Sunday, July 6, 2008

Grand Canyon, Las Vegas Road Trip: June 29th, 2008

Packing & Leaving
We left San Jose at around 1pm from Rohit’s apartment. We’d stayed up ‘till 3am loading the car with goodies and making sure we had everything we needed for the long drive. We tried to plan ahead as much as possible. A few days before our departure date, we had compiled a somewhat comprehensive list of everything we needed to bring with us...



Initially, I was thinking we could take at least another two people with us, so I posted an AD through craigslist, however, nobody replied and that turned out to be a good thing, since there was zero space left in the trunk and no room to sit in the back seat.



As part of our planning, we had picked out three spots to stop at along the way to the Grand Canyon.

San Luis Reservoir
Our first stop presented us with an opportunity to do a short hike to a place where I’ve driven by many times over the years. We initially wanted to stop at the trail head for the main trail in the area, but we didn’t feel like wasting our time searching for it; instead, we settled for a parking an alternate route.






After hiking for a few minutes, we had an opportunity to walk where water once covered the ground just a few years ago.






Following a brisk descent, we started walking on sediment to the water source in the distance. Along the way, we found old beer bottles that were probably tossed by fisherman when water covered the ground, and other miscellaneous items.






And it was really hot down there…


We finally made it to the shore, where we had some snacks and rested for some time. We saw a huge bird in the water and as we looked back at the beautiful landscape behind us, I was gripped by an overwhelming feeling of regret… I reminded myself that our next stop would be Harris Ranch and suddenly, the thought of their mouthwatering burgers gave me the courage to trek back to the parking lot.







Our next stop would be Tehachapi Loop, one of the seven engineering wonders of the railroad world. After taking an exit marked for Tehachapi Loop, we came upon what I labeled a “wild horse.” I honked at it a few times, but it didn’t seem to be affected.



We stayed at Tehachapi Loop until after sunset, and then resumed our journey.





10 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was browsing Inet looking up info about Canon FS100 and your post came across. It's offtopic to your post but if you don't mind - I'd like to ask few questions about the cam. First of all - did you make all those photos in the post by this Canon FS100? They seem to be of a good quality. And was the UTube movie the best thecamcorder can do? the thing is tat I'm trying to consider the camera for family history filmings... so I'm wondering about the quality of the movies it can do.

Eugene said...

The photos were taken on a Canon PowerShot SD630 Digital Elph. As for the video quality, the youtube video is not a good example of what this camera is capable of. The camera takes very good quality SD video. I would deem it very acceptable for your purposes and the only way you could really improve is by upgrading to an HD camcorder.

Anonymous said...

Thank you for your prompt reply. I'd gladly get an HD camcorder but the price gap between SD and HD category here, in Ukraine is pretty big. So I have to stay on SD but ... I'm trying to find at least a cam, that would be able to do the job not only outdoors under sunlight, but what's more important for me - inside the house with artificial light avaliable. Can you tell me from your experience - what kind of noise level and grainness will i get filming, say, indoors birthday? Will the result be worth looking at using TV set? What is the video resolution in pixels in SP and XP modes? Is it grainy in XP?

Eugene said...

I can't answer your questions, however, I will try to take some sample video with the camcorder and post them on here.

Anonymous said...

Thank you a lot! that would be very kind of you.

Eugene said...

I took a small indoor poor-lit video clip and encoded it using the divx video codec. The result can be viewed here:

http://dl4u.savefile.com/d1b0bcce4f7ada823e38c1360598ace8/sampleDivx.avi

Anonymous said...

I guess I'm kinda late or something, as it says "Invalid download session. Please initialize download session again."
Can't download it. Would you be so kind to re-post it...

Eugene said...

try this link:

sampleDivx.avi

Anonymous said...

Wow ... that's amazing. Pretty good quality if the light was low. Aliasing is pretty visible though...
Thatnk you a lot for all your time.

Eugene said...

I think that might have something to do with the compression I used.