So if you’ve hung around me much at all and discussed travel, you’ve no doubt heard me talk about the Megabus.  One of my friends has heard me say it so many times he now yells “MEGA!” every time I mention it.  At any rate, I’m always willing to share my stories about it because people are always curious when you tell them you took a bus somewhere a good distance away.  There is no doubt a stigma about bus travel.

    Holly and I started researching Iceland some time back and quickly found that people were saying it was expensive.  Just how expensive was a little hard to gauge… but expensive none-the-less.  We wanted to do this trip more or less free style; with only plane tickets, a rental car, and the first night’s hotel booked, so cutting costs as much as possible up front while those costs were known was important to us… enter Megabus.  Holly and I had a good experience with Megabus the first time around (you can read about it here) so we thought we’d give it another look.  Tickets were a whopping $22 this time… that’s total for both of us, round trip.  After comparing flights, taking the Megabus to Washington D.C. and then flying to Iceland from there as opposed to flying to D.C. from Knoxville and then on to Iceland was going to save us a little over $600.  $11 a person versus $300 per person is a pretty substantial difference.  So we could a) leave on a plane Sunday morning and arrive in DC just in time to wait around the airport for 10 hours for the flight to Iceland or b) leave on a bus Saturday night and arrive in DC with plenty of time to goof off and make it to the airport for the very same flight to Iceland and SAVE $600.  Pretty straight forward.

    I’ll be honest and tell you that the ride there was pretty darn miserable.  It was outrageously hot on the bus for the first half of the trip.  I was luckily wearing my trusty zip-off pants and had layered, so I stripped down to shorts and a t-shirt… it was just hard to get away from the heat.  I think I dosed a little, but I couldn’t get to sleep.  The drivers recognized the problem and left the doors open at the rest stop to try and dump the heat… literally everyone got off the bus to stand in the cold to cool off.  15 minutes with the doors open did the trick and the rest of the ride there just fine.  We all put our clothes back on and were comfortable.

   After arriving in D.C., Holly and I walked over to the nearest Metro station (Union) and took it to the Rosslyn station where we caught the Metro bus to the airport.  We mistakenly thought we’d have plenty of time to get to the airport and drop our stuff off at the hotel (more on that in a minute) and then go back to D.C. for some sight seeing… that didn’t work out so well though.  We bought the all day Metro passes and then 2 and a half hours later finally made it to the airport… we had no idea.  We missed the first Metro bus by apparently minutes and then had to stand there for another hour waiting on the next one.  The bus ride itself took over 45 minutes with very little traffic.  Don’t try to pull this off with tight timelines is the take away here.  We decided not to risk being late for our flight by going back in to town and gave our all day passes to some other travelers leaving the airport.

    The way home was less eventful.  The Metro bus was waiting at the airport when we arrived and we traversed the subway system with ease.  We hung out at Union Station until it was close to time for the Megabus to depart and then made the short walk over and boarded almost immediately.  Timing is everything.  The ride home was comfortable and I slept almost the entire trip. 

    I’ll again be honest and say I was a bit grumpy from all the traveling.  When we made it to Union station and then had a couple hours to burn before the bus was to leave… I was none too excited to be hanging out.  There is a convenience factor to flying that can sometimes be hard to put a value on.  We realistically got to Iceland the same time we would have had we flown and we got home the morning after we would have arrived home had we flown (assuming we didn’t miss any connections… which seems to happen every time we fly).  We could have slept in our own bed as opposed to sleeping on a bus.  At the time, I would have paid the $600 to just be home.  600 bucks is 600 bucks… I’d do it again.  Now that Megabus is going to Atlanta, you can bet I’ll be looking into flying out of Hartsfield-Jackson instead of Dulles… even though I HATE Hartsfield with a passion.  Is it worth it to save a bunch of extra money?  I happen to think so.

The Day Room

    As a funny aside; when looking at the layover in D.C., Holly and I jokingly talked about trying to find a hotel that rented rooms by the hour so we could crash for a bit.  After doing some digging, we found that a lot of hotels actually offer what is called a “day room”.  Check-in times are generally early in the morning and I believe our check-out time was at 8 or 9PM… past when we needed to be gone anyway.  We compared the prices ($70) to the various airline clubs in the airport ($40 per person with our credit card benefit… although that doesn’t seem like much of a benefit) and decided it was a no-brainer to have a private room / bathroom and a bed we could take a nap in as opposed to just lounge chairs and finger food.  We got the room and were able to hang around and have a restful afternoon and then took the free shuttle to the airport and arrived in Iceland very rested and ready to tackle a new country.  Good times!

–Dan Thompson

    If you’ve been paying attention at all lately you’ll know that I’ve been fiddling around with time-lapse photography quite a bit.  Well… there has of course a reason behind it and that was this we had a trip to Iceland planned; and I was hoping to see the Aurora Borealis (northern lights) and capture it using time-lapse.  All that effort paid off this past Monday night when Holly and I got to witness the most amazing show in the sky.  I’m super pleased with how the video turned out, but like anything, you really need to see this in person fully grasp the awesomeness of it.  God’s creativity was definitely on display in the night sky.  If I could have a dollar for every time Holly and I exclaimed “WOW!!!” while we were watching this in person, I’d probably be a millionaire. 

    For the techies out there who will want to know, this is about an hour’s worth of photos compressed in to 23 seconds worth of video.  Each frame consists of 10 second exposure at f/4.0 and an ISO of 2500.  We were setup about an hour north of Reykjavik, Island on the 1 Ring Road just at a little pull off.  The flashes in the trees were actually semi’s going by with their hi-beams on. This one is really worth watching in HD, in my personal opinion just to catch all the details of everything that is going on.

–Dan Thompson

    Have I mentioned that I’m really getting in to these time-lapse videos?  This is my most recent capture and is of the smokehouse at the Dan Lawson place in Cades Cove.  A buddy of mine went out there to work on this Cades Cove at night project I’ve been messing around with and this is one of the products from that evening.  These things are tons of fun to setup and do because you never really know what you’re going to get.  So much of it the naked eye just doesn’t see while you’re sitting there.  This particular video is about an hour reduced down to 5 seconds.

–Dan Thompson

    Now, I’ll be honest, we were both a little leery of the whole thing.  I don’t know about you, but when I think bus station… I think the Greyhound Bus Station in the Old City, which is not the type of place I would hang out.  Let me assure you though, the new bus station downtown is not THAT bus station.  It was very nice, and the Megabus picks you up right out front.  There were no weird people (that we know of) on our bus.  We never woke up with the guy sitting next to us staring at us or anything like that (these are the things my wife thinks up).  It was just a bus ride, with ordinary people… lots of whom are commuters.  Now, the nice thing about it, for us anyway, is that the bus leaves Knoxville at 10:30PM (they have other times as well)… which is totally cool because you can let the bus be your hotel for two nights of your trip; when you wake up, you’re there!

    So I’ll admit that it wasn’t all totally peaches and cream, and I know what you’re thinking… oh here comes the part where he talks about the psychos… nope, I promise, no psychos in this story.  Me being a taller guy, I was a little cramped and the seats weren’t the most comfortable seats ever… HOWEVER, after some fidgeting around with my backpack, I was able to find a comfortable sleeping position and ended up sleeping away almost all of the trip.  Also, the bus is a little cold (okay, a LOT cold on the way home), so bring a jacket and I’d recommend long pants unless you find yourself to be hot more often then not no matter where you go.  Last, the parking lot where you get dropped off at in DC is about 7 blocks from the closest Metro station (Union Station).  I had heard from several people that they have a shuttle service that runs from the parking lot to Union Station, but it wasn’t running the days we were there so we walked the 15 or so minutes… in the rain on our first day there… both times.  The night we left we just hung out in Union Station until about an hour before departure time and then headed that direction.  I’m not at all familiar with that part of town, but it did feel a little sketchy that late at night… but then, almost anywhere in DC feels sketchy late at night.  We passed hardly no one on the way there and never at all felt threatened; I think it was just the unknown that had us on edge more than anything.

   Here’s the totally awesome part.  We were able to find a nice hotel (Hyatt Arlington) online for just $85 that was about two blocks away from the Roslyn metro station, so traveling was easy once you made it to the metro station that first day.  We bought all day train passes for two days ($9 per person, per day) which let you get on and off the trains as many times as you want.  All the Smithsonian Museums as well as all the memorials and monuments are FREE to visit (including the National Zoo, which was a lot of fun).  So we had two VERY full days and three nights for something like $260; that’s all meals, overnight stays, all transportation, and souvenirs.  Not too shabby!  We didn’t go crazy with the meals, and probably could have shaved some money off had we tried… but the trip wasn’t about going as cheap as possible… we literally did everything we wanted to do, and that’s all it cost.  I can be a little uncomfortable on a bus for that!

I’m not sure, but I think that the Megabus could be Knoxville’s best kept secret.

–Dan Thompson

    So I’ve been goofing around with time-lapse videos here lately to try and get better at them.  This is one I worked on last weekend in Cades Cove (Great Smoky Mountains National Park).  This is of the Primitive Baptist Church and is a capture of about an hours time reduced to 13 seconds.  The light source is actually the moon (it was a full moon that night and EXTREMELY bright, as you can tell).  I’m actually using flashlights inside the church to provide a light source inside the building… but the batteries are apparently fading and it flickers in the video like a candle; but just to be clear, I did not have an open flame inside the almost 200 year old structure! The video is admittedly better the bigger it is, so click the link in the video screen to make it full size.

–Dan Thompson

    So I think I’m officially addicted to time-lapse stuff.  I’ve been doing tons of reading about it here lately and subsequently got a new remote for my camera… so I obviously had to try it out.  The weather wasn’t nice enough tonight for the other project I’m working on to travel all the way up to Cades Cove, so I decided to just shoot off my deck.  I was actually hoping for clouds… and that’s exactly what I got! I’m not exactly sure what happened at the beginning of the video that makes it jump though; I’ll need to figure that one out.  Anyway, still a bit of playing to do, but this is another attempt.  This one is an hour and a half reduced down to 16 seconds.

–Dan Thompson

–Dan Thompson

    This week’s picture of the week is from a little adventure we took over the Memorial Day weekend.  Holly and I and two of our friends, Sarah and Jackie Mathis (pictured), headed over to Abingdon, Virginia on Sunday afternoon.  After checking in to our hotel we ate dinner at a local Italian restaurant, who’s name escapes me at the moment, that the hotel clerk recommended to us.  The food and fellowship were great!

    The next morning we made the short drive in to Damascus where we had found a company called Adventure Damascus that rents bicycles and also provides a shuttle service.  If you’re not familiar with the Virginia Creeper trail… let me just tell you that this is the way to ride bikes for the day!  The company shuttles you up to Whitetop Station and then it is downhill for 17 miles on an old rail bed.  You literally coast all day!  We took our time with it and stopped a few times to look around and just generally dilly dallied all day and it took us about 4 hours to get down.   Towards the end we stopped off and had a late lunch and ice cream and then finished the last 100 yards or so.  You can actually continue on all the way to Abingdon if you want, however there is currently a bridge out so we called it quits when we reached the bike shop again.  This is the kind of thing the whole family could enjoy!  We would highly recommend doing it, and we plan on returning in the not-so-distant future!

–Dan Thompson

    Yesterday was a bittersweet day for Holly and I.  On the one hand, I was in one of my best friend’s wedding and watched them start a new life together… and on the other, one of my other best friends passed away.

    I met Dale Young about 16 years ago; he was caring for his mother who was ill and I was delivering medicine for a local pharmacy.  Dale was one of those people who could carry on a conversation about anything.  He loved to laugh and loved life.  Along the way he ended up befriending myself and several other of my life long friends, and as our friendship grew we all adopted him into our families; my buddy’s daughter has grown up calling him ‘Gramps’.  After he married Holly and I he used to joke that he had “tied the knot extra tight” with us, and we would certainly agree.

    Dale was a good man, a man of great integrity and character.  He was a mentor, a confidant… a friend.  W. Dale… you will be greatly missed.

–Dan Thompson