route 55 cuts through the Monongahela National Forest, taking people from Front Royal, Virginia in the east through to central West Virginia, near where my conference is being held.

the landscapes along the route are exotic — much more like rural Australia and much less like what i’d have expected being only a couple hundred miles from D.C..

i’m off for a couple of days — work is having an internal marketing conference out in west virginia for a couple of days, which means i won’t be back until Thursday.

the conference is actually at resort that is part of a west virginia state park, and isn’t too too far from Monongahela National Forest.

i’ve looked over the conference materials and there is less than three hours built into the schedule for us to actually be out in nature — which is ironic considering who i work for — but i’m taking the “good” camera for the pretty stuff on the drive out and back.

with my well known obsession for the Olympics, I just couldn’t imagine being so close to an Olympic site and not checking it out.

(although I have been to Vermont two dozen times and haven’t managed to make it to Lake Placid — a mere two hour drive west.)

i’ve been to Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park, to Melbourne’s Olympic Stadium, and had near misses with Canada Olympic Park in Calgary (drove by, but couldn’t stop) and Sydney Olympic Park (saw it from the air, but only had 18 hours on the ground).

Utah Olympic Park was home to 14 of the 28 events in the 2002 Olympics, including all the sliding events (bobsled, skeleton, luge) and the jumping events (ski jump, Nordic combined).

at the park, a multiple-sport Olympian (one of them for ballet skiing, apparently) took us around to the five venues, and Terry Kent (sliding venue announcer for the last three Olympics) talked us through what it was like in Vancouver.

great experience. stunning views.

it was mainline-ing the Olympic experience to someone who’s already an Olympic junkie … something tells me it’s only going to make things worse.

i’m in salt lake city for a web analytics conference, and the views from this place are just stunning. it’s not very hard to imagine a group of people being moved to center a religion here.

I’ve got no idea how this week will go … it’s my first week way from sparklet, i dont travel for work much anyway, and hordes of socially awkward web analytics geeks make me nervous,

I’m going to try and squeeze in two quick things while I’m out here … a trip to Utah Olympic Park (site of the 2002 Winter Games) and the Great Salt Lake (seems like a good thing to see in its eponymous city).

besides that, I’ll just be missing baby … and trying to process being in a city that make Vermont look like a bastion of genetic diversity.

holy moses, it’s actually snowing?!?

it seems like every other year, the D.C. weathermen predict at least one “major” storm that will paralyze the city … although, seeing that three inches of snow is more than enough to bring D.C. to its knees, i guess “major” is a relative term.

we’re supposedly at 10 inches, which would already puts us in the top five storms of the last twenty years. we got 24 inches of snow my junior year of college, a much smaller storm (maybe a foot?) in high school, and i remember using a yardstick to measure a 20+ incher back when i was seven or eight.

outside of those, we’ve had way more false alarms than anything of interest … which is a good thing, because in the end D.C. is a southern town, and southerners (a) refuse to walk or use public transit, and (b) only think they know how to drive on snow.

quick trip through the zoo. the last time we went, i got *really* great pictures, and then proceeded to have my camera stolen at the bar afterwards. no where near as good pictures this time, but at least we all came home in one piece.

it’s a bit of a tradition in D.C. to clamor up to your rooftop (if you have one) to watch the fireworks on the Fourth. the lady sparkler and i had never been, but decided to give it a go this year … thinking that it was probably our last year to do something illegal (before baby sparklet arrives).

i always assumed that the best show was from the mall, but i think the rest of the fireworks (they come from all around us, including Columbia Heights, Crestwood, Silver Spring and over by the National Cathedral) were even more fun.

i did the washington, d.c. part of the c&o canal last year, and liked it enough that i decided to go back for more. the next section, between great falls and edward’s ferry, started off exactly the same … until lock 23 (mile 22) where the trail turns into one long mud pit.

needless to say, my happy little three hour ride turned into a six hour extravaganza … one from which my thighs (and butt) may never fully recover.

Explore the Photo Set:
Edward’s Ferry, Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park, Maryland

not everybody has the patience to sort through 800+ photos from a family vacation, so i have distilled out about 70 of my favorites from scotland, london and paris. there is more commentary on the trip to come (UPDATED: it’s here now) but wanted to get the pictures up quicker than my weary brain can draft real blog posts.

Explore the Photo Set:
Photos: The Best of Europe (Slideshow)

Paris has turned out to be the big surprise for me on the trip — i thought i was going to hate it, and was only doing it to buy off my wife for spending seven days in a car running around a nation she’d already seen.

And i have to say, i was partially right. Paris is an ugly, ugly city during the day — there seems to be no sanitation in the traditional sense, the people on the sidewalks aren’t terribly nice, and it was painfully obvious that I just wasn’t in Kansas anymore Toto.

But Paris at night, is just stunning.

I have a feeling we’ll be back — we didn’t get to see even half the things on our list, but when we do come i think we’re going to do another long weekend and not even going to try adapt to the time change.

We’ll just get up at noon, and stay awake until 2am, and do Paris the way that God intended — at night.

friends of ours came to Paris of their honeymoon. they basically rented an apartment for two weeks, and packed a bunch of books, and just lived a normal Parisian life for two weeks (sans blackberry, i hope).

i thought they were crazy — turns out they weren’t.

we ran around like tourists for the first 18 hours we were here, before we started dawdling longer and longer in the cafes around the tourist attractions than in the attractions themselves.

the cafe at Notre Dame is a great example. it’s a horrible tourist trap, and it was horribly overpriced, but sitting there drinking liquid chocolate for two hours is one of the top memories i’m taking home with me.

It’s nearly impossible to overstate the impact that tourists have on The Louvre. They’re everywhere, and they’re crazy. The Lady Sparker and I spent a grand total of two hours in the museum (including 45 minutes at their cafe) and ticked off most of the top 10 things you “have” to see — and then got the heck out of dodge. Beautiful museum, it just needs about 2.3 million less people in it at any one time.

i had such an incredible sense of déjà vu standing on Pont Neuf, a bridge from Paris’ left bank to one of the islands in the river Siene. After a second, i figured it out — the bridge is featured in the first Jason Bourne movie:

Enough. 5:30 p.m. Paris. Today. Pont Neuf. You come alone, you walk to the middle of that bridge. You take off your jacket. Face east. I’ll redial this number.

I’m sure I’ve once again offended a couple centuries of cultured peoples by having this association, but (again) you can take the American out of America, but you can’t …