I was up early enough on Monday morning to drive a partial loop around the town, grab some cereal and soy milk from the local grocery store, and discover the overwhelming beauty of Nelson I missed when I drove in under the cloak of darkness. I really should have brought a box of this cereal home with me. Sean and I discovered it in Vancouver and we loved it.The city is sandwiched in between a lake and mountains all around. Somehow you miss the feeling that you've dropped down into a valley when you arrive at night. Downtown is relatively flat and adjacent to the lake, while the neighborhood gently climb up the mountain giving every home a stunning view.
Miles was there to collect me right at 9:30 and we walked from the WhiteHouse Backpackers Lodge up to his house. If you made this walk every day, you'd have buns of steel. Nelson has lots of environmentally conscious residents that walk just about everywhere.
He has a fun family. Elka is the sweet smiley baby of the house. Z is the energy of the house. He's probably wondering where I am right now. Kell is their oldest and he's a bit quite and reflective. He seems wise. Miles's wife Jane takes care of everyone, including me while I'm there. There are two dogs, too. One hyperactive Chester, one mellow Lola. I kept quiet about my allergies so I could pet them as much as I wanted. People tend to squirrel their pets away when they find out I have allergies. I was loaded up with antihistamine. I'm petting those dogs. I'm excited. One is jumping all over me. Jane and Miles are trying to make him stop while I'm probably encouraging the bad behavior by trying to get in as much petting as I can. Dogs are just rad. I'm reminded of Hyperbole and a Half.
We spent the first day reviewing models to see what we could re-purpose after talking a little bit about the goals for my project. On Tuesday we really dove in collaborating in a "designer to developer" style very much like my Adobe Flash Hackathon experience. We came up with an underlying TB model that is far more sophisticated than anything I would have been able to formulate on my own. Monday and Tuesday were ten hour days, and Wednesday stretched into twelve. All of the behavioral aspects were coded on Wednesday. We were both exhausted, and I'm not sure how Miles had the energy to push through for so long when he was up most of the night taking care of two sick children.
Going all the way to Nelson BC reminded me that what I do is important and valued. It's unfortunate that I often get bogged down by the politics of my committee. They have clear well intentioned goals for my dissertation work. To finish this degree, that's all that matters I suppose. Miles has had prior experience modeling the dynamics of disease diffusion and he was genuinely interested in my research questions. He's also had experience with policy makers and knows how to construct models that have the capacity to answer the types of questions they are most interested in. When we wrapped up on Wednesday night, the model was about 90% complete. Hopefully I'll be able to sort out the rest in the next week or two.
Thursday morning, after a failed attempt to find a geocache in the rain, it was time to pack up the car and start driving back to Spokane. Of course, right when I'm getting ready to leave, it starts snowing, but only for a minute. The snow came down in giant clumps like nothing I've ever seen before. They were literally big round splats a few inches in diameter. I'm not even exaggerating a little bit. I kept my fingers crossed that it wouldn't start up again, and headed over to the Ellison Market to buy some chocolate to bring home to Sean. This is where folks buy their fresh milk in glass containers among other things. I thought I'd ask the clerk how to get back to the highway that goes to the border. She was bewildered and clearly stressed by the question, so I stopped her mid stammer to let her know I had a map. I would guess that a lot of folks that live in Nelson take very few trips out of the city. The highway out of Nelson was literally a few blocks away.
The trees all around had a beautiful white dusting of snow and as I climbed out of the valley, it started snowing. I can't even begin to describe how spectacular the scenery was. The trees are enormous and everything was just so stunning in shades of green topped with fresh white snow and deeply contrasted by the dark wet pavement. Waterfalls were making their way down craggy rock faces at every turn, and the occasional creek over passes were mighty displays of white water rapids making their way down to the glassy river below. Unfortunately, I didn't stop anywhere along the snowy part to take any pictures because I didn't want to get caught up there should the light snow turn heavy. I have to say, I handled it really well.
The border crossing back to the US was less "interesting" accept that my car, bags, and suitcase were all searched. Not a lot of questions this time around which was fine by me. Heading back into the US, I just felt like the Border Dude was doing his job. A few days earlier when I was entering Canada, I felt like the Border Dude was interrogating me.
Once I was clear of the snow, I stopped a few times to take pictures at various heritage markers and the Box Canyon Dam.
The rest of the drive back to Spokane was relatively free of any precipitation, and traffic was at a minimum until a brief section through the middle of downtown. I stopped at the Mountain Gear store on Division which was somewhat anti-climactic. I was so excited to go there after having bought gear from their online store. It was very much like an REI, but I didn't find any deep discount sales racks. With still an hour before I needed to drop off the rental car, I stopped at a little Asian restaurant called the Mustard Seed for lunch. Nothing to write home about, so I'll spare you the bland review. I will say that the wait staff and manager were really nice and the service was fantastic.
I was in and out of there pretty quickly, arriving at the airport just in time to drop off the rental car before it started snowing again. It was only a tiny bit of snow that had no chance of surviving the warm pavement. Nothing like the giant snow clumps of Nelson, and certainly nothing capable of delaying my flight. In fact, the flight from Spokane to Phoenix was the highlight of the many flights I took for this trip. I flew on US Airways and they will charge you extra for what they consider "premium seats. When I booked, they only had premium seats left. I wasn't about to pay an extra $15 dollars for a premium seat, so I just didn't select a seat for the trip back to Phoenix from Spokane. When I checked in the day before my flight, an exit row seat was now available for no extra charge, so I took it.
When I got on the plane, it wasn't just any exit row seat, it was one of those super awesome exit row seats without a seat in front of it. Check out all of that leg room! It's a little wasted on someone as short as I am, but that didn't stop me from swinging my legs up and down like a kid on the playground.
On top of that, I had the good fortune of sitting next to Matt, a funny guy on his way to Vegas to celebrate his 40th birthday with his best friend.
My connecting flight to Los Angeles departed and landed on time and I thought I'd call the Santa Barbara Airbus office to see if by chance there was a bus back to Santa Barbara at 8:00PM when I landed. One was scheduled to leave at 7:30PM, and the one I had a reservation for was scheduled to leave at 10:00PM. To my total surprise, the 7:30PM bus was still circling the airport and I had literally 5 minutes to get off the plane and run through the airport down to the exits by baggage claim. I got out there exactly as the bus was pulling up in front of my terminal. I've never been so excited to get on a bus. This means I'll get home at 10:30PM instead of 12:30AM.
I've been home a few days now, and it has taken me some time to catch up on all the little projects that I'm involved with. Now it's time to see how far I can get with the model...
Next trip: San Francisco for Google I/O.
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