Last Stop: San Diego

After spending about 6 hours at the Albuquerque airport, we finally boarded the plane that would take us to our last stop for this US trip: San Diego.

Barney Rickett, the Professor whom Kevin has been working with for the past year or so, and whom Kevin would be working with for the next couple of days, picked us up at the airport and brought us to his home in La Jolla. He and his wife have kindly offered to host us for two nights, cooking for us and giving us the entire top floor of their very beautiful home! Due to visiting family members, they were unable to host us for the entire duration of our stay.

La Jolla is a seaside community, and their place is just a few minute's walk away from the beach. While discussing a bit of astronomy, we took a walk down to the beach to enjoy the view and watch the surfers trying to catch some good waves.

For the next few days, Kevin would work with Barney in the Engineering Department in the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). In fact, he wishes that he could have stayed here longer. They've had really good discussions on the project, and Kevin now has enough to think about for the next couple of months.

On the third day, we moved into the accomodation on campus. Unlike UC Berkeley, UCSD has a much more modern flavour to it, being a relatively new university. They've got quite a few interesting giant sculptures around the campus grounds, like the giant teddy bear:

There's even a huge snake that forms a path that leads to the library:

The name Geisel comes from the man behind Dr. Seuss of the cat in the hat fame. Apparently he used to work here once. So they've erected a sculpture of him and one of his characters near the library.