Benj’s blog!

Unless you count Syracuse, until Tuesday, I had only been to two large US cities — Boston and NYC. With this in mind, and since I hadn’t really had much of a break over summer, I decided to accompany Angela on a short trip to Chicago.

We set of on Monday night, with the intention of flying out of Ithaca Tompkins Regional Airport (ITH) (also a first for me) to Philadelphia (PHL) and onto Chicago (ORD), but the weather had made other plans for us. On arrival at the airport it was clear something was afoot, people were milling around and generally looking miserable and the queues for check-in were short, we were second or third in line.

On stepping forward, we were told that the had just been cancelled due to thunderstorms (it was a beautiful evening in Ithaca). On top of that, tomorrow morning’s flight to Philadelphia was full, so we were kind of stuck. The only flight leaving Ithaca that night was going to NY - La Guardia (LGA), but we were told that by the time we would arrive, there were no flights on to Chicago. Thinking we could make an adventure out of it, we chose to go to LGA and travel to ORD at 6am the following morning.

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As promised here are two more great videos from YouTube.

First up, Eric Clapton with Old Love. This is a video from “24 Nights” recording, which for those unfamilar, is a live recording of Clapton’s 24-night stint at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 1990 (and again in 1991!). Enjoy (especially Ray Cooper on percussion ).
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I spent the past weekend in Vermont with Sam (my good friend visiting from England) and Angela (who was there for work). The drive took about 6 hours and was fairly uneventful, passing through NY state and directly into Vermont. So far I’ve noticed that the geography of each of the states are noticeably different. For example PA seems less hilly than NY, which in turn is less hilly than VT. Differences are also apparent in the flora.

We stayed by Lake Morey in the Connecticut river valley. The picture up and left is the view from a 2000ft hill Sam and I canoed to and then climbed and features the aforementioned river. On another adventure, Sam spotted this little thing, which I believe is a salamander, scurrying around. I guess the fauna differs too.

All in all it was a great weekend. And now it’s time to get back to working on my paper.

As promised here are two more great videos from YouTube.Well, actually, two videos, but one track (I’m not getting lazy, it’s split over two videos, so that counts!) Featured are: Ray Brown, Ulf Wakenius, Michael Brecker and others. The track is Secret Love, a jazz standard that I enjoy playing on the guitar. Enjoy
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