While in Southern California for work in December '08, I went on a jaunt down to flagstaff. Saw the Lowell Observatory. Percival Lowell thought he'd discovered canals on Mars back in like 1895 with this very telescope! What a maroon. I'd loved that story since hearing about it from Carl Sagan in Cosmos, which I'd read long before seeing the TV series. Because of his mistake, he fired up many a young boy's imagination with thoughts of Mars and Martians, culminating in HG Wells' War of the Worlds. Pluto was discovered here, as well as the observation that the galaxies were receding from us very very fast which lead to the discovery that the Universe is expanding. Good scientific history. The telescope was also awesome to visit because it just looks so damn cool. Very Steampunk. Those are truck tires which rotate the roof of the observatory so that the telescope can be pointed at any direction in the sky.

Stayed at the Monte Vista. Parts of Casablanca were filmed there, and it's one of those places that movie stars love to stay in. We stayed in the room Lee Marvin stayed in while filming some western or other. Wicked.