First birthday out of town...

Time flies, and I just turned 26… and I spent my first birthday away from Singapore… I couldn’t help feeling just a little bit lonely... Even though I’m not a fan of birthdays… my birthday is usually a day when I will get all my buddies and treat them to a nice ‘zhi char’ dinner… nothing beats that!

I received a surprise present from my friends from Singapore… really appreciated it… can’t get better friends than you guys… Thanks! Called home too… nothing beats having my mom wishing me a happy birthday too! =)


Here's the cardigan from you guys in Singapore! Thanks a lot!


Here's the gloves... will come in handy in the coming winter!

On the day itself, I was at work as usual… and I got a surprise birthday lunch from more than twenty of my co-workers I worked with across three departments! I was really honored and grateful for all of them making this day one of my most memorable moments in the States! We had Brazilian barbeque at Rockville pike… where it was a buffet… the meat was served by waiters, who come with huge slabs of meat on big skewers and they will slice off the meat on our tables! We had sausages, pork loin, turkey-n-bacon(which was really good!), beef kabob, lamb and sirloin… I ate the most amount of meat in one sitting!

Thoughts… grateful with a smile on my face… Paul had a happy birthday!

Clips of Yellowstone

Of course aside from pictures, I took some interesting short clips when I was at Yellowstone National Park. Here's a little taste of the stuff I've seen there!


A small geyser spurting boiling water in the Old Faithful Geyser Basin, Yellowstone National Park



Castle Geyser in the Old Faithful Geyser Basin erupting, Yellowstone National Park



Black bear spotted at while it was snowing in Dunraven Pass, Yellowstone National Park

Yellowstone National Park (5th Oct - 8th Oct)

Get ready for a long story! This Yellowstone trip is definitely the most memorable trip for me in the States so far! Took a plane out of DC early Thursday morning (5th Oct) and reached Salt Lake City, Utah in the afternoon with a quick stopover in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Well… flying into the city itself is so amazing… Salt Lake City is such a beautiful city: the mountains at one end, and the massive Great Salt Lake on the other…. it really set up the mood for my solo road trip!


Wasatch Mountains east of Salt Lake City


Great Salt Lake west of Salt Lake City

Took out my rental car at the airport and quickly headed up north on this 6 hrs drive to West Yellowstone, Montana. Of course, I have to stop for a sugar-overloaded breakfast at an IHOP in Layton, Utah. I had scrambled eggs, hash brown, a nice pot of coffee and a super sweet syrupy French toast (you can only imagine how much syrup is on it… and it’s topped with strawberries!).


My rental, a Pontiac Vibe... the easiest car to drive ever

After breakfast, I headed back on interstate highway 15 and crossed the state of Idaho (mainly farmland… with mountains as a backdrop)…. Seem like there are a lot of mountains around here eh? Well, all these mountains are part of the Rocky Mountains that stretches from British Columbia in Canada all the way to New Mexico in the States! …so the mountains accompanied me the whole drive across the 3 states Utah, Idaho and Montana.

Stopped for a short break at Idaho Falls before heading northeast on route 20 towards West Yellowstone. After driving through Targhee National Forest, I finally reached West Yellowstone right about nightfall. Of course, I had to reward myself with an nice dinner with sliced beef brisket, and potato salad and cheese grits sides. My hostel was the Madison Hotel of West Yellowstone… a log hotel with a history of 95 years… it was the best hostel I’ve stayed so far… the bed’s made everyday, towel’s changed… almost a hotel except the room’s shared and the bathroom is at the end of the hallway. The first night was shard with an English who drove from San Francisco and planning to go to Las Vegas next… the second night was spent alone (yes! Alone… in my own hotel room!)… the third night I met a very interesting guy who biked (bicycle) more than 10,000 km from Toronto, Canada! (fyi, 10,000 km is a quarter around Earth)


Reward for a hard day on the road, a sliced beef brisket dinner


The Historic Madison Hotel of West Yellowstone


My hostel room, I slept on the top left hand corner btw

I went on a bus tour on the lower loop of Yellowstone National Park (most of it is bounded by the state of Wyoming) on Friday morning with an older couple from Vancouver Island, Canada and a lady from Colorado. The Madison Valley greeted us on the East entrance with elks and bison roaming freely in the grassland with the Rocky Mountains in the background… it’s all so surreal… like walking into a documentary! Pine trees occupy most of the otherwise hilly parts of the park.


Bison in the vast grassland of Madison Valley

Yellowstone is most well known for its hydrothermal features and there are so many hot springs of various shades of colors and gurgling geysers and of course the famous Old Faithful geyser which sprays water and steam up to 56m! …very unusual… interesting and strangely beautiful…….


Firehole Spring


Fountain Geyser


Old Faithful Geyser

We stopped by the Yellowstone Lake… the largest alpine lake in the world. The lake is so beautifully calm with the snow-capped Absaroka Mountains bounding the east side the pine forests of Yellowstone on the west…



Yellowstone Lake

Finally we stopped by the Artist Point overlooking the imposing Grand Canyon of Yellowstone… definitely very awesome... amazing… Of course, every vehicle here always has their fair share of ‘Buffalo Jam’! Of course after seeing so much buffaloes running around, I got to have my buffalo for dinner!


Grand Canyon of Yellowstone


Buffalo jam!


Awesome buffalo meatloaf dinner

The next morning, I went to the Grizzly Discovery Center in town to see some grizzly bears and wolfs. At about noon, I went on my evening wildlife van tour with another 3 Chinese guys.



Wolf


Grizzly bear... pretty big actually... probably a bad idea to meet it in the wild...


A herd of elk in the plains of Madison Valley

This time we went on the upper loop of the park (the main road in Yellowstone is shaped like a figure of 8, with a upper and lower loop and it takes about a day to do one loop!). We stopped at Mammoth Hot Springs Village before going on past Tower Falls and up Dunraven Pass (2700m) where it actually started snowing! We were all so excited to see a black bear up close there!


Roaring Mountain


The massive Orange Mound... my tour guide is the guy in the bottom left


Angel Terrace


My favourite photo, a bull elk in Mammoth Hot Springs Village


It's starting to snow! (Dunraven pass)


Black bear sighted!


The black bear got tired of the attention and went across the road down the mountain

We stopped by the other side of the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone this time before heading back to see the spectacular sunset over the Madison Valley.


Yellowstone Falls


Sunset in the Madison Valley

I left West Yellowstone at about 4am (8th Oct… first had to solve the problem of ice on my windshield!) and drove through very dark and misty conditions back to Utah. Watching the sun rising over the mountains on this good old country road was really quite an experience! I stopped at Blackfoot, Idaho for gas and later at Tremonton, Utah for an emergency 5min nap and coffee break (I was dozing off while driving!). Stopped at Temple Square in Salt Lake City for a short while before flying back to DC.


The towering Salt Lake Temple

The Yellowstone turned out to be much bigger and much more beautiful than my imagination… I can only wish that I’d taken more days off for the trip… Hopefully I can come back again to this amazing place!

Summary: crazy road trip; alone; awesome unusual place.
Feeling: awe; love; beauty; and everything in between.
Price: priceless (well… a couple of hundreds)

Operation - Get Back In Shape!!!

Almost a week back from my most fascinating trip in the States so far… Being dropped right back into work straight after the trip did drop my productivity a lot… I’m struggling to get back to the Eastern US life (which is pretty much city life)… had to sleep a lot, which is really an excuse for my laziness! Will blog more about my travels over the weekend…. I had some stuff written in a small notebook but it was incomplete….

Today was my company’s manufacturing department’s company picnic and we had a nice half day eating and playing sports and stuff. I was pretty disappointed in myself… mainly my shocking lack of fitness!…. I was dying after 10-15mins of small goal post soccer! What the heck?! This was what I’ve been doing pretty much the few years in my secondary school! Wait… secondary school is almost a decade ago too……

Pretty much… I think I need to buck up and start working on my horrible fitness…… join a gym and start on my fall/winter workout routine and hopefully be in good shape for traveling again come January 2007! (California! ^-^) Also there is talk of doing an overnight camping trip next month with John and Jason again (we climbed Old Rag Mountain together in summer)…which is going to be awesome if we manage to do it! Everything’s all good except for the chill of autumn… god I missed summer!