Snippets from Mike's Road Trips

• Upper Gauley rafting trip, October 2006.  With Mark Stevenson, Karl Kleinpaste, and George Jones.  More full contact rafting!  This time we also rafted the Lower Gauley, which was pretty but not as wild a ride as the Upper.
• Hike up Granite Mountain, WA, July 2006. With Alex Mares-Manton.  Splendid beauty and isolation!
• A hike up Sauk Mountain, July 2005. Stunning scenery, beautiful wildflowers, and Mike and Alex Mares-Manton enjoying one another's company.
• Lexington, Kentucky on November 14, 2002, for Mike to attend a Bruce Springsteen concert with Alex Mares-Manton, an American friend living in Singapore, who needed some fun in his life!  Three hours of singing, dancing, and yelling no more than a dozen feet from the stage.  Amazing!!!  As a fellow musician I have to say, Bruce and the Band were definitely not going through the motions -- they gave their all the entire time.  We were so close that Alex read Bruce's lips when he said to Clarence Clemens off microphone at the end of three curtain calls "Boy, did we rock this town, or what?!".
• Taipei, Taiwan, June 2001.  The people were friendly and the food was wonderful, particularly the dumplings at Dim Tai Fung and the soups at King Join.  This was Mike's second trip around the world (Seattle -> Philadelphia -> Munich -> Bangkok -> Taipei -> Tokyo -> Seattle).
• Fourth-annual Upper Gauley rafting trip, September 2000.  This time adding John Regehr.  A wild ride, as always!
• Martinique in the French Caribbean -- Mike, January 2000. Martinique is both fully Caribbean and fully French -- an amazing combination. Very lush, with banana and sugar cane plantations covering much of the flatter land, and the 4500 foot volcano Mt. Pelee towering over the north end of the island.
• Mike's third now-annual rafting trip on the Upper Gauley River in West Virginia -- September 1999. With David Lund and Mark Stevenson, plus a now-regular friend on the river -- our guide extraordinaire, Phillip Belcher.  Tremendous, as always.  This year, with crash-and-burn photos!
• Rafting on the Upper Gauley River in West Virginia -- September, 1998. Mike, with David Lund, Mark Stevenson, and our trusty guide Phil.
• Rafting on the Upper Gauley River in West Virginia -- September, 1997. Mike, with David Lund, Mark Stevenson, & Steve Ploughe. Tremendous!

Also, see Mike's blog and Mike's work web site.

Where do you want to go today?  :-)