Travels, Visit in Durham, NC, 2009

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After the interview in D.C., I headed to Durham, NC where I visited with my friend Ronnie, shown here, who I had met at SUUSI previously. Above is her house. It is very nice and close to Duke. We walked to her office at Duke and along the way saw the Nasher Art Museum where they had a Picasso exhibit that we were able to see.	=0=
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Along the way to Ronnie's office, we went through the Duke Gardens. Shown above, here and below. They have some newer very nice gardens which are in an Oriental style.	=0=
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Above are pictures of the Duke Medical Center which is just huge and growing. Ronnie is an Assoc Consulting Professor on the Duke faculty there and had some papers to drop off. I waited outside while she went through papers and the squirrel shown here kept me company. :-)	=0=
We walked back through the gardens. They have a Dawn Redwood (shown here) which are very ancient conifers which were common in the fossil record but thought to be extinct until some were found in a remote valley in central China in the 1940s. On that day the first year med students had arrived (their first day) and were having their orientations in groups of about twelve (two doctors, one third year med student, and about nine new students). We walked around trying to avoid the sprinklers which were blocking our path and had a chance to visit with one group (most had broken down into pairs and were doing common team building exercises), but still had to make a dash between various sprinklers (waiting for them to cycle past the path and hoping that we wouldn't get hit by the last while we waited for the next). We made it mostly dry though it wouldn't have been so bad if had gotten wet. After a very pleasant couple of days, I was off to Florida. I stopped at a Loves Truck stop off I95 in NC and parked across the street off the road (on an informal gravel turn around for big trucks). Because it was dark across from the truck stop (trucks stops are generally very well lit as you can see below), I was able to leave the car windows open and slept with my feet to the rear of my Camry (for the first time ever). I had a little 12V computer fan (from an old dead power supply) which I had attached to a cigarette lighter plug and it worked great. The drive the next day to Florida was pretty hot (high of 96 degrees in the car, but more humid than I experienced so far with plenty of rain, too).	=0=
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