We’ve had an interesting turn of events at the Gordon Conference this year. Everyone from our current group is attending the conference. Indeed, a rather large number of people from ANL are all coming to the conference. Interestingly, there only appear to be a handful of us here so far.

Kerri and I took a rather odd route to get here. We went first to NY (in order to stop there for a significant period of time on the way back) and then up to Maine the next evening. Needless to say, I doubt anyone else went first to Albany and then took a car up to Maine.

The lab uses a single travel agency for official travel. It seems that there were 8-9 x-ray science people from ANL all booked on the same flight, including everyone else from my group. This flight turned out to be a “nightmare”. There were significant delays before the flight left Chicago. It then made it about half the way when one of the pilots was walking back through the cabin a few times. The plane then turned around and went back to Chicago with a “technical problem.” Apparently 1 of the instrument flight systems on the plane had failed (1 of 3, so it’s not that the plane was without sensors), but it made it such that they did not wish to attempt an instrument landing (and indeed we had fog, wind, & rain).

ANL people should be slowly trickling in tomorrow.

Anyhow, thankfully I’m here and my talk isn’t for a couple of days anyway.

I’ve never been to Maine before and the country looks just beautiful here. In fact, this entire trip has really made me miss the northeast countryside.