After my parents left I didn’t really have any time to relax before heading away myself. Monday and Tuesday were mainly spent at work, checking e-mails, catching up on other stuff from my week off, and preparing for my trip. Wednesday morning saw me heading down to the airport (again) to fly to St Louis for a plant genomics conference. Other than arriving in the middle of a mid-west thunder storm nothing much exciting happened on the trip. When I got the hotel I found out they’d upgraded me to a suite. But to be honest, with the exception of a hot tub, it didn’t seem that different to what a normal room would have been like – maybe a little bigger but that was about it. That said I did briefly use the hot tub before I left just because it was there but it wasn’t anything too great.
The conference itself was nothing too exciting. There was one talk that was really quite relevant to my current work and being still rather new to plant genomics I found it really useful to see what other people were up to. The posters were really badly organised as there was no defined poster sessions and I saw hardly any discussions about a poster. Certainly no one discussed mine with me. The last conference session had been changed from something that should have been of interest to me to something that really wasn’t so I left a little early and started the drive down to Arkansas via a nice beer store I’d found, REI and a grocery store. After stopping for food I arrived at HCR at a quite reasonable time, long before others would be turning up, so I ended up pitching my tent, having a couple of beers by myself and going to sleep.
Next morning I, thankfully, managed to bump into Mary Ahsley before I’d even started looking for her, which was convenient! Somewhat less convenient, for me at least, was that she was almost ready to go climbing so I ended up skipping breakfast. I climbed reasonably well that day but boy was I lacking stamina. Although it was on top-rope and dogged I was pleased with doing all the moves on a 11b. Not so much because of the grade but more because there were at least a couple of moves on it I know I wouldn’t have been able to do even a year or so ago. Just a shame I have no stamina so currently have no chance of stringing all the moves together on something that hard. Indeed by the end of the day I was struggling to string all the moves together on some really quite easy stuff.
That evening we went into Jasper, and to a cafe I’d never been before, for dinner. It was certainly an experience! There were posters for sale of “Space Jesus” and they were deadly serious not some sort of joke. They had a little shrine that said that Jesus was the fifth (I think) notable alien visit to Earth. To each their own I suppose. Still it did good food, including things like Elk burgers and sausages. I had the all-day breakfast and it was good. All in all an odd but enjoyable experience.
Sunday the plan had been to go somewhere else to climb as I didn’t really fancy a second day at HCR. However Taras – Mary Ashley’s significant other – and his climbing partner wanted to get on something first. They were meant to be done by about ten but actually weren’t for another hour or so. Given my own uselessness at time keeping I could hardly explain but it did just mean we climbed at HCR again. Things went much the same as the day before – pleased with the moves I was doing and how I was doing them but really lacking stamina and the ability to string moves together.
By mid-afternoon they were all wanting to head back home but I had decided to stay down for an extra night and head up towards KC the next day so I headed towards Sam’s to camp for the night. After stopping at the overlook I’ve stopped at several times before, and taking more photos. I got to Sam’s and went for a walk to the bluffs. Then I set up camp before heading back to the bluffs just as the sun was setting. Sam’s is very definitely still one of my favourite places and I took even more photos. All of the photos from the day are here.
Next day I woke up to the sound of rain falling on my tent so I got up, quickly packed up and started to head towards KC. When I got there I headed to Rob’s parent’s house where Jess and he were currently living while they worked on their new home. Their new home being a converted Sprinter van. They have a blog about the conversion here. It was cool to be able to catch up with them as I hadn’t been planning on it not really expecting them to be in the area.
After leaving Rob and Jess I headed over to Lawrence to catch up with Carol. It was great catching up but there’s nothing that exciting to report. We went to Free State for some food and a couple of beers before heading back to hers where I stayed the night. Next morning I up about the same time as Carol, i.e. nice and early, to start the drive back to St Louis to get my afternoon flight back to Halifax. At one point it looked like I wouldn’t be making it back to Halifax as there was a problem with the plane. Just as we were being ordered off so they could carry on trying to find the hydraulic leak they managed to find it and so we were all told to sit back down again. Made it quite a tight connection in Chicago but I made it so by that evening I was back home and looking forward to work the next day. Or something like that.