Sunday, March 6, 2011

3/6/11: The First Day

Today is our first day of our trip. In case anyone needs any background information, Matt Biron and I, along with our fathers and Mr. Feenstra, are here in Big Sky, Montana at the IEEE Aerospace Conference because we won the Zero Robotics National Competition. Matt and I will be presenting on Tuesday, March 8th about our experiences in the Zero Robotics program.

Today we had to wake up early and get to Logan Airport by 6:30. My dad and I stopped for a quick bite to eat at Dunkin' Donuts first. We departed at about 8:00 AM and arrived at our layover destination in Minneapolis at about 10:30 local time. We stopped for a snack/lunch at Subway while at the airport. Our flight to Montana was delayed by almost 2 hours, so Matt and I played some games and went over our presentation. We departed at 2:00 PM local time and arrived in Montana at around 3:30 local time. We grabbed our bags and our rental car, a maroon Chevy Tahoe, and headed off towards Big Sky. Matt, my dad, and I threw lots of nice snowballs at each other.

We crossed through beautiful mountain landscape, and saw some fishermen fishing in a river during 30 degree weather--yikes! After about an hour of driving and/or getting lost, we reached the resort.

Mr. Feenstra went in to check us in and find out which room we were staying in. When he came out, he had some awesome news: we had received a free upgrade. And what an upgrade it was! A 3-bedroom, 3 bathroom condo with a couple of 50-inch TVs, games, and its own Wi-Fi router.

We got ready to go see some of the presentations, as well as eat dinner. We saw first a presentation on the irrationality of human thinking and reasoning, and then a presentation on a quantum theory that explained gravity (went WAY over my head; I don't even know what the 5th dimension is, let alone the 8th one!). We saw an LCA alum from the class of 2004 who immediately recognized Mr. Feenstra, so we had a chat with him. We had dinner, and were going to go to an Ice Cream social, but were far too stuffed. So, we went home, lounged a bit, and went to bed... sorta. I'm staying up writing this. But now I'm done, and I'm going to bed.

What a great way to kick things off!

4 comments:

  1. Hey...you forgot to mention that I woke up early too yesterday morning to drive you and your Dad into the airport! LOL

    ReplyDelete
  2. Very Cool Travis. I hope there's a video of the presentation. I'll be looking for it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. There will be a video of the presentation up tomorrow, and tonight I'll have a bunch of other cool videos and pictures up as well.

    ReplyDelete
  4. If jou See-Attle, tell her I said hi.

    Wait, that's Washington...

    ReplyDelete