east coast into Hartford, CT (from Vancouver/Seattle) and stayed with my friend Christian before heading up to Manchester, VT to visit my aunt and uncle's family's cabin.  It is beautiful up there!  I had a lot of fun in the quiet countryside.  My aunt and I went on a really nice hike, went to a fun mountain and played some mini golf after doing the alpine slides, and then we ended the week with dinner and a show!  We had dinner at a place that my grandmother frequented as a 20 year old.  There was also a really nice bookstore and some good outlet shopping too.  :)

After Manchester I headed back to Troy for preseason and the start of school.  I have a lot of field hockey photos because, quite frankly, that was all I did until November haha (and study of course).  I also got to travel out to Austin, TX and Seattle, WA (again) which was a lot of fun.  I've included a bunch of photos to highlight my favorite experiences of the semester.  I'm sure I will miss a ton of fun things but these are all I have photos of anyhow!

The farm in Manchester, VT

I don't have any photos of Jako on hand but I'm rooming with Jako in Bryckwyck this year.  My car was having a lot of problems and Jako was always there to help and when I wasn't feeling well, Jako came home to look after me. :)  Love my roomie!

I was really excited about this project this semester.  I printed out some of Brendan's panoramas from England and cut them into posters and then framed them with a ton of smaller photos from my travels.  I've also got a few other photos from high school on another wall along with some posters.  The framed photo is a lovely gift from my hockey team in England!  The decorations make studying a little less painful :)

This was also the semester that Kevin got a moped haha (left).  What a cool kid.  I mentioned we did a lot of studying... well now that we're seniors we can study in the student union pub!  Although that only happened once haha.  The bartender asked me if I knew what snakebite was.  I spent a year with a uni hockey team in England, of course I do... : P

Seniors at Playday at Skidmore.

Senior Day against Rochester.  One of my favorite defenders, Julia, is sporting the mask :)

Senior Day family photo!

Panorama of the team in the lockerroom.  Julia photobombed it twice haha.

After we won against Rochester 2-1!

These guys are among my favorites at RPI!  Max, Travis, and Alex hosted a steak and red wine party which was tons of fun.  Not your average college party haha.

Arrived to some beautiful fall foliage back home for Thanksgiving (that's my trusty old Volvo that has made it so many miles!  About 158,000 so far).

Thanksgiving dinner, yum.

I took Petey on a little bike trip to the Lincoln Memorial.  I think she was pretty pumped haha.

I took a trip out to Austin, TX and absolutely loved it.  If you ever have a chance to go you definitely should!  6th St was incredibly fun and Hop Doddy serves the most delicious burger on the face of the planet.  I was visiting National Instruments and met a lot of really great people.  Seems like a great company.

Actually I have a somewhat crazy story about my flight to Austin that I'm going to interrupt the pictures with. So I had a flight from Albany to Newark and then Newark to Austin on a Thursday but my first flight got delayed a bit.  I was sitting on the tarmac waiting for some plane to back out of our gate for twenty minutes, staring at my watch wondering if I'd make my plane.  I got off the plane, sprinted to the gate for my next flight, and then watched my plane take off.  At this point I had pretty bad asthma and went over to the less-than-friendly customer service people who informed me that it was the last flight to Austin for the day so instead they put me on a flight to Houston (Texas is tiny, I could basically walk to Austin from Houston).  So I caught that flight and arrived in Houston at midnight.  I figured since my flight to Austin was at 7:30am, it'd be useless for me to bother getting a hotel so I slept as best I could on a very itchy carpet by the airport's tram tracks.  I got about three hours of sleep which were intermittently interrupted by dreams of me missing my flight.  I ended up arriving in Austin around 8:11am where I changed into my business clothes in the bathroom, washed my face, brushed my teeth, and got in a car with my awesome NI host (Dana) and went straight to my 5 interviews & technical presentation (which I had planned on working on in the hotel the night before haha jokes on me).  For some reason I wasn't bothered by any of it the whole time.  Perhaps my year abroad gave me great patience or I was just so excited to be in Austin that I didn't really care but either way my interviews went surprisingly well and I think everyone at the company was like, "How are you awake...?"  I really did have a wonderful time there though and hope to make it back there sometime soon.  I can assure you that my flight back to RPI was pleasantly mundane.

I got to catch up with some sailing camp buds in TX!  Alex (left) was just visiting Kelly (right) who gave me a tour of the UT Austin campus :)

This photo is from the inside of a Boeing 747 mock-up (the "VIP" section).  I had a lot of fun visiting Seattle and got to see a lot of cool things around the Boeing facilities.  I hope to go to the Music Experience thing by the Space Needle the next time I go!  To round out the semester, I accepted a job offer working with Boeing in LA.

Enjoy the following video of my teammate's pump up speech.  Probably my favorite part of the pre-game ceremonies:

That's all for now!  Thanks for reading :)

Vancouver/Seattle

My blogging over the past six months has been pretty nonexistent but I foresee some travels in my near future so I thought I'd make an attempt at a bit of a revival.  This is my Vancouver/Seattle post which will be followed by a "RPI Fall 2012" post :)

Seniors (pretending to) jump in the water.

The RPI field hockey team goes on an international trip every four years.  The last trip (before I got to RPI) was to Dublin, Ireland.  This time around, we flew out to Seattle and caught a bus up to Vancouver for a week.  We left around August 7th and had a blast!  The whole team couldn't go but we had enough to field a team and play a few games against some of the local club teams.  My coach forgot to pack my kickers so I played kicking back for the first game and well, let's just say that's the last time I played field... :)

We also got to enjoy a lot of fun outdoors activities!  We went on a Native American canoeing trip, an awesome whitewater rafting trip, a ride on some mountain zip-lines, and a tour through Seattle (among other things of course).  Below are a few photos of our adventures.  Some of these photos were taken from my teammates.

Teammates and Coach

We drove over this bridge after every game we played to get back to the hotel.

The field!

A beach right by the field.

 The Native American Canoe Trip

The whitewater rafting was probably my favorite part!  In the middle of the trip we stopped and jumped off a cliff into the rapids which was fun and then they had a mid-trip snack.  The snack was a massive snack of oranges which was hilarious because of Carlie's disdain for them... hahah

Whitewater Rafting

Whitewaters

View of Vancouver from the top of the mountain where we were zip-lining.

Zip-lining through the mountains!

We went on an awesome hike involving the Lynn Canyon Suspension Bridge and this cliff jumping area into water that was... very cold.  I don't know the temperature but I can safely say very, very cold.

We stopped in Seattle for a day on the way home.  The farmers market (pictured here) was packed with a lot of people, a famous fish market, and is across the street from the original Starbucks!  It was a really neat place.  We were fortunate to catch Seattle on a beautiful summer day!

Seniors chilling by the Space Needle (we didn't go in it though).

We got to do a little shopping in Seattle when I stumbled across this awesome pavilion with a live band playing swing music.  A guy (from India who works at Microsoft) asked me if I wanted to dance so of course I said yes.  Love swing dancing!!

Atlanta, GA

Me, Jake, Gary, and Ashley at the World of Coke on the American Idol couch.

Hello again!  Last weekend some friends and I decided to do a weekend trip up to Atlanta to see all the sights and hit up a Braves game.  Originally we were supposed to be a group of five but our friend Dewey decided to head up to Ohio for a week at the last minute.  He goes to GA Tech so we were supposed to be staying at his apartment but instead he just gave us the key which was nice.  So we make the four hour drive and arrive at his apartment to an angry security guard telling us that we can't park without a resident.  We call up Dewey's roommate, Bennett, (who we know to be the only resident of this apartment) and he kindly let us in despite never having met us.  As soon as we get into the apartment we find about seven more people all hanging out.  Most of them were Georgia State kids, one was a marine, three were straight from South Korea and came to Atlanta to learn English (we taught them how to say "nah mean?").  They were really friendly so we felt welcomed in no time but it was a little awkward just showing up without Dewey haha.

Anyways, we went to bed and woke up bright and early to start our day off at a tasty diner by the aquarium (I forget the name of it).  That's where we met up with Lydia who was passing through town.  We then intended to go to the aquarium but after a ridiculously long wait in line (while it was well over 100 F out) we decided to do coke world instead.  I should explain that we had CityPasses and got a ticket for the aquarium, coke world, a cnn tour, and two museums so we waited in line to pick that up which is why we could just go to coke world.  Anyways, Lydia didn't want to go to coke world so she left and we had THE BEST TIME in coke world.

First of all, they had the 2012 London Olympic torch and we got to take a photo with it.  Secondly, they had a coke tasting room where you could try coca cola products from around the world and some of them were delicious but the more entertaining flavors were absolutely disgusting haha.  Don't try The Beverly.  We also got to see the vault, a little bottling area, some really cool art... it was awesome.  Then we headed off for the Braves game.  I forgot to mention that we walked from Dewey's place to Coke World (about two miles) in the ridiculous heat and then attempted to walk to Turner Field but it was way too hot and we ended up catching a bus.  The game was great though because Jake had strategically chosen seats in the shade so we sat back, had some peanuts and bratwurst (I don't know what happened to the ball park franks from the days of yore?), and watched the Washington Nationals lose... :(

After that we were pretty exhausted so we took a taxi home.  Well, first the driver tried to drop us off at a strip club but then we told the guy, "WEST Marietta street, not Marietta street..."  Hah.  We cleaned ourselves up a bit and headed out to an amazing restaurant with Bennett called Ecco.  It was absolutely amazing.  We had Gouda with salami and oven baked pizza mmmmmmm it was delicious.  After that day we were simply exhausted and passed out really fast when we got back to Dewey's place.

The next day was more of the same.  We started out really early at the aquarium (the largest in the world) and had an absolute blast there.  The dolphin show: amazing, the whale sharks: awesome, the belugas: fantastic.  My favorite part was probably either the dolphin show (despite the story line haha) or the awesome tank that you could go under and have whale sharks and manta rays swimming over you--or maybe this place where an entire wall was just glass.  I could have sat in  that room watching the tank all day.

Anyways, after the aquarium we did a tour of the CNN studios.  It was pretty cool but not nearly as cool as coke world or the aquarium.  I'd never been to a Hard Rock Cafe which is where we ended up eating for dinner so that was a really cool experience too.  I saw them in nearly every city in Europe it seemed so I guess it was about time I went to one hah.  Our last stop was the mall so that Ashley could get her computer fixed.

We rolled out for Savannah around 6:30pm.  Ashley looked at the sky and said "do you think it's going to rain?"  I said, "yeah probably, those clouds seem pretty dark."  Well, it rained.  A lot.  Maybe around 7 or 7:30pm it started pouring and there was lighting all over the place with an accompanying roar of thunder for each bolt.  At one point the rain was so thick I could only see two dashed lines on the highway in front of me.  We passed by a jack knifed semi, a flipped over car, and saw a bolt of lighting hit a tree in front of us--it was madness.  At one point I was only driving 25 mph!  We made it back by 11pm to find that our apartment had no power but it came back on while we were asleep.  It was certainly an adventure!

We're actually heading out to Atlanta to finish up using our CityPasses tonight, woohoo!  Thanks for reading!

Holding the 2012 London Olympics torch!  We're planning on being a relay team basically haha

A CNN couch.  We like our couches.  Jake is doing the "Mother of God" pose in case you're in the dark :)

Railroad tracks and some cool buildings

City skyline with... I-75?  I-20?

Breakfast at a diner!  I had the grits and they were not so awesome... haha

The entry room

Some of Coca Cola's other products.

Tasting cokes from around the world!  They have many flavors.

Why thank you sir.

me and Ashley in a crazy camera (left) and the vault to the secret formula (right)

Gary (left) and one of the cool art pieces (right)

Gary burning himself while trying to take a photo haha it was 106 F (41 C) plus the humidity out so it was a rough day.

Centennial Olympic Park was apparently setting up for something that looked cool

They didn't seem to have hot dogs but I think the bratwurst will do just fine :)

Braves vs. Nats

A panorama attempt

Ecco's had the most amazing food I've tasted since Italy...

At the aquarium bright and early

That would be a whale shark--the largest fish in the world.

Big Tank

Friends :)

Belugas!

Penguins

The awesome lobby/epicenter of the aquarium

Cleaning Crew

He looks adorable but unfortunately his skin is poisonous.

One of the many petting ponds

Fish

The CNN escalator is only connected at the bottom and top making it the tallest free standing escalator in the world.

Hard Rock Cafe for dinner!

Jake got an awesome drink and glass.