At the end of summer, we had to load the last of the crap my UIUC research group had accumulated over the years into a UHaul and UHaul-ass down to North Carolina.

Evan did most of the driving because his parents were around.

It was cool that our UHaul had equations on it, though.

When I finally made my triumphant arrival at Duke, I knew I was in for a week of crazy fun.

Of course we had to unpack first.

The first night I was there, I walked into Durham to a nice Irish Pub with a real Irish guy singing real Irish songs. I met a guy there in the law school at Duke who introduced me to some of his lady friends when they arrived.  They kept saying how the girl behind the mic would flash the crowd when Patty got to a certain point in a song.  Let me tell you, right on cue.

My hotel was right across the street from the Duke University Hospital, which I walked through every day to get to...

The Engineering building, where my advisor Dave Brady had taken up post as head of the multi-million dollar Fitzpatrick Center for Photonics, whose logo he helped design.

I ate lunch here at least 5 times.

Duke had a very pretty campus.  It looks more Ivy League than Harvard, which is probably part of the reason they were filming Dawson's Creek there.  (It was all built in the 20s and 30s, though.)

Of course I had to leave my mark.

They have this amazing garden there.

I guess when you make your millions giving people lung cancer, it's the least you can do....

It only it wasn't over 100 degrees the entire time I was there.

High humidity does have it's advantages, though.

The next great adventure for my Rotational Shear Interferometer was to be connected to a telescope.

It took two guys a semester to get the thing working with a microscope, so I wasn't expecting much of my week of unpacking.

The amazing thing was,

The last day I said, "wouldn't it be cool if this thing worked before I left?"

It's amazing what a deadline can do.  (Not that you can see much.)

What I didn't know the first night was that everybody goes to Chapel Hill to hang out.  This is the beginning of my night exploring the town with Steve, who had too much food in his mouth at the time I took this picture.

These people knew how to serve a Guinness, though.

Our first (and last) stop of the night was this great place called the Cave.  

The next day (amazingly enough) Steve and I woke up early to go to Wilmington.

Where I took way too many pictures of this boardwalk.

See?

But it was nice.

.......ok.....

Then we visited the USS North Carolina.

It was a WWII ship that was only used for a few years.

But man was there a lot of cool stuff inside.

That's us taking a nap under there.

Don't know what the snow fence was for.

But on the whole, my trip to Duke ended my last summer of my blissful pre-Harvard youth.