2019 in Review

In January, just after the -40°F week that the polar vortex brought, we went to Chicago to see Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, the NPR News Quiz. We flew up Thursday morning, saw the show Thursday night, and enjoyed the rest of the snowy weekend travelling the windy city.

We opted for the City Pass so that we could see the Field Museum, Art Museum, the Aquarium, the Sears/Willis Tower Observation Deck, and the John Hancock building Observation Deck.

There was also a lunar eclipse during our visit, and the Planetarium had a special celestial celebration. The planetarium had scientists, activities, and hot chocolate, but the sky had snow and clouds, and roughly 15 minutes before the eclipse was supposed to start, the clouds obscured our tidal influencer.

The New York Public Library was having a special exhibition on early scientific photography, specifically cyanotypes of plants by Anna Atkins, which was reason enough to Jet (Blue) on up to the Big Apple. The exhibition was in a small gallery, and had plenty of cyanotypes and correspondences between Anna, her husband, and her peers.

We spent the rest of the weekend exploring Brooklyn, eating at trendy Millenial restaurants and bars. We also made a bad decision of going down to the Hudson after dark and almost freezing under the Brooklyn Bridge.

A trip up to Times Square was also in the works, which on a Friday night has plenty of life, as was a stroll over to Korean Town for the Korean Cafeteria near the Empire State Building.

As a part of a work trip, Garrett went to Guatemala to collect data at the Quirigua Mayan Archaeological Site. The Quirigua site was inhabited around a thousand years ago, and has the largest and tallest stelas in the Mayan world. You can see the products from our 3D work on Sketchfab

In late May, we took a trip to Europe to see friends in the Netherlands and meet Gianpiero's family in Pozzouli, near Napoli. Garrett was somehow able to swing a 3 week vacation AND a 3 day conference, and Gianpiero got to stay for another 2 weeks after, one for family time in which his nephew Vincenzo was born, and another few days to retrieve samples for his Ph.D. dissertation.

Most of the time for the two of us together was in the Netherlands, staying at Gianpiero's friend Davide's house in Rotterdam. Davide has a two bedroom apartment in the city, and is close to many of the fun things to do in Rotterdam. We got to meet Davide's Italian friends who live in Rotterdam, and got to eat his delectable cooking.

Our friends Myriam and Vincent live in the northern part of the Netherlands, and we took a 30 minute train ride, that felt like 3 days for some reason, to Alkmaar, and then a bus to Schermerhorn. The highlight of our visit with Myriam and Vincent was hiking at the Nationaal Park Veluwezoom, a quaint little park wandering around cow pastures, a coffee bar along the trail, and barely more elevation change than a good Florida trail.

Gianpiero's friends from university live in Manneheim, Germany, they had come to visit Gianpiero in 2017, and we had to go visit them. Luckily, exactly halfway in between Manneheim and Rotterdam is Köln, Germany, so we each took a morning 3 hour train ride, and took a stroll around the city. The Köln cathedral next to the train station is still undergoing renovations (Garrett visited Köln back in September 2018 on a trip to Oktoberfest), as was the city hall, which has an amusing carving somewhere on it but eluded us when we went to find it. We also went to find a beer garden, but it was closed at mid-day on a German holiday (weird), and then later in the day it when it did open it was cash only, which we were all a bit light on. Our main venue was a restaurant at the East Asia museum near a park in the west of the city.

The second part of the trip was down to Napoli, the major regional city near Gianpiero's home town Pozzouli. Garrett got to meet Gianpiero's family, and stayed at Gianpiero's parent's house. Many of Gianpiero's extended family also lives in Pozzouli, and Garrett got to meet his grandma, his sister, and his aunts.

Gianpiero as the native tour guide showed us around Napoli, taking us to all the best places for pizza, coffee, and pastries. His main claim being that if Di Matteo is the best pizza in Napoli, it is the best pizza in the world, which appears to be true. However, Gianpiero's brother in law took us to a restaurant in Pozzuoli where he knows the chef who cooked us a load of special made dinners for us, and the flavors provided out shined Di Matteo. But then again, without his brother-in-law, Di Matteo probably has the most consistent best pizza.

Gianpiero got us tickets to see Mahler's Symphony Number 6 at the theater in Napoli. Inside it is the standard gaudy baroque that Napoli is known for from its hay-day.

In September we took a trip to New York City, again, this time using the St. Gennaro festival in Little Italy as the excuse to go. St. Gennaro is the patron saint of Napoli, Gianpiero's home town. The festival itself was basically like any American food fair, a street clogged with places to eat fried goods, this one just had a mildly Italian flare.

This time, weather being nicer and Wall street hotels costing over $100 now, we opted to stay at an AirBnB in Brooklyn near Prospect Park, the park and that area of Brooklyn are both really nice placed to walk through. Gianpiero found a photo exhibition in Dumbo under the Brooklyn Bridge called Photovilled. Photoville is a really fun concept, take a bunch of shipping containers and put a different exhibit or gallery in each shipping container. There were also a lot of interesting exhibit concepts inside too, one was a bunch of postcards you can take off the wall that will later reveal a large mural photo, and another where a lot of prints are stacked into a pad, and if you want to take a print, just take one off the pad.

We had a work research trip in October to Castillo de San Marcos and Fort Matanzas, two National Monuments in the National Park Service, and both in and near St. Augustine, FL. We were there to digitize more parts of each Spanish fort, Gianpiero helping out as needed, and Garrett flying the drone to create models of the buildings and landscape.

USF granted us December 21 to January 1 as one long holiday, so we decided to fill the entire time off with a road trip. The trip started with a quick stop in New Orleans, LA, both of our first times in the city. We enjoyed walking around the French Quarter, eating beignets, gumbo, po-boys, and jumbalaya.

Our second stop was Washington, DC, arriving Christmas Eve and staying a few more nights. Christmas Day was very quiet around the capital, the Smithsonian museums were all closed, so we took a stroll around the National Mall. We got to see the Capitol building, the Library of Congress, the Supreme Court, the White House, the Washington Memorial, the World War II Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Jefferson Monument, an 8 mile walking trip. The next two days the museums were open so we took the chance to see the Air and Space Museum, the Museum of the American Indian, and the Natural History Museum. The Air and Space Museum has a wonderful timing and navigation exhibit right now, with interactive exhibits on how sailors used to navigate with astrolabes, the LORAN system created during World War II, pre-GPS satellites, and finally modern GPS systems.