The best thing about my prelim last week being moved to Monday was that it freed me up for the drive to Woods Hole on Thursday morning. Given that Woods Hole is a decent three hours in good traffic from Amherst, and this was the Thursday before Memorial Day Weekend, the long weekend that marks the unofficial start of the American summer, and our supervisor asked us if we could possibly make it for a 9am meeting, this involved a very early start. And as matters turned out, the person who would have had to drive if I’d still been in prelim-recovery mode (or Mike had taken the car for a work trip) only had time for three hours’ sleep before we had to be on the road. Our supervisor was already nervous enough about having all three grad students in one car on one long-distance trip at the same time without adding a potentially hallucinating driver to the mix.
In any event, the only problem we faced on the trip was the wonky driver-side electric window getting stuck open just before we got on the Mass Pike, which – as the Mass Pike seems to be the through-route for every truck heading to Boston from the west – wasn’t the most pleasant of experiences. (It was eventually solved by the tried-and-true expedient of hitting the window button repeatedly and calling it names.) The drive reminded me exactly how mind-bogglingly dull American interstates are, and we’re not even in the Midwest; six lanes does remove some of the more exciting moments of long-distance driving in New Zealand, and are frankly necessary for the traffic volumes involved, but make for not much of a view of anything that isn’t cars or trees.
Woods Hole – site of the eponymous Oceanographic Institute – is on the south shore of Cape Cod, basically the only part of Massachusetts outside of Boston that anyone remembers exists, and just opposite Martha’s Vineyard. The Cape is both lovely – I’d never been – and one of those places that is clearly a sort of Venus Flytrap for tourists with money, which is one of the reasons I’d never been. (The other being that it’s just about as far away from where we live as you can get and still be in Massachusetts – which isn’t that far in the continental US scheme of things, but far enough to be dissuasive.) Both Falmouth, where we stayed, and Woods Hole, where our meetings were, were just full of cute little coffeeshops, sailboats scudding across the water, and almost painfully English-seaside-town-esque architecture. Boston remains, in my experience, true to the first impression I formed of it as the most English of the major American cities – New Orleans has been the most European – and Cape Cod is a sort of outlier of that, Dover-on-Long-Island-Sound. It’s historically logical, but still startling, when Western Massachusetts – settled around the same time, but in a much smaller way – is so much more American rural, distinctly different from the English countryside.
Well, to be fair, the American flags are something of a giveaway. (Those shingles are near-ubiquitous here, but I don't think I've seen them anywhere else. The tourist areas of the Cape apparently have pretty draconic regulations to keep it looking this way.)
It's just that they want to make sure you're not confused about which side of the pond you're on.
This is just a fraction of the boats in the harbour.
Our meeting was at the Marine Biological Laboratory. I had been operating under the erroneous impression was part of WHOI – oceanographic scientists, Woods Hole, it made sense – but is apparently quite separate from it in the way that, say, the Mets and Yankees are both baseball teams from New York. Fortunately I think I hadn’t made that assumption to (or in front of) anyone from MBL, so that’s probably OK. (I hope). Woods Hole itself is full of things that are really interesting if you do any ocean-related work and pretty boring if you don’t, like the Redfield Building, as in the Redfield Ratio (the ratio of carbon to nitrogen and phosphorous in plankton) and the place they’re reconstructing Alvin (all right, Alvin is pretty cool even to non-oceanographers). We’d hoped to have a look at it, but it turns out that right now there’s not all that much to see. Maybe next year.
The best thing about my prelim last week being moved to Monday was that it freed me up for the drive to Woods Hole on Thursday morning. Given that Woods Hole is a decent three hours in good traffic from Amherst, and this was the Thursday before Memorial Day Weekend, the unofficial start of the American summer, and our supervisor asked us if we could possibly make it for a 9am meeting, this involved a very early start. And as matters turned out, the person who would have had to drive if I'd still been in prelim-recovery mode (or Mike had taken the car for a work trip) only had time for three hours' sleep before we had to be on the road. Our supervisor was already nervous enough about having all three grad students in one car on one long-distance trip at the same time without adding a hallucinating driver to the mix. In any event, the only problem we faced on the trip was the wonky driver-side electric window getting stuck open just before we got on the Mass Pike, which - as the Mass Pike seems to be the through-route for every truck heading to Boston from the west - wasn't the most pleasant of experiences. It was, however, eventually solved by the tried-and-true methods of hitting the window button repeatedly and calling it names. The drive reminded me exactly how mind-bogglingly dull American interstates are, and we're not even in the Midwest; six lanes does remove some of the more exciting moments of long-distance driving in New Zealand, and are frankly necessary for the traffic volumes involved, but make for not much of a view of anything that isn't cars or trees. Woods Hole - site of the eponymous Oceanographic Institute - is on the south shore of Cape Cod, basically the only part of Massachusetts outside of Boston that anyone remembers, and just opposite Martha's Vineyard. The Cape is both lovely - I'd never been - and one of those places that is clearly a sort of Venus Flytrap for tourists with money, which is one of the reasons I'd never been. (The other being that it's just about as far away from where we live as you can get and still be in Massachusetts.) Both Falmouth, where we stayed, and Woods Hole, where our meetings were, were just full of cute little coffeeshops, sailboats scudding across the water, and almost painfully English-seaside-town-esque architecture. Boston remains, in my experience, true to the first impression I formed of it as the most English of the major American cities - New Orleans is the most European - and Cape Cod is a sort of outlier of that, Dover-on-Long-Island-Sound. It's historically logical, but still startling, when Western Massachusetts - settled around the same time, but in a much smaller way - is so much more American rural, distinctly different from the English countryside. I'd love to go back for a holiday, but a brief one, I think. (pics) Our meeting was at the Marine Biological Laboratory. I had been operating under the erroneous impression was part of WHOI - oceanographic scientists, Woods Hole, it made sense - but is apparently quite separate from it in the way that, say, the Mets and Yankees are both baseball teams from New York. Fortunately I think I hadn't made that assumption to (or in front of) anyone __from__ MBL, so that's probably OK. Woods Hole itself is full of things that are really interesting if you do any ocean-related work and pretty boring if you don't, like the Redfield Building, as in the Redfield Ratio (the ratio of carbon to nitrogen and phosphorous in surface waters) and the place they're reconstructing Alvin (all right, Alvin is pretty cool even to non-oceanographers). We'd hoped to have a look at it, but it turns out that right now there's not all that much to see. Maybe next year. What was remarkable was the way that the scientific institutes were integrated into the town - there were offices above tourist coffeeshops, labs next to bed-and-breakfasts. It's not an uncommon phenomenon in America, the town supported by the academic institution - the whole Five Colleges area I live in is a good example, with UMass Amherst as large, population-wise and size-wise, as the surrounding town of Amherst. Universities and CRIs in New Zealand tend to be much more integrated into larger population centres, with the odd exception like the extremophile research unit in Taupo. I suppose (Lincoln).