Day 9: The Drive to Santa Monica

After sleeping off a fantastic meal from the previous night we, awoke to take showers and eat breakfast. Our breakfast conversations were a little varied from what they usually were because we were discussing the possibilities for our poster at the Society for Neurosciences, and how to spice our web pages up. Though this conversation was extremely important it was interrupted many a time and never concluded because of the need to pack our vans.

If the idea of ridding in a 15 passenger van stuffed full of people and all of their equipment for a several hour drive sounds bad to you, you can most certainly be right. However, during this thoroughly uncomfortable trip some of us caught up on sleep or our journals. Only one van had the pleasure of a great car game called "Mafia." A rather complex game where "towns people" try to kill of "mafia" members before they get killed themselves. We enjoyed our standard picnic lunch.

We didn't quite arrive at one o'clock, like we planed. Instead we made a timely 12:00AM entrance. As we all groggily got out of the vans we received a warm welcome from Dr. Colbern. We only unpacked what we had to, in the interests of time, and set up camp on her roof. We also received some great seafood dinner.

Beemnet is run from Dr. Colbern's loft. She had three computers running up there: one Win95, one Win3.1, and one Macintosh. Our first priority was our near full digital camera. Unfortunately, connecting our laptop to Dr. Colbern's PC was not as easy as you might think (however hard you may think it to be). Our chief "computer nerds", Mike Liindeman and Badr Albanna, stayed up 'till around 3:30 getting the necessary software off CD, onto the PC, and from the PC to the laptop. They never would have made it had it not been for Dr. Colbern's generosity in providing gummy worms, and OJ.