Chris Pine Will Play Kirk In New Trek Movie

That's him on the immediate left next to Shatner. The rest of the cast is also in place.



Zachary Quinto, the bad guy from Heroes, will play Spock. Karl Urban - the guy who played Eomer in the Lord of the Rings movies -- will play McCoy. Simon Pegg of Shawn of the Dead and Hot Fuzz fame will play Scotty. John Cho (star of Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle and the upcoming Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay) will play Sulu.

Although the casting looks to be pretty solid, I still think there is a good chance this movie will suck. I was under the initial impression that the film was going to be about Kirk and Spock's final days in the Academy -- followed by their first space mission together as junior officers -- and I thought that might be interesting. But now it sounds like it will be set aboard the Enterprise and Kirk will be the captain.

I hope I'm wrong and the movie turns out to be good, but I just think that the whole Star Trek concept has run out of steam. What they should do instead is let the franchise rest for about a decade and then return with a television series set about 100 years later than Next Generation.

Maybe they could do a series where the Federation is destroyed and the survivors of the last starship -- Enterprise -- lead a rag-tag fugitive fleet on a lonely quest to find a new home (or something like that).

This Could Get Ugly

From Reuters:

Kurdish rebels killed 17 Turkish soldiers and wounded 16 others in an ambush on Sunday, prompting crisis talks in Ankara to consider a military strike against rebel bases in Iraq.

The attack, the worst in more than a decade by rebels of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), came four days after Turkey's parliament overwhelmingly approved a motion to allow troops to enter northern Iraq to fight guerrillas hiding there.

"We are very angry. ... Our parliament has granted us the authority to act and within this framework we will do whatever has to be done," an ashen-faced Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan told reporters.

Is A Presidential Pardon In Alberto Gonzales' Future?

It is starting to sound like one might be necessary (from the Spokesman-Review):

The U.S. Inspector General may recommend criminal prosecution of departed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales at the conclusion of an investigation, possibly as early as next month, the fired former U.S. attorney for Western Washington told a Spokane audience Friday. * * *

“My best guess is [the Office of Inspector General's final report to Congress] will be released sometime next month,’’ and likely will include recommendations for criminal prosecutions of Gonzales and maybe others, McKay said.

Gonzales “lied about” reasons for the firings when questioned under oath in July by the Senate Judiciary Committee and now has hired a lawyer and is refusing to answer questions from the Inspector General, McKay said.

The White House said McKay was fired for poor performance ratings of his office, but the ex-U.S. attorney said he and his office got exemplary reviews just three months before he was fired.

Of course, Gonzales would never see the inside of a jail cell [Fredrick, are you in a betting mood?] In fact, unlike what happened to Scooter Libby, I'm certain that Bush would pardon Gonzales before a trial even started.

But that doesn't mean they shouldn't at least begin a criminal prosecution. I lost count of how many times Gonzales lied under oath before Congress.

Sure, he wasn't the only Bush official to do so -- lying seems to be standard operating procedure for the White House these days. Call me old-fashioned, but I think the Attorney General for the United States of America should be held to a higher standard, even though a criminal prosecution would amount merely to a temporary inconvenience for that sonofabitch.

It Begins

Snowfall in Bend on October 20. This is the earliest first snowfall of the season that I can remember.

Yesterday Was A Good Day For The Democrats

Maybe it was the result of a recent poll showing Bush with a 24% approval rating, but something definitely clicked yesterday for the Democrats -- well, at least for two Democrats.

This is what California Democratic Rep. Pete Stark said during yesterday's House debates over whether to override Bush's veto of legislation to expand the SCHIP program (the override attempt failed):

First of all, I'm just amazed that they can't figure out-- the Republicans are worried that we can't pay for insuring an additional ten million children. They sure don't care about finding $200 billion to fight the illegal war in Iraq. Where are you gonna get that money? You gonna tell us lies, like you're telling us today? Is that how you're going to fund the war? You don't have the money to fund the war or children, but you're going to spend it to blow up innocent people, if we could get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the President's amusement.

Of course, the Republicans immediately demanded a retraction, but Stark would have none of that. He simply responded by offering more criticism of the "chicken hawks in Congress who vote to deny children health care." Stark apparently understands how to deal with Republicans -- raise the stakes, and when the Extreme Right complains about it, then re-raise.

And Democratic Senator Chris Dodd found some guts as well:

Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) announced in a breathless press release this afternoon that he would block the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) "from being considered by the full Senate and from receiving a vote on the Senate floor." The statement came as the Senate Intelligence Committee met to consider the legislation -- and weeks before it is likely to reach the floor.

On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of Senators and the Bush administration reached a compromise on the politically charged bill, which governs the federal government's domestic surveillance program, including a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies. Civil libertarians oppose the compromise as going too far to protect telecoms that were revealed to have participated in a warrantless wiretapping program, and because the legislation wouldn't establish warrants for each individual wiretap.

Dodd said he would place a "hold" on the FISA bill, a device available to any senator to stop legislation from moving forward. "By granting immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in the president's terrorist surveillance program, even though such participation may have been illegal, the FISA reform bill sets a dangerous precedent by giving the President sweeping authorization to neglect the right to privacy that Americans are entitled to under the Constitution," Dodd explained in a statement outlining his concerns.

The rhetoric got hotter with every paragraph. "It is unconscionable that such a basic right has been violated, and that the president is the perpetrator," Dodd said. "I will do everything in my power to stop Congress from shielding this President's agenda of secrecy, deception, and blatant unlawfulness."

We'll see how all this eventually plays out, but it is a good start.

24% Of Americans Still Support Bush

From Reuters:

Deepening unhappiness with President George W. Bush and the U.S. Congress soured the mood of Americans and sent Bush's approval rating to another record low this month, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Wednesday.

The Reuters/Zogby Index, which measures the mood of the country, also fell from 98.8 to 96 -- the second consecutive month it has dropped. The number of Americans who believe the country is on the wrong track jumped four points to 66 percent.

Bush's job approval rating fell to 24 percent from last month's record low for a Zogby poll of 29 percent.

And speaking of asses, here is a contest I can really get behind.

Moths To The Flame

I love it. The GOP and their harshoid mouthpieces just got their asses handed to them on the whole Graeme Frost Debacle and now it appears that they are coming back for more. This time they are trying to swift boat Bethany Wilkerson, a two-year-old girl who benefited from the SCHIP program after being born with a serious heart problem.

I think the Democrats are really on to something here. What they should do is line up at least a dozen more kids just like Graeme and Bethany and release videos featuring each one and explaining how each benefited from SCHIP.

Like lemmings to the sea, Michelle Malkin and other right wing extremists will be compelled to attack every one of these kids. The overall political effect will be like Terri Schiavo times 12.

Krugman Is Right (As Usual)

Paul Krugman's recent op-ed, "Gore Derangement Syndrome," addresses the Extreme Right's outrage over Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and it is right on the money. The whole piece is great, but here is my favorite section:

* * * What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved. * * *

The Extreme Right's recent attacks on Gore have been nothing short of hilarious. As Krugman mentioned in his op/ed, the National Review Online suggested that the Nobel Peace Prize should have been shared with "that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance" (bin Laden apparently mentioned climate change in one of his videos, so that is enough for the Right Wing to allege that Gore is in cahoots with The EvilDoers).

But Imbecile Supreme Bill Kristol and his cohort-in-idiocy Charles Krauthammer had the funniest responses:

Conservative commentators Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer appeared on the program Fox News Sunday this morning and were eager to rain on the environmental activist and, now, Nobel laureate's parade.

"Friday, I felt a warm glow thinking this man had won the Nobel Peace Prize for bloviating about global warming," Kristol said through a snarky grin. "It's a prize given by bloviators to bloviators."

Krauthammer perhaps felt Kristol was letting the prize committee and prize winners off easy.

"Look, let's not forget what the prize is about," he admonished. "Al Gore joins the ranks of Yasser Arafat, the father of modern terrorism, Le Duc Tho, who sign a treaty on behalf of a government that two years later invaded and extinguished the country it signed that treaty with, and the most disgraceful ex-president of the United States Jimmy Carter," another undeserving winner in Krauthammer's view.

How do we know for sure that giving Al Gore the Nobel Peace Prize was the right thing to do? Because Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer thought it was the wrong thing to do. And that's enough confirmation for me, given the track record of these idiots. Indeed, Kristol has made a career out of being wrong.

Last Wilderness Trip Of The Season

Central Oregon's weather from mid-September to mid-October is usually the nicest of the year. Sure, the nights can get pretty cold, but the days are usually sunny and comfortable. That's why I like to do a lot of backpacking right about now (the lack of mosquitoes is also a big plus).

Unfortunately, the weather for the last month or so hasn't been the greatest. Just check out my posts from a couple weeks ago to see what kind of conditions we've been having in the high country lately.

But this last weekend's weather was great, so Danimal and I decided to take one final overnight trip into the the Central Oregon wilderness before the snows really start to fly. We ended up backpacking into an area full of smaller-sized lakes to see if we could catch a few trout while enjoying what will probably be one of the last decent weekends of the year.

Backpacking is so much easier when it isn't snowing or raining on you. I'm not saying that backpacking in bad weather is always unenjoyable -- it isn't -- but things like setting up camp or packing up to leave are much simpler when the skies are clear and sunny. It's also a lot easier to see the stars at night when it isn't snowing.

Fishing was a bit on the slow side, but we did tangle with a few cutthroat as well as one particularly tenacious brook trout that followed Dan's bait right up to shore and then leapt in an attempt to eat Dan's weight and swivel as Dan was pulling his rigging out of the water. I then flipped my spinner into the shallows a few feet from this fish, and he did a beeline right to my lure, hit it hard, and then put up a really aggressive close-to-shore fight. We released that fish, but kept two others for dinner and breakfast.

We did quite a bit of "off trail" backpacking this time, guided only by compass and our map (no GPS this trip). Some of the lakes we visited have no trails going into them, which can make them a bit difficult to find sometimes, but we managed. We saw a couple of deer hunters up there about five miles in, but nobody else.

Anyway, it is a great time of year to be roaming around in the high country, but also a sad time because the area wll be snow covered in a few weeks and inaccessible until the late Spring or early Summer. Oh well.

Now What? (with update)

Al Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize. He's sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I'm sure the Extreme Right will attack the award on the basis that climate change -- whether it exists or not -- has nothing to do with peace. The problem with that argument is that even Bush's Defense Department believes that climate change is one of the greatest -- if not the greatest -- security threats our country currently faces. No matter -- the Extreme Right doesn't much care about the facts anyway.

The issue now is whether Gore will try to take advantage of all this positive press and run for president. For a long time, I thought that Gore would run, but only if no clear front-runner emerges early from the current Democratic field.

Well, Hillary has emerged as the clear front-runner. Yes, it is still early and anything can happen, but there it is. One year ago, I thought it would have been a mistake for the Democrats to nominate Hillary -- and thus essentially neutralize Iraq as a campaign issue for the 2008 General Election -- but one of the underpinnings to my thinking in that regard was that the GOP would run a candidate who could actually win the presidency.

Fortunately for the Democrats, that is not happening. Giuliani, the current GOP front-runner by some accounts, is a cross-dresser who is so hated by the Radical Religious Right that they are threatening to run a third-party candidate if Rudy gets the GOP nomination. Giuliani is even hated by his own children, for God's Sake.

Romney is not only hampered by being a practicing member of a religion that some folks think is akin to a cult, but is also the biggest flip-flopper in American political history. He'd get crucified in the General Election.

The one Republican I thought might have a chance -- Fred Thompson -- is reportedly the laziest campaigner in the world, and he also thinks the Soviet Union is still a real country. Plus, he's probably the most right wing of the GOP field, and that alone might sink his chances in the General Election because Bush is the most right-winged president in American history and I think that folks are a bit tired of having an extremist in the White House.

Anyway, my current thinking is that Gore will probably not run for the 2008 nomination. But I hope he proves me wrong because I believe he would make a great president.

Gore/Obama 2008.

UPDATE: For what it's worth:

A source involved in Gore's past political runs told CNN that he definitely has the ambition to use the peace prize as a springboard to run for president.

But he will not run, because he won't take on the political machine assembled by Sen. Hillary Clinton, said the source. If the senator from New York had faltered at all, Gore would take a serious look at entering the race, the source said. But Gore has calculated that Clinton is unstoppable, according to the source.

More Treason From The Bush Regime

Isn't it funny how Bush apologists never hesitate to accuse anti-war folks of being traitors when the Bush Regime itself has committed several acts of outright treason in the past seven years? Here is the latest one (from the Washington Post via AmericaBlog):

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network. * * *

This latest act of treason, however, is different from all the other traitorous acts of the Bush Regime because this time the Democrats control Congress and I have no doubt that they'll get right on it and expose the wrongdoers.

I'm kidding, of course.

And on a somewhat unrelated topic, I found this interesting:

Two months before the 2004 election, when she was still at NBC's "Today" show, [Katie] Couric had asked Condoleezza Rice whether she agreed with Vice President Cheney's declaration that the country would be at greater risk for terrorist attacks if John Kerry won the White House. Rice sidestepped the question, saying that any president had to fight aggressively against terrorism.

Couric interrupted and asked the question again. Would a Kerry victory put America at greater risk? Rice ducked again, saying that the issue should not be personalized.

Soon afterward, Couric got an e-mail from Robert Wright, the NBC president. He was forwarding a note from an Atlanta woman who complained that Couric had been too confrontational with Rice.

What was the message here? Couric felt that Wright must be telling her to back off. She wrote him a note, saying that she tried to be persistent and elicit good answers in all her interviews, regardless of the political views of her guests. If Wright had a problem with that, she would like to discuss it with him personally. Wright wrote back that such protest letters usually came in batches, but that he had passed along this one because it seemed different.

Couric felt there was a subtle, insidious pressure to toe the party line, and you bucked that at your peril. She wanted to believe that her NBC colleagues were partners in the search for truth, and no longer felt that was the case. She knew that the corporate management viewed her as an out-and-out liberal. When she ran into Jack Welch, the General Electric chairman, he would sometimes say that they had never seen eye to eye politically. If you weren't rah rah rah for the Bush administration, and the war, you were considered unpatriotic, even treasonous.

The reason this stuff still angers me really has nothing to do with the fact that BushCo lied this country into a war -- and then repeatedly committed acts of outright treason -- and neither he nor anyone else in his corrupt administration has really been called on any of it.

What troubles me is how much the Corporate Media assisted the Bush Regime in launching the illegal invasion, and then continued to help our Deserter-In-Chief "propel the propaganda" with regard to Iraq and the "War on Terror" long after the stated reason for the invasion (i.e., Iraqi WMD) turned out to be complete bullshit. The question Katie Couric was asking Condi Rice was a legitimate one that should have been answered.

And since when does a single Bush-supporting, e-mail-sending moron from Georgia get to dictate what kind of questions a network news interviewer can ask Condi Rice?

And speaking of extremists, I find this to be hysterically funny (from the Oregonian):

Opponents of a new domestic partnership law for same-sex couples failed to gather enough signatures to put a referendum on the November 2008 ballot.

The secretary of state's office said Monday that volunteers who spent the summer collecting signatures to allow voters to weigh in on domestic partnerships fell 116 signatures short of the 55,179 needed to qualify for the ballot. * * *

Am I understanding this right? These right wing religious extremists worked all through the summer getting signatures and actually got over 55,000 legitimate ones, but fell short of their goal by a mere 116 signatures?

That may be the funniest thing I've ever heard.

I've Got Some Good News And Some Bad News (With Update)

First the bad news:

A Minnesota judge has denied Sen. Larry Craig's request to withdraw his guilty plea to a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge stemming from his arrest in a sex sting at an airport men's room.

Hennepin County District Judge Charles Porter found Craig had entered the guilty plea "accurately, voluntarily and intelligently" and it was too late to withdraw his admission.

In a sharply worded, 27-page order, the judge found the Idaho Republican had freely given his plea after extensive discussions with prosecutors and after waiving his right to an attorney.

"The defendant, a career politician with a college education, is of at least above-average intelligence," Porter wrote. "He knew what he was saying, reading and signing."

Well, that's a shame, because now it looks like Senator Craig will have to follow through with his promise to resign, thus ending a scandal that really had the potential to replace PenisGate as my all-time favorite.

But wait! All is not lost! Here is the good news:

Idaho Sen. Larry Craig defiantly vowed to serve out his term in office on Thursday despite losing a court attempt to rescind his guilty plea in a men’s room sex sting.

“I have seen that it is possible for me to work here effectively,” Craig said in a written statement certain to disappoint fellow Republicans who have long urged him to step down.

Excellent.

UPDATE: Robert Novak said this on Saturday:

I have talked to several of my sources in the Senate, and this came as a surprise to me. . . . They knew about it. They knew that he had this problem, and it was in the closet. And it was not just a homosexual relationship. It was this weird conduct. They didn’t do anything about it.

More Bad News For GOP

This is brutal:

When it comes to looking for a presidential nominee, Republican voters may not want a full divorce, but they certainly want at least a trial separation from President Bush.

In the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll out Wednesday night, about half of all Republicans (48 percent) want a candidate who takes a “different approach” from that of the president, while just 38 percent want a “similar approach.” This is a reversal from April, the last time the question was asked, when 50 percent wanted a candidate who took a similar approach as opposed to 41 percent who wanted a different one.

It'll be interesting to see how the GOP presidential candidates deal with this particular problem, given that every one of them (except for Ron Paul) supports Bush with regard to the Iraq Catastrophe.

But then again, maybe Iraq isn't that big of an issue for the Republicans. After all, the top Democratic contenders for the presidency won't even commit to having all our troops out of Iraq by the end of their first term. I can't believe that the Democrats are basically neutralizing their best campaign issue in years by going GOP-lite on us with regard to Iraq, but there it is.

More Backpacking Photos

As promised, here are a few more pictures from last weekend's backpacking trip.

This Is A Great Idea

A war tax:

President Bush will not get an Iraq war supplemental spending bill until he changes course on the war, House Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.) said Tuesday. The powerful lawmaker also voiced his support for a “war tax.”

“As chairman of the Appropriations Committee I have absolutely no intention of reporting out of committee anytime in this session of Congress any such request that simply serves to continue the status quo,” Obey told reporters.

He wants a war spending bill to end U.S. involvement in combat operations by January 2009, allow more rest time for troops between deployments and start a “diplomatic surge.”

Obey also came out in favor of Rep. James McGovern’s (D-Mass.) war tax proposal.

“If you don’t like the cost, then shut down the war,” Obey said in a news conference.

The tax would be intended to raise roughly $150 billion for the war. It would be a surtax of 2 to 15 percent of income tax. A 2 percent surtax means that a person who would otherwise pay $100 in taxes would pay $102.

Let's hope Obey has the guts to see this through.

Thank You, Franklin Roosevelt (And Jayson)

I love the first big snowfall of the season. After looking at the snowless Mt. Bachelor and the Three Sisters for a good part of the summer, it's great to gaze west this time of year -- after a big storm goes through -- and see those peaks covered in newly-fallen snow.

In fact, the only time I really don't like the first big snowfall of the season is when I am on a backpacking trip and am camping at a lake with an elevation of over 5000 feet when the storm hits.

That's what I was doing this last weekend with six friends. Our destination was a lake in the heart of the Three Sisters Wilderness. The weather was great on Thursday afternoon when we set out from the trailhead on our nine-mile hike. After about four hours of hiking, we reached our destination and set up camp near a leaky old shelter which was built during the Franklin Roosevelt administration by FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps. And thank God that shelter was there.

Thursday evening (pictured at right) was great. Dan caught a fat, 15-inch rainbow trout just as the sun was going down and then caught a smaller rainbow that he released. Nick and Jayson also hooked into fish that evening. Then the moon came out, and we had a nice campfire. We were expecting some snow or rain to come in about midnight, but when we went to bed the sky was clear and we were hoping the weatherman was wrong.

He wasn't. His timing was just a bit off. The snow started falling around 5:30 am on Friday morning and it pretty much snowed all day long. Thankfully, Jayson had brought several tarps with him. He positioned them inside the leakiest parts of the shelter and then moved the fire pit closer to the shelter's entrance, so our group had a dry, warm place to congregate. If it wasn't for that shelter and Jayson's tarps, we would have been pretty miserable.

We fished hard on Friday, but the snowy weather apparently kept the bite down. I caught a 16-inch cutthroat trout early on Friday morning right in front of our camp -- that's me at right holding the fish -- and Dan caught a nice fish later in the evening, but those were the only two we landed that day (we did, however, miss many bites on Friday). Both those fish made excellent hors d’œuvres to go along with lunch and dinner that day. We briefly discussed whether we should hike out on Friday due to all the snow, but we eventually decided to stick it out.

The weather cleared on Saturday. At left is a picture of Dan, Liz, and Chris enjoying the improved conditions. We experienced a brief snow shower on Saturday morning, but then it warmed up and we even had some sun breaks as the day wore on.

And the trout bite improved with the weather. Dan caught an 18-inch cutthroat off of a peninsula about a third of a mile from our camp -- at right is a photo of one of Dan's fishes cooking -- and Carl followed Dan's fish by landing a 17-inch cutthroat (pictured below) about an hour later.

We then moved over to a cliff area on the other side of the lake and tangled with some nice trout there. I briefly hooked a fish that nearly pulled my rod into the water, then Dan lost one that he got right up to the bank before it broke off.

Up to this point, we were mostly fishing bait off of the bottom, so I decided to mix it up a bit and do a little bobber fishing. I casted out a worm/powerbait combo beneath the bobber, and within 30 seconds after my bobber hit the water, a nice cutthroat hit me hard then proceeded to jump a couple of times. The cool part about this fish was that I got to fight him from an elevated level about 10 feet above the lake's surface, which meant I would have more control over the fish in that I could keep him out of the submerged logs.

After a spirited battle, Nick landed the 17-inch cutthroat for me then gently released it back into the lake to be caught another day. That's me on the right relaxing by the lake while enjoying a delicious cigar after battling that fish.

The bite shut down after that. We landed one more cutthroat trout later in the evening, but that was it. We fished for several hours on Sunday morning while we were packing up, but we didn't get a single bite.

Despite the weather and the slower-than-expected fishing, we had a great time. In fact, the only time I didn't enjoy myself was on the hike back out (pictured below). The trail on the nine-mile hike out was a slushy, slippery, snowy mess, and it was pretty miserable. But we reached the trailhead in about three-and-a-half hours, and the trip was over.


I am looking forward to next year's trip and hopefully some better weather. I'll post some more pictures later.