I'm Back!

Nick and I arrived at Cambridge late last night after our France and Spain trip. The trip was mostly good but I didn't climb particularly hard. But I had a good time. There will be many updates to come. Some are already drafted and just need photos added, and uploading, but others aren't yet written. I'll get to them all soon though. Today's priority, though, is going to be catching up on email -- I have about 500 or so messages of varying importance. So stay tuned...

The Plan, Redux

At the moment, the weather forecast for next week in Barcelona is Not Good. We are not driving all the way to Siurana to get rained on, so I suppose there is a possibility that Nick and I will end up spending way more time in Fontainebleau than planned if the forecast doesn't improve. Which will probably make me really grouchy.

I survived my plane flight back to the UK, but I sneezed a lot, so the rest of the plane was probably ready to kill me.

We leave tomorrow at 10am local time -- and there is a lot of packing to be done between now and then.

The Plan

I’m flying back to England (in four hours!) for my final term, but before that starts, Nick and I are taking the car and driving to France and Spain for a 13-day road trip.  Here’s the general outline:

We drive out from Cambridge in the morning of Wednesday, April 8, and we arrive at Fontainebleau that night.  We will then stay in Fontainebleau until the 11 or the 12, depending on the weather (Saturday or Sunday).  We will probably also visit Sage in Paris on the afternoon/night of the 9 or 10 (Thursday or Friday), depending on the weather.  On whichever day we choose to leave, we’ll probably boulder briefly in the morning, and then drive to Andorra, where we’ll spend the night.

The next day (the 12 or the 13), we’ll look around Andorra in the morning before continuing on to Siurana (about an hour or two outside of Barcelona).  We’ll stay in Siurana until either the 17 or the 18 (and hopefully visit Barcelona briefly while we’re there).  On whichever day we leave, we’ll try to climb briefly in the morning before heading back north, and probably back to Andorra.

Again we’ll have a night in Andorra, and a morning, and then continue driving north to Fontainebleau on the 18 or the 19, probably arriving in the evening of whichever day, at which point we’ll try to meet up with a few OUMCers who will be there then.

Then, on the morning of the 21, we’ll be able to climb in Fontainebleau, but from there we’ll need to take the car and drive to catch an evening ferry out of Calais.  From there, we’ll drive back to Cambridge, and will be arriving there late at night on the 21.

Email access will probably be pretty sporadic, depending on what sort of internet situation the campgrounds have.  If no one hears from me, don’t worry – but if I can get email access I will probably use it.

I’ll also be checking my phone sporadically – my English number (when calling from the US) is 011.44.7546.580017.  But that’s expensive.

Wikileaks in England

A recent article does a good job explaining and analyzing (sorry, analysing) a court decision in England forcing the Guardian to take down documents that exposed Barclays’s (is that the right possessive form?) tax evasion techniques.  The Guardian was also not allowed to link to Wikileaks, which still had the documents posted.

By the way, my Barclays bank account is run out of the Isle of Man because I’m an “international student.”  Which is annoying – the fact that Barclays only had one processing center for thousands and thousands of international students meant that it took almost three months for my full bank account in the UK to be set up.

Getting back to the main point, this has shades of the Bank Julius Baer case from about a year ago, where a US District Court in CA tried to force Wikileaks’s domain registrar to “lock” the domain name.  After about a week, the judge turned around and lifted his injunction.  He admitted he was wrong in his preliminary decision, and also admitted that his attempt to shut down the site really only garnered a lot of publicity.

One more side note:  If I was an IP law professor at Cambridge writing an exam right now that needed a breach of confidence question on it, I would totally write one involving something like the Guardian situation.  Maybe throw in something about what happens when a commentator on an article in a different UK newspaper mentions that the documents can be found on Wikileaks (when the article presumably can’t say it itself).  Just saying…

Willey's Slide Report

On Wednesday, I went up to New Hampshire to do the Willey's Slide ice climb with Daddy. We left Westborough around 9, so by the time we were ready to start walking in it must have been around 1. On the way up, the car went over 250,000 miles. Once we actually got to the parking lot, it was pretty muddy (since it was a warm day -- the high must have been near 50), which made packing the gear difficult. It also took a while to figure out exactly which gear we would use.

We had about four harnesses with us, and only two had adjustable leg loops (which we wanted). One was normal, one was a Mammut "sitzgurt" harness from the early 90s that had an interesting buckle system. I thought I was a harness expert, but I couldn't figure it out. Subsequent online research shows that it was probably a "click buckle", but I couldn't make it feel very secure, and I also couldn't make it stay tight (even that picture doesn't really explain exactly how it should work). Daddy said that when he used the harness it would just spontaneously fall off. So I ended up just using a nonadjustable leg loop harness that kind of squeezed, but wasn't too bad.

Daddy also had to adjust my crampons to fit back on my boots.



Once we figured all that out, we started hiking in. My pack felt REALLY heavy (but Daddy had all the gear and the rope). We did it without crampons, and there were sections that were kind of icy/tricky, but it wasn't too bad. We made it to the railroad tracks about 2/3rds of the way up, and took photos ... and I made a panorama photo:





Then we made it up to the base, and started getting ready. There was one other party one the right hand side of the climb, but we were going up the more central/left hand section, so that wasn't really a problem. The first pitch, which was still in the sun, was pretty snowy and went pretty quickly, but the ice was also super slushy and so a little insecure. Daddy said there was really hard ice a few inches below the slushy stuff, but my tools never got down that far.



The second pitch was more of the same, but was a bit more icy and less snowy than the first pitch. The slush made Daddy, who was leading, nervous, and he put in three ice screws (which are a challenge fore me to get out).

By the time we started the third pitch, though, the sun had gone behind the ridge, and we were in the shade (it still wasn't that cold at the belays, though). The ice got a lot harder and more brittle, and Daddy led the crux "bulge" pitch -- but I don't think it was as tricky for him as the second pitch. I followed it without too many issues.



The fourth and final pitch was a full rope length, but not too bad. I did get some ice sort of kicked down on me by both Daddy and the other party, who were slightly ahead of us and moving to their left (the whole thing narrows at the top so we were converging), but nothing too major. I finished that one too, but on the easier sections where I was standing upright, I kept running out of breath. (In the end, I ended up crawling up quite a lot of the climb.)



So that was the end of the climb itself! We ate some M&Ms and I took pictures of the climb, and tried to do another panorama (it didn't come out that wide):





Then it was time for the actual descent, which was the hard part. The descent was a trail in the woods that ran parallel to the climb, and was pretty much at the same angle as the climb ... but you go down it unroped. It was pretty snowy, with only a few icy sections, but it was still very tough for me. So I ended up downclimbing a lot of it. Like, facing in. It took a while. But we still made it down to the packs marginally faster than we made it up. From there, the rest of the descent route (that we had already hiked up on the way in) wasn't too bad -- much less steep, and still easier, even though I was wearing a pack for this part. I strayed from the trail a few times because it was so packed down, and I was tired, which wasn't very LNT of me.

Then we went to North Conway for Daddy to pick up some stuff for his crampons he had ordered at IME. On his way out of the store, multiple old people started yelling at him -- two people he knew (Henry Barber and Alan, a guide) had seen him, and both were trying to say hi at the same time. So Daddy was befuddled.

Then we had dinner at some "brew pub" that Daddy likes to go to. I really liked my dinner: It was chicken, with some sort of teriyaki sauce, and bacon, and mango-pineapple salsa on a bulky roll. It was really good. Especially the mango-pineapple salsa. The waitress that brought us our food was a different one than who took our order, and tried to guess which one of us had which meal, and tried to give me the dainty little wrap that Daddy ordered. Wrong!

Then we had to drive to Westborough. Daddy got a phone message from Harry asking if he wanted to go to MR tonight (Harry didn't know Daddy was in NH), and Daddy did mention that we could get to MR in time for the last hour, but that wasn't happening. So we drove all the way back to Westborough.

So the day was good, I guess, but it was too much work carrying stuff up, and getting myself up the climb, and then getting myself down the climb.

English Judges

First of all, I’m not posting this at a bizarrely early/late hour of the morning.  I’m back in the US, and the blog is still on England time (to keep things relatively simple).

Second, on the way to the airport, Nick and I were listening to some BBC radio station in the car, and the DJ mentioned a recent court decision in the UK that found a cyclist in an accident was contributorily negligent for not wearing a helmet.  Or, actually, that cyclist was not negligent, but the court said that it would be possible for there to be contributory negligence in that situation.  I don’t want to get into the merits of that decision, but instead point out that the DJ then interviewed a fairly high-profile UK judge from the Court of Appeals to get his take on things:  The Right Honourable Lord Justice Jacob (I want to be a judge in England to get a name like that).

I just thought it was really interesting that this relatively high-profile judge made random radio appearances to talk about recently decided cases, and no one made a big deal about it (although this wasn’t one he decided or anything).  In the US, the high-profile judges definitely like to try and remain super cloistered, and people do make big deals when they agree to be interviewed.  So that was an interesting thing I learned about England!

Oh, and going back to an earlier post, here is Abbey Road on Street View:

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A Recap

Krissy, summarizing my blog so far:

what were you complaining about????? everything. cold, hungry, tired, plane seats, rental cars, mud, dirty pants, luggage, carry-on luggage, nick's finger getting in the way of the door, parsnips.

While I’m mentioning her, here’s a picture of Krissy and baby Mario from Sunday:

Oh, and I did Willey's Slide today … but that will be its own separate post later.