RoboCup trip to the US, 2007

Wheee! 14 flights, 12 stops, 5 official events, 4 universities, 2 hire cars, 1 really good holiday and many many new friends ... how is this for a trip? Between the 15th of June and the 27th of July I managed to squeeze all of these in:

1. Fly to College Station, Texas (via Los Angeles and Dallas Fort Worth) for the NIST/DHS Response Robot Evaluation Exercise #4
2. Fly to Corvallis, Oregon (via Dallas Fort Worth) for the International Conference on Machine Learning at Oregon State University
3. Drive to Rockaway Beach (booked an "economy car" via Hertz and got a Prius with all the fruit!) for lunch with a good friend
4. Fly to Atlanta (via Dallas Fort Worth - where we got stuck for 24 hours due to bad weather!) for the Robotics: Science and Systems conference, RoboCup 2007 and the RoboCup Symposium at Georgia Tech
5. Fly to Tampa, Florida to visit the Center for Robot Assisted Search and Rescue at the University of South Florida - and to meet up with friends!
6. Drive to Fort Myers to get a jump on the traffic and visit the summer residences of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford (and fix their penny crusher!)
7. Drive to Key West, Florida, watching the sun set on the way (ya, we mistimed it, we were going to try and get there for the sunset)
8. Drive to Cape Canaveral to visit the Kennedy Space Center!
9. Drive to Orlando for DisneyLand and Universal Studios!
10. Fly to Las Vegas via Dallas Fort Worth to see the Grand Canyon and Cirque du Soleil's production of "O"!
11. Fly to Los Angeles to see Hollywood!
12. Fly to San Jose to meet some friends, visit Google, Stanford University, NASA Ames and the Golden Gate Bridge

Let's just say after all that I was pretty exhausted ... but it was great fun! Now to dig up all those photos ... per-event blog entries to come ... maybe ... yes I know, I haven't updated in 8 months or so, this is the backlog ;-)