Florida Fun

I spent 4 days in Florida for the 30th AMS hurricane and tropical meteorology conference last week. The conference was at the Sawgrass Marriot, in Ponte Vedra just outside of Jacksonville (i.e. the northeast of Florida close to Georgia). It is the golf course they use for the Players Championship for those that are into golf (not me, I didn't even see the golf course).

Anyway, aside from a slight detour on the trip down it was a great conference workwise and socialwise! I got to see a lot of friends from Texas and Colorado, some of which I hadn't seen since I left Colorado in 2007. It was awesome to hang out with everyone - and those Pina Colodas really were good!



View from my room



Most of the week was spent sitting in conference rooms and talking about science. I'm not going to talk about work here, but I'm pretty sure my talk went well and I spoke to a lot of great people. Anyway, even though we were only a few blocks from the beach I only managed to go down to the private beach club (part of the hotel) on my final evening. We walked down the beach and had some food. On our walk I noticed what I thought was either a jellyfish or a bit of plastic (it was all dried up). I poked at it with my shoe a bit and then moved on. Then I saw a couple more that weren't as dried up and were more brightly coloured. I still didn't touch them of course - I was taught well! Anyway, when I got home I looked them up in one of Matt's field guides. Turns out they were Portuguese Man-O-Wars!! For those that don't know, they are highly toxic jellyfish and can really give you bad burns. Glad I didn't touch them :-)

Beach

On the way home I flew through Washington D.C. I only had 38 minutes to make my flight to Albany so I was a little stressed but as we were taxiing to the terminal I noticed something out of my window. It was the space shuttle still on the back of the NASA 747 that had just transported it from Kennedy Space Center to D.C. to be an exhibit at the air and space museum. It was really amazing to see it just sitting there at the edge of the taxiways/runways. It would probably be even more crazy to see it being transported on the roads to the museum. Anyway, we got up pretty close on my second flight as we went to the runway. Definitely an unexpected perk of the trip.

Space shuttle

Despite the fun trip, it's always nice to come back home!