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Trip Start Mar 02, 2011 Previous
Entry Trip End Oct 14, 2011

  Broadlands, Virginia
Tuesday, November 1, 2011

It's been quite a trip.  With a length of roughly eight months, it's the longest trip I've ever taken.  Even a brief summary will be rather long.

I spent more time doing outdoor activities than anything else so I'll start with some of them.

I went to ten national parks.  They were:

• Canyonlands Maze and Horseshoe Canyon Districts with their challenging 4WD roads.
  
• Grand Canyon where I hiked down to the Colorado River and back to the rim.
• Death Valley where I checked out the strange trails left by the rocks at the Racetrack.
• Yosemite where I went to the Hetch Hetchy Valley.
  
• Channel Islands where I took a boat trip to Santa Cruz Island.
  
• Gates of the Arctic where I canoed the Upper Noatak River.
  
• Kobuk Valley where I hiked around the sand dunes.
  
• Zion where I visited the Kolob Regions.
  
• Lassen Volcanic where I hiked around the best thermal areas in the U.S. outside of Yellowstone.
  
• Acadia where I visited the Maine seashore.
  

I also visited the following 11 national monuments:

• Statue of Liberty including going up in the crown.
  
• St. Louis Arch
• Grand Staircase-Escalante where I went to Coyote Butte North and South, which are actually both in the Vermillion Cliffs Wilderness Area but they're administered by the Paria Canyon Ranger Station in Grand Staircase-Escalante.
• Natural Bridges
• Pinnacles
• Craters of the Moon
• John Day Fossil Beds
• Scott’s Bluff
• Agate Fossil Beds
• Pipestone
• Effigy Mounds

I also visited a national historical site:

• Chimney Rock National Historic Site

And along with the federal properties, I visited a couple state parks in California:

• Big Basin Redwoods State Park
• Julia Pfeiffer-Burns State Park

I didn't just see natural landscapes.  I also visited a number of gardens:

• New York Botanical Garden (New York, NY)
  
• Conservatory of Flowers (San Francisco, CA)
  
• San Francisco Botanical Garden (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Ganna Walska Lotusland (Santa Barbara, CA)
  

I tried to climb the highpoints of six states and successfully climbed three of them:

• Boundary Peak (NV) (successful)
  
• Mt. Whitney (CA) (too much snow)
  
• King’s Peak (UT) (too much snow)
  
• Gannett Peak (WY) (successful)
  
• Granite Peak (MT)
• Borah Peak (ID) (successful)
  

I visited 11 of the 12 U.S. restaurants on Restaurant Magazine's 2010 World's Best Restaurant List, 14 of the 15 on the 2011 list and 9 of the 10 Michelin three-star restaurants from their 2011 guides for New York, Chicago and San Francisco and their older guides for Los Angeles and Las Vegas.  The noteworthy restaurants I went to are:

• Momofuku Ssam (New York, NY)
  
• Per Se (New York, NY)
  
• Daniel (New York, NY)
  
• Eleven Madison Park (New York, NY)
  
• WD-50 (New York, NY)
  
• Minibar (Washington, DC)
  
• Guy Savoy (Las Vegas, NV)
  
• China Poblano (Las Vegs, NV)
  
• Twist (Las Vegas, NV)
  
• The French Laundry (Yountville, CA)
  
• Chez Panisse (Berkeley, CA)
  
• Coi (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Saison (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Millennium (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Restaurant at Meadowood (Yountville, CA)
  
• Cyrus (Healdsburg, CA)
  
• Manresa (Los Gatos, CA)
  
• The Bazaar - Rojo y Blanca (Los Angeles, CA)
  
• Providence (Los Angeles, CA)
  
• Stefan’s at L.A. Farm (Los Angeles, CA)
  
• The Bazaar - Saam (Los Angeles, CA)
  
• Red Medicine (Los Angeles, CA)
  
• Joel Robuchon (Las Vegas, NV)
  
• E by Jose Andres (Las Vegas, NV)
  
• Mistral Kitchen (Seattle, WA)
  
• Joel Palmer House (Dayton, OR)
  
• Alinea (Chicago, IL)
  
• Charlie Trotter’s (Chicago, IL)
  
• L2O (Chicago, IL)
  
• Moto (Chicago, IL)
  
• Fore Street (Portland, ME)
  
• Le Bernardin (New York, NY)
  
• Jean-Georges (New York, NY)
  
• Momofuku Ko (New York, NY)
  
• Blue Hill at Stone Barns (Pocantico Hills, NY)
  

I visited lots of museums ranging from some of the largest museums in the country to some small museums including these:

• Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY)
  
• Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY)
• deYoung Museum (San Francisco, CA)
  
• California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Museum of Performance and Design (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Museum of Craft and Design (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Asian Art Museum (San Francisco, CA)
  
• San Francisco Art Commission Gallery (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Yerba Buena Center For the Arts (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Musee Mecanique (San Francisco, CA)
  
• San Francisco Art Institute (San Francisco, CA)
  
• California Palace of the Legion of Honor (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Intel Computer Museum (Santa Clara, CA)
  
• J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles, CA)
  
• Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, CA)
  
• Museum of Jurassic Technology (Los Angeles, CA)
  
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA)
  
• Page Museum (Los Angeles, CA)
  
• Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA)
  
• Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (Los Angeles, CA)
  
• The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens (San Marino, CA)
  
• Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena, CA)
• Seattle Art Museum (Seattle, WA)
  
• Experience Music Project / Science Fiction Museum (Seattle, WA)
  
• Museum of Glass (Tacoma, WA)
  
• Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN)
  
• Minnesota Institute of Arts (Minneapolis, MN)
  
• Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI)
  
• Racine Art Museum (Racine, WI)
  
• Charles A. Wustum Museum (Racine, WI)
  
• Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago, IL)
  
• Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL)
  
• Shed Aquarium (Chicago, IL)
  
• Smart Museum (Chicago, IL)
  
• Museum of Science & Industry (Chicago, IL)
  
• Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, IL)
  
• Contemporary Art Center (Cincinnati, OH)
  
• Cincinnati Art Museum (Cincinnati, OH)
  
• West Virginia State Museum at The Culture Center (Charlotte, WV)
• New Jersey State Museum (Trenton, NJ)
• Portland Museum of Art (Portland, ME)
• Museum of New Hampshire History (Concord, NH)
  
• Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, MA)
  
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston, MA)
  
• MIT Museum (Cambridge, MA)
  
• RISD Museum (Providence, RI)
  
• Frick Collection (New York, NY)
  
• Museum of Art and Design (New York, NY)
  
• Brooklyn Museum (New York, NY)
  

I visited the capitols of the following 16 states:

• Tennessee
• Iowa
• Idaho
• Kentucky
• Ohio
• West Virginia
• Pennsylvania
• New Jersey
• New York
• Vermont
• Maine
• New Hampshire
• Massachusetts
• Rhode Island
• Connecticut
• Delaware
  

I visited a number of architecturally interesting sites including:

• San Francisco City Hall
• Hearst Castle
• Eames House
• Seattle Space Needle
• IDS Center
• Taliesin
• House on the Rock
• Willis Tower
• Robie House
• MIT Stata Center
  

I did a lot of other things that don't fit into any of the above categories.  For lack of a better term I'll just label these as miscellaneous

• Armory Show, a large art show in New York.
  
• Flew in a Vertical Wind Tunnel.
• Skied 750,000 feet of vertical in Colorado.
• Took the Sky Jump at the Stratosphere in Las Vegas.
  
• Hunted for morels with the Mycological Society of San Francisco (MSSF).
  
• Watched the Bay to Breakers run in San Francisco.
  
• Drove Lombard Street, the crookedest street in San Francisco.
  
• Went to the Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA.
  
• Went to Burning Man in Black Rock Desert near Reno, NV.
  
• Hunted fossils in the Green River formations in Wyoming.
  
• Stopped to see Carhenge in Alliance, NE.
  
• Browsed the Mall of America in Bloomington, MN.
  
• Took a tour at the Maker’s Mark Distillery in Loretto, KY.
  

As I said, even a summary is long.  I covered a lot of ground in eight months.  It's been quite a trip.

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