Robert and I took off for Santa Barbara again, this time to plan a grant application with Manjunath, Ambuj, Steve and Ken at UCSB and meet with a Swapna, a graduate student whose committee I will be serving on.
It feels like I just made this trip and in actuality, I did. It turns out that this was another quick trip and I hope it will be the last one for the year as I am tired of airports and flying this year.
We caught a late night flight out of SLC to LAX as the flights direct to Santa Barbara were over $1000. Flying South, South West from SLC, we passed over Las Vegas where I caught the introductory photograph, then on down to Los Angeles where one can see the smog, even at night. We picked up a car and drove up to Santa Barbara, arriving too late to eat at any place other than a Denny’s <shudder>.
I had wanted to get in more photography of the UCSB campus with a better camera and lens system than I had last time, but there simply was not any room in the schedule this trip. Because of this limited time, unfortunately, I was also not able to meet up with Trevor for a photowalk, but I will be coming back in the near future and will take advantage of the beautiful weather, architecture and ocean of Santa Barbara, not to mention Trevors gracious hospitality.
After working the entire day on the grant submission, we went out to Carlitos (try the carne asada I highly recommend it) for an excellent dinner and talked some more, this time with a new faculty member at UCSB, Luke Theogarajan who is interested and engaged in some quite provocative ideas in bionic prosthetic devices. After dinner Ambuj hosted us at a lovely party and introduced me to Masala chai which rocked my world. I had never before tasted such a wonderful concoction and that tea ranked right up there with the lovely tea I had in China. There is more tea in my future…
Early the next morning, we raced back down to Los Angeles to catch our flight back home to end the last trip of the year. Because of the rush, we did not stop at the Randy’s Doughnuts, though we should have. Instead we filled up the car across the street while I watched the morning shift of local repo men getting their morning doughnut fix. We essentially skipped breakfast and made a beeline to the Delta Crown Room to get an Internet connection and load up on work for the flight home. Interestingly, as we were sitting there, a Gulfstream V with I believed tail code N2N landed, meaning possibly that Steve Jobs might have been in town. You can see the Gulfstream in front of the Delta 767 to the right of the image above on the other side of the airport. Unfortunately, I did not have a long lens to verify the tail code, but I am pretty sure that was the plane.
