Sunday, October 7th - Back on the (American) Road
The combination of wine, pepperoni pizza and the anxiety of another 3 weeks of travel, produced a bellyful of acid, that crawled up my throat and woke me before the 2 a.m. alarm was scheduled to go off. The 3 hours of rest, if you could call it that, didn’t refresh me. It was far too little, leaving me groggier than before laying my head to the pillow. Anita and I had to catch a 6 am flight from Sacramento to Washington D.C. I pulled back the covers, disturbing the weiner dog at my feet, as she growled disapproval at my departure. I showered in a daze, not sure if I’d washed my hair once, or twice, brushed my teeth and dressed. After quickly packing my clothes that my daughter had ironed for me the night before, I went back into the bedroom and kissed my wife, and two children goodbye, sighing at the realization that I had only been home for 24 hours.
The journey between Chico and the Sacramento airport passed quietly as Anita and I struggled to reset our internal clocks to east coast time. The next 2 weeks will see us travel over much of the Midwest and the Washington D.C. area. First, we’re off to Baltimore, to visit the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institue. We will drive into the fall-foliaged West Virgina Hills, to the worlds’ largest steereable radio telescope. Then, we head to a planetarium conference in Wheeling. We will visit one of America’s oldest observatories, in Cincinnati, and interview a cosmologist in Cleveland. From there, we travel to the Windy City, to visit our friends at the Adler planetarium, and we’ll end up at the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin.
This begins what should be the last 4 weeks of travel for the production. Its also some of the most important travel we will do, as we’ll be conduction many of the key interviews for the program. These interviews will be conducted by Anita and myself, as Krista remains in Chico to begin the log and capture process of the footage and interviews we’ve got in the can. Scott has other obligations outside this production. So its just us, similar to our previous emmy-award winning Astronomy telecourse we produced in 2004.