I’m not really a huge fan of socal. I think I’ve mentioned that before. I mean, there are some great things going for socal. There’s an abundance of awesome food down there, some stuff which is not really available up here. The beaches down there are great, not like the cold water beaches we have…

If you remember from your early calculus classes, an inflection point is a point on a curve where the curvature changes sign. On an S-curve, the inflection point occurs at the transition point between the increasing-slope segment and the decreasing-slope segment. I like Wikipedia’s illustration of an inflection point- “If one imagines driving a vehicle…

One of my favorite restaurants when I was a kid was a place called Stone Soup. I remember going to Tanforan mall one day with my mom and being really sad because it went out of business. It was a small cafeteria style place like Pluto’s or Jack’s Urban Eats. I think part of the…

One of my favorite lesser known movies is Big Fish. It’s about a son who resents his dad because he thinks the crazy stories about his past are all lies. At his funeral the son finds that the traveling circus, the giant, the Chinese twins that were in his dad’s stories were all real. The…

We spent the night at my old college roommate Chris’s place in New Jersey.  It was pretty cool catching up with him.  His son Sam is really cute, and grew a lot bigger since the last time I saw him.  In the morning we took the train into New York City with him, since he…

Our car broke down in Amish country so we were forced to ride a buggy to the nearest car repair shop, which was over a hundred miles away.  We couldn’t find afford a horse though, so we had to take turns pulling the buggy. Haha just kidding.  We took this picture at a little Amish…

Dayton’s reason for existence is a humongous US air force base.  The air force base is home to the USAF museum.  Here they have several humongous hangers that house some of the world’s most famous aircraft including the F-117, SR-71, and even a F-22 raptor.  It was pretty cool taking pictures with all these exotic…

Another long drive on the interstate, but this one wasn’t too bad.  Probably because we drove from one famous BBQ city to another.  Again we yelped the best BBQ place in town and found a joint called Pappy’s.  It was in an inconspicuous building, and we actually walked right by the door and would’ve missed it if…

Sioux Falls is a pretty cool town. It’s named after a waterfall that runs in the heart of downtown.  We made a quick stop there before heading out of town. Now we were heading into the heartland of America.  There wasn’t much to see and the long stretches of interstate highway were straightforward and monotonous.…

Mount Rushmore was one of the most anticipated sights of this trip, and it didn’t disappoint.  But even before Mount Rushmore we got to do some cool things.  The drive out of Worland was pretty cool.  We passed through a canyon that had some of the oldest rocks in the planet visible, some over 3…

Wow today we drove in four different states.  We passed north out of Salt Lake City out of Utah and into Idaho.  Idaho, at least the part we drove through, is pretty much like you’d expect, lots of farmland and grassland.  After Idaho we drove through Montana for a grand total of 30 minutes.  Montana…