Again?!?

Okay, today was our final day before we left! It was also very cool. This was the day we went kayaking.

We woke up kind of early (7:00), ate breakfast, and went to Food Lion to get some lunch materials for, er…, lunch. Next, we went to the kayaking place and left with the kayaks and the guide and his assistant for the point where we would set off.

I feel too lazy to finish the rest up, but it was a very interesting day. I'll put what happened later.

To Laurel; From Felix

Felix says that he is indeed going to be playing with the BVSO.

The Saga Continues

Okay, it's time for another round of "Lengthy Science Bowl Trip Report!" Seriously, I'm sorry these are so long, but we have done a lot of stuff over the past few days.

Last time on the Science Bowl Trip:

We were in Aiken. We were about to go out to eat and everyone was taking a nap.

Well, for supper, we decided to go to a Japanese restaurant. It wasn't just any Japanese restaurant though. It was one of those cook-in-your-face entertainment meals. There was the grill that we all sat around and he cooked and did cool tricks. It was awesome.

After that, we went around in the car and looked at some of the fancy houses. We also saw some horse race tracks. In my humble yet frank opinion, it was lame.

Wednesday!

The next day was pretty awesome. As with the previous days, we started out by going to some rather sleep-inducing tours/lecture-type things. That's not to say that they weren't interesting (they were; we got to see some mass spectrometers and stuff); it's just that we were tired and didn't have any physical activity to keep us very awake.

Then the coolness began. We went to do some ecology stuff with this completely awesome guy named Tony. He was like the crocodile guy in terms of his enthusiasm, but it was really cool. We went out to the forest place and first looked at the drift fence traps. Basically, there are these fences that herd insects/small animals into buckets where they can be counted and released. We found some six-striped runners (a type of lizard), toads, some centipedes, and large wolf spiders.

There's an interesting story he had to say about the toads. There were these glands behind their eyes which he said were poison sacs. I asked how the poison was excreted, and he said it was through the skin and told an interesting anecdote. Apparently, some youth in the state had been licking the backs of these toads to get high (the poison acts like a hallucinogen). So, the government passed a law prohibiting the licking of the backs of toads. Pretty strange.

So, after we checked some more of those drift fences and met some more gopher turtles, we went over to this pond to check on some underwater traps. There were a snake, a few turtles, and some small fish. Also, there were a few leeches. Tony (he's probaly around 45) spotted them and said something like, "Cool! Leeches!" and just lunged and grabbed them out of the water. We put them into some plastic bags. Then we went to lunch and ate with some of the scientists who worked there.

Next, there was even more coolness. We went to the actual Savannah River and got on a boat. Our objective was to find and catch some Brown Water Snakes. After going on for a while, Tony found one in the bushes. It took us a while to see it (especially me) even we were looking right at it. After a little tight maneuvering, we got right next to it, and he grabbed it! He got bitten a few times, but the snake isn't poisonous so it was OK. Later, I spotted one in a tree (mostly out of pure luck), so Tony was impressed. Michael had asked to catch the next snake, so he got his shot. He grabbed the snake's middle with his bare hands and got bitten just like Tony, but he still got the snake and put it in the snake bag. Excellent. Perhaps in return for finding the snake (the purpose of the snake-finding is to help a student with his thesis), I was allowed to drive the boat around. I took it up to almost its highest speed. It was most excellent. I wish I had a boat of my own to drive around the river. Anyways, we didn't find any more snakes.

Later, after supper, we went up to the Savannah River Site again. We looked at some snakes that they had in captivity, held some baby alligators, fed some larger alligators, and went to see Stumpy. He is a monstrous huge alligator with one foot off (hence his name). We tried to feed him some of the dead mice, but he didn't notice. As we walked back to our car, a guy drove up with one of the boats that we were to use on L Lake, where we were to see the alligators. He popped out of his truck and pulled a dead squirrel out from the back and said something to the effect of "Time to feed Stumpy." He put the squirrel on the end of a long wooden pole and let Stumpy at him. It was awesome. I have some good video footage of it. After that, we drove to L Lake (the artificial lake created as a cooling reservoir for the L nuclear reactor) to go gator-hunting. Meredith, Adam, and I first took a quick ride on an airboat, which was a boat with a giant fan on the back. I clocked its speed with the GPS device and it measured about 45 mph. It was really cool. Next, we switched off with Mrs. Jones, Adam, and Felix. We went on the other regular boat to do some gator-hunting. By this time, the sun had just set. The key to hunting gators is to shine a spotlight parallel to the water and look for the red glint that comes off their eyes. We spotted two gators through the blanket of bugs that had just suddenly appeared. We couldn't get one, went to the other, couldn't get the second, went back to the first, and found a small boat of some other people who had been around with the gator noosed and a line on him. We watched them close his mouth and duct tape it throughly. Michael, Meredith, and I went to the nearby bank to wait for the arrival of the gator.

They dragged the gator over to the bank, where we helped pull him up. They hog-tied his hands and legs and measured him. At this point, the air boat had arrived and the rest had showed up. They proceeded to mark him and take a blood sample. Then they released him into the water. The whole process took about an hour. It was now about 11 o' clock, so we went back to the hotel.

Thursday!

Thursday was basically a travel day. We woke up late (10 AM perhaps) and left for Charleston. It was a long drive, so basically everyone but me and the adults slept. I finished up A Beautiful Mind. It ended up being pretty interesting. Anyways, we got to the hotel, which is completely, totally awesome. It has a restaurant built into the bottom floor called Tristan which advertises "eclectic, creative cuisine." If that doesn't sound expensive, I don't know what does. Anyhoo, next we traveled out to an adjoining island for a so called "Dolphin Watching and Sunset Cruise." We saw some dolphins, which was cool, but it was three hours before sunset. That strikes me as kind of stupid. Next, we went to dinner at this restaurant nearby. It took forever for our food to get to us, and in my case it wasn't that good at all, there was very little food, and it was horribly overpriced. Stinko.

Anyway, after about 2 hours we went back to our hotel and then went on a nighttime walk around part of the city. We looked at part of the open market and found some pretty cool souveniers. Whatever. Then we played 360 (80 with nine decks; it was insane) and went to bed.

Friday!

Okay, today was tour guide day. We got up and went on a carriage tour that took a couple of hours. Next, we went souvenier shopping in an open market. After that, we went to this awesome seafood restaurant called "A. W. Shuck's." I had a superb, bigger, tastier meal for 1/3 of the price of the one I got the previous night. Michael got one of their advertising T-Shirts that says "Big Mussels, Great Legs, and Fantastic Tails: A. W. Shuck's Seafood and Bar." Very funny.

We went to the beach and goofed around for a while.

We went back to the hotel, ate out at an excellent steak/seafood place called T-Bonez, and then went on an interesting "Ghost Tour" of the city where we became acquainted with some of the local myths. Anyways, afterwards, we went back to the hotel to discover that we were sunburned rather badly despite our liberal appliance of sunscreen. Ah well.

Saturday!

It's Felix's birthday! And I am going to sleep!

Hello, everyone! A message from your favorite scince bowl friends.

Hey! We all are in Aiken, South Carolina having a most excellent time. We flew in on Sunday and spent the night inthe local Hampton Inn. It has pretty nice accommodations. Yesterday we went to the Savanna River Site. Because it's government property, we had to get badgered .... er .... badged by a badger. Or something. We all had to show our ID's and get visitor tags that we are required to wear at all times while we are on the grounds. We hadn't gotten a lot of sleep at all the night before because we stayed up late playing 80 and talking, so we all were pretty tired in the morning. First, we went to check out some Red Cockaded Woodpeckers, and endangered species whose population they have brought up from 4 to about 150 in the past few years. We got to raise up a telescoping pole to their nest hole up in a pine tree and see the little baby woodpeckers. Next, Meredith and Adam got to climb maybe 30 feet up on a tree (with the help of a foot-ladder and some climbing gear) to see another nest. There wasn't time for the rest of us to go, so oh well. We got to see some holes dug by the gopher tortises, which are a species of turtles (not a cross-breed). There was some kind of uninteresting tours that went on for a bit (i.e. a local archeology slide show that was designed for fifth-graders). The next part was, in my humble opinion, the coolest part of the day. We got to speak with some forest firefighters/firestarters. We talked a bit about fire safety, but that was mostly in the context of lighting so-called "prescribed burns" to alleviate the threat of wildfires among other things. We could have started a controlled burn ourselves if it had rained recently, but alas! it hadn't. Ah well. We still got to see some of their cool fire-starting equipment and climb up one of the fire towers. It was nifty. Anyhow, we went back to the hotel. Later that night, we went to the local Publix. We each had $285 paid to us for the whole trip, so we wanted to get some Klondike bars. While we were there, we had this awesome idea of frightening the pants off Mrs. Jones. We decided to get a $4 bottle of sparkling grape juice. We went back to the hotel and tried to do some good acting, but Meredith kind of messed it up. Oh well, it was still fun. We also wanted to just for the heck of it buy a park bench that was for sale at the Publix for $80. It would have been hilarious. Ah, well.

Today, we went back to the SRS again. We didn't have to get badgered again, but our van did have to be searched again. Tom Colleran, a person at the Defense Waste Processing Facility, explained to us what they did there. Basically, they take high-level radioactive waste left over from the Cold War bomb-making days, process it, and add borosilicate (the stuff that Pyrex is made of) to turn it into still high-level but very stable glass. They put it into huge canisters (10ft high and a diameter of 2 ft) to be temporarily stored in a warehouse so that they can put it into Yucca Mountain later when it hopefully opens up for waste storage. We got to have a tour of the facility in which they did that. It was quite cool, but the goggles gave me a headache. (It felt as if I were crosseyed; it's kind of wierd to explain.) Later, we got to see this cool demonstration of Wackenhut Security Incorporated, which is hired to do security for the area. They had all sorts of awesome police/near-military equipment. We got to see one of the K-9 demonstrations too.

We spent the rest of the afternoon doing a tour of the robotics lab, which was awesome. To get into the complex (which apparently houses fissile materials) containing the robot lab, we had to undergo some really strict security. There, we wern't allowed to take any cameras, cell phones, or even PDAs. There was an extra security check too. Anyhow, once we got in, we went to the robot lab. The guy there is awesome. He's a middle-aged engineer who is a kid on the inside. He had these inchworm robots that the robot team designed to remotely check out contaminated (e.g. inside the processing plant) pipeline. He had some scaled-down versions that he let us try to make go. Each robot had three toggle switches: left (out, in) which controlled the position of some claws on the left, center (expand, contract) which toggled a hydraulic system that pushed the two ends apart or pulled them together, and right (out, in) which controlled the position of some claws on the right. He let Meredith and me race them, but he didn't tell us how to operate them. It took a little, but we got the hang of it (and I won the race :-) ). Then he showed us a robot that they designed and built in 10 days to clean up the bottom of the inside of the DWPF which had fragments of highly radioactive glass all over. It was neat. Then he showed us that they built a battlebot (the Jabberwock) that got 17th in the world. It was pretty cool. Next, we got to remotely command (the robots were actually in the same room, but we did it by camera and wires) some robots. It was awesome.

Well, we came back to the hotel, and the rest of the guys took a nap, Meredith is reading the new Harry Potter, and I am sitting here on Mrs. Jones' laptop. So, they probably won't post for a while, but I'll try to keep in touch.

South Carolina!

Why, hello there! We five are leaving for South Carolina at 12:45 today. There's a chance that we might tell you how things are going while we're there, but I can't say for certain. This looks like a pretty outdoorsy-centered trip, so we might not have too much internet access time. Anyhow, wish us a safe trip!

Another one!

Well, it's good to know we're still on the web: "asleep with her eyes" "blog".