Two Q's

I've been in Albuquerque for the past week for Particle Accelerator Conference 2007. It was a pretty good conference, despite the fact that Albuquerque is a typical sprawling American city with not much to do, especially if you don't have a car. I regretted slightly not having a plan for my free day (the Sunday), since it would have been nice to get out to the pueblos or maybe the VLA. We went on a couple of good trips though:

On Wednesday, we drove out to Santa Fe. The town was pretty nice, some very attractive buildings. Everything was fronted with adobe (I think), which gave it a nice sandstone-ish feel. We did some tat shopping at a Five & Dime, but failed to find a real six-string, disappointingly. And we saw an immense thunderstorm - lightning everywhere, constantly for a few hours. I'd never seen anything like it. We tried to get some photos but it was just pot-luck really. I think Duncan has a good one.

On the Friday, we got the cable car to the top of Sandia Peak, above Albuquerque. It was well worth the trip. The mountain stands at 10,000 feet (the city's at 5000-6000ish), so the views were absolutely amazing. We had a bit of a wander around the ridge, tried to climb some trees, ate in the restaurant at the top, and watched the sunset over the city. Didn't see any bears though.

Most of the photos of last week are on my Flickr page. I'll put the cable car ones up shortly.

Cycling in Europe

I was in Grenoble, France* last week, at the FFAG 2007 workshop with a load of other accelerator physicists, many of them Japanese (apparently they have quite a few FFAG machines). On the first day, I got the bus to the conference and walked back. But after nearly being mown down by several cyclists, I had a flash of inspiration and hired a bike from the train station. It was brilliant! The weather was just right for it - not too hot. And Grenoble, despite having huge mountains all around, is a very very flat city. It took me about five minutes and almost no effort whatsoever to cycle from my hotel to the workshop venue. Counteracted some of the weight-gain effects of free food and cheap booze too. One of my better ideas, I think. And hopefully one I'll be using again - though I have a feeling it will work less well in US cities (I'm in Albuquerque in June for PAC 2007).

On a very similar note, this is brilliant.

*Argh! How American does that make me sound? I'm only trying to save you a minute looking it up on Wikipedia...