Travel

Recently, I’ve been enjoying the delights of air travel. In addition to the scores of flights I’ve taken in economy class, I’ve had the chance to check out the C class service of Thai Airways on their A380, the onboard lounge on the Emirates A380, and the 787 (before the grounding) on a trans-India flight.

{.asset-media-link} Air travel has, at present, taken me to New Delhi where I have been botanizing at the Lodi Gardens. This is Cynodon dactylon. Since my last report I’ve traveled to many places and on many airlines – ANA, JAL, Thai, Jet, and Go.

You may have noticed the short hiatus in my monthly golf reports. An absolute avoidance of competitive matches for two months left me little to write about. But when I returned to the competitive arena in September, I birdied the first hole and never trailed in a match that was effectively over by the time I made another birdie at the ninth.

I’ve been writing this month, and doing a lot of data analysis, and I’ve also been botanizing. At Ishigaki, Okinawa, and Taketomi Islands, I’ve been walking along the beaches to see what grasses are growing.

http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=109786 I've been on a bit of a sabbatical this month, working on writing projects and making tremendous progress with my research. Today I took a sabbatical from my sabbatical and studied marine biology for a few hours, before the high irradiance forced me to seek the shade of a palm tree, from whence I am writing this.

{.asset-media-link} After my visit to Korea in March, this article was published in the April issue of Golf Course Seminar magazine. Korea has a challenging climate for turfgrass, with temperatures similar to the American mid-Atlantic states yet with summers drenched with nearly three times as much rain, on average.

{.asset-media-link} I’ve found Thailand rather salubrious this week. To begin with, I went botanizing in the Gulf of Thailand. {.asset-media-link} I botanized by the seashore, and on the hillsides, and on the roadsides, exploring the cracks and crevices of the rocks for the particular species of grass that can survive in such an hostile environment.

After a few disappointing months in which victory escaped me, I’m happy to report that I’ve started a new winning streak. Or perhaps more accurately, after two matches in June, I’m confident that I’ll be undefeated for the forseeable future.

Since my last air travel update, slightly more than a month ago, I’ve been on 20 flights, and in one particularly insert creative adjective here stretch of 19 days, I visited eight different countries.

I went botanizing at Hawaii a few weeks ago, searching for grasses and observing how and where they were growing in relation to their surrounding environment. The trip started off on a rakish note at Oahu as my cousins and I stepped outside and ordered someone to take a photo of us in our fatigues.