THE MOST EPIC POST EVER!!!!!
by Nathan
you know it's true because we use CAPS, a rarely used rhetorical weapon carefully selected for the following occasion: THE SOLAR CAR IS HERE!!!!!!!!
as usual, the solar car is singlehandedly motivated by Sasha
We received the shipping container with the van and solar car at long last. After an adventure involving a guy with a crowbar (hello, Dr. Freeman) and an air compressor, we had the solar car in the truck and the van driving with unknown legality on Australian roads (take that, speed cameras). We then drove over to a local automotive trade school for some workspace. Over the next several hours, we worked on prepping the car for our impending journey to Adelaide, and then to Darwin.
But enough of that. Back to the major theme, THE SOLAR CAR IS HERE!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
eh? you thought you could read a post without a picture specifically of Marvin!? what were you thinking!
marvin! is excited!
recognize that mess? it's something we brought with us from the solar car shop.
there is one thing left to say. Great Success!
Did someone say “Solar Car”?
by Ben
We have the car!
No, I lied. We don't have the car. However, we just got off the phone with the shipping company, and they said that neither customs nor quarantine even looked in the container, and that we will have it by 2pm tomorrow when it gets unloaded from the boat. This is very excellent because it means we will get a chance to test it before the race starts.
We're going to spend tomorrow afternoon working on the panels, and aim to leave at dawn Wednesday morning (err... in this country its Monday today, so we get the car Tuesday afternoon and leave on Wednesday). This means we should have plenty of time to get to the start of the race before the race starts.
In other news, defending champions Nuon recently suffered an accident while testing- it looks like they had a blow out which knocked them off the road, similar to what happened to equinox, our previous car. They've been working around the clock the past couple days to get their car fixed up in time for the race. We all hope that they'll be ready in time- it's a beautiful car.
Expect more updates (and photos!) tomorrow after we get the car!
The Mysterious Case of Phillip Island
by Nathan
cue the debussy...
It may sound like a Hardy Boys mystery....truth is, it's not. Matt, Lucie and I took a break from city life to go camping and sightseeing and penguin-finding on Phillip Island, a small* island around two hours from Melbourne. Why? I caught a bit of the wanderlust going around and wanted to see a bit of the coast before we head through the outback. The others liked the idea, so we booked a campsite in a little town called New Haven (Victoria, not Connecticut, which led to an incident involving a 20-something-thousand mile route planned by google).
lucie staring into the vast emptiness of the (new) trusty solar car van
*not worth invading if you're an 18th century colonial power
And when I say campsite, I mean corner of a field. We got our campsite, wandered around New Haven for a little bit, bought some food to eat/cook, and headed back. On this walk, Matt fell in love with a bridge. Ask him about it sometime. It's a really nice bridge. This is a picture of Matt and his favorite bridge.
he's in love
While making the curry, we talked to a local junior who was on the island for a golf tournament. If he ends up reading the blog, hi Bryce! He wanted some advice on which colleges to go to in order to party and get laid. We told him UC Santa Barbara. We didn't recommend Stanford. Also, he seemed to have warm feelings towards Americans. I wonder if Australia somehow maintained its respect for America after Bush trashed it pretty much internationally.
Anyways, the three of us slept an uneventful yet cozy night in Matt's two man tent and were woken up by the loudest and most myriad series of bird noises I've ever heard. It sounded as if huge flocks of birds were devouring flocks of other birds, all while trying to avoid hungry kangaroos and a fierce assault of drop bears. Apparently this is business as usual in this country.
So we packed up and headed to one of the free! activities on the island, the Conservation Hill Sanctuary. This park had several square miles of salt-water wetlands and played host to a bunch of birds and other living things part of the local ecosystem. Most peculiar were the Mangrove trees, which had pneumatophores, a bizarre adaptation where the trees had roots sticking straight out of the mud. These roots supposedly allowed the trees to "breathe" while submerged in high tide. We noticed that many of the trucks here have a similar adaptation.
since we're bad bloggers, we forgot to take a picture of the mangroves in the conservation park. instead, we've included a picture of some very confused mangrove trees in an inlet we found around sunset the first night.
A Toyota Hilux with a Pneumatophore
Anyways, on this same little hike we saw several wallabies and a very noisy parrot. Everything with wings wants attention in this country. Anyhow, we then tried to find the Koala preserve, realized that it would have cost money to see koalas, gave up, and went to the "Nobbies," to see a seal colony. What we saw there proved to be the highlight of the trip, but we didn't see any seals (their 3d-wireless-panoramic-amazement cameras were broken at the time). That being said, this conservation area (free?!?!?!?!) was home to an extraordinary seagull colony as well as some fairly spectacular views of the coastline. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves here, or, rather, I'll say that it was like a mountain had been covered with mother seagulls, each one nesting two feet away from another, with every male seagull noisily trying to defend its own territory. Parallels to suburban America aside, I'll let the pictures speak for themselves:
moi. moi. moi moi moi. nemo anyone?
...giving babysitting a whole new meaning...
the elusive penguins. these required a short hike over wet, slippery rocks right on the edge of wet, slippery cliffs to find
And then Matt went swimming. Because he's hardcore like that.
After we all dried off, we drove into downtown Cowes, the largest town on the island, got some food, and drove back to Melbourne. Also, Special thanks to our sponsor:
- we like wasabi peas
anyways, peace
-nathan
This is at the Nobbies. The editors regret the inclusion of such a cliche image, but hell, why not! On the left is Lucie, Matt is in the middle, and Nathan (blogger du jour) is on the right.
Solar Array Repositioning System
by matt
Today, we contracted SARS. Also, it looks like we won't take delivery of the car until early next week because of a tsunami and the fact that our dirty old van will need to have its undercarriage steam-cleaned.
At first, when someone said that we needed SARS for the race, we instinctively reached for our Hello Kitty backpacks and felt around for our sterile facemasks. Then,we made friends with a plumber. Little did said plumber know that the 65 and up demographic has a 50% mortality rate, while our age group enjoys a mortality rate less than 1%.
Our plumber friend mostly told us about how he had designed rear seats for Ford Explorers. His stories were voluminous, ranging from woman test drivers to something called a jubilee clamp. While his presence was great, he distracted us from the task at hand, which was mathematics. Nathan solicited Lucas, Marvin!, Lucy, and Matt to help him with the (not so) complex geometry of a right triangle, which proved to be useful as we created a monster--a polyvinyl chloride structure that we called SARS.
Everything Fits!
This structure is, simply stated, a one-axis solar tracker for the array of our solar car. More specifically, it has approximately a 5 to 90 degree elevation range and should allow for simple adjustment and easy set-up and take down. This means that during the race, we can tilt the top shell of our car towards the sun for more power generation when we are stopped. These constraints led us to one thing: large diameter PVC.
Matt, Lucas, Daniel, and Nathan Assembling SARS
It started simply. One of us coughed, and someone else contracted SARS. Before long, most of the team was at some stage responsible for the spread of SARS to the Victoria Hall parking lot. Terry, our plumber friend, was a-fixated on our SARS and felt the need to ward it off with incessant story-telling in a thick but surprisingly mumble-free Aussie accent.
Marvin! Degreasing/Priming the PVC
In between the stories, we (DC Posch, that is) managed to cut massive amounts of (not so) precision-cut piping. Marvin was very skillful with a toothbrush at the task of degreasing and priming all of the joints. With the sheer strength of Lucas, our resident University of Kentucky Solar Car Team representative, we were able to attach these PVC pipes into a massive protein chain bent on destruction of many Asian countries in the year 2003. After completing our masterpiece, we set out to celebrate at our gracious friends', the Tuckwells, who hosted Sasha and Ben before the rest of us arrived in this land.
There, we feasted on rare steak and avocado-themed salad, the former of which our vegatarian girls shied away from. They were unaware that we had contracted SARS and that our celebration was in honor of SARS, and our general nerdy talk about SQUID's, the Czochralski process, and battery technology scared our gracious hosts away from the dinner table. Thus ends the saga of SARS synthesis.
Things that will eat us
by Marvin!
Sasha, NHS, and mech crew headed off after lunch to buy PVC pipe for the solar array rotation system (SARS), so Ben, Erika, and I headed to the Melbourne Zoo. It didn't have a buffet with samples of its animals, which made Ben and I very sad, but we had a chance to scout out the animals that will be eating us in the coming weeks.
There were kangaroos, penguins, turtles, lions, giraffes, zebras, snakes, gators, and way too many other animals, so here's a condensed version of our trip.
One of the first, and by far the most awesome of the animals we saw, was the emperor tamarin. There were only two of them in the cage but they had enough energy to run the solar car across Australia. They would constantly leap around the branches in the cage and scramble across the fence for absolutely no reason. By the time your camera had focused they would be flying through the air. They are the ninja assassins of the animal world. To top it all off, they have beautiful white beards worthy of a Chinese martial arts master. In conclusion, TAMARIN!!!
TAMARIN!!!
None of the other animals were nearly as exciting. This giraffe's tongue came close to being as amazing, but the tamarin licked it in terms of sheer awesome.
slurp
The only animals that looked like they wanted to eat us were the little crocs and snakes in the reptile house, but it was more poison than actually eat. Other than that, the lions looked like they had the potential to eat us, but they were far too busy sleeping.
We didn't see any dropbears, but we found evidence of their existence in the aviary. Someone found this bird and brought it to the zoo to recover. As you can see, its head has been stolen by a dropbear. Poor, poor bird...
Victim of a drop bear attack
The Australian animals were actually very disappointing. They don't seem to understand the concept of predators. The koalas wedge themselves between tree branches and sleep...The kangaroos lie on the ground and sleep...Wombats climb into their holes and sleep... Every animal was extremely lazy. Maybe the kangaroos were pretending to be roadkill to hide from predators. We've concluded that if we are being chased by a stampede of hoop snakes, the best strategy is to immediately fall asleep. Here are many sleeping Australian creatures, for your viewing pleasure.
naptime
zzz
Afterwards, we came back, had dinner on the way, and then had gellato! Mmm... We got to the hostel before the PVC pipe crew returned, but after they got back, Ben then ate a second dinner with them. Ben is a monster.
In other news, SARS has been completed*! Hooray!
great success
*by completed, i mean not completed
More animal photos in the gallery
Steak! (an exhaustively researched post by marvin! and nathan)
by Nathan
Steak! We* ate three pounds of it. For dinner. It was a great success. There were other things that happened today. But mostly we just ate. But, for those who came here for the rundown, we resume our regularly scheduled program:
After a night of drunken revelry at the pub eurotrash and spending way too much money on beer, we headed off this morning for a journey to the beach. We went to St. Kilda, which Matt realized is just like Santa Cruz.
It was a small district south of Melbourne with a busy main street and beaches. I (nathan) managed to lure the others out of their Cube-Runner-induced stupor long enough to convince them that going to St. Kilda was a great idea for two reasons:
1. beach!
2. cake!!! According to the website, Actura street had a variety of cake shops, most of which would accept our currency in exchange for delicious edibles. We took full advantage of this.
That being said, we took the #96 tram out of downtown Melbourne, rode for around 30 minutes (during which Ben discovered that there's a football team called the "Socceroos." amazing.), and got off around lunchtime. Incidentally, this was about the time that Marvin and Ben were feeling hungry. We ended up having lunch at a strangely sensible shop selling fish, fish & chips, and sushi. Then, we grabbed some cakes and headed for the waterfront.
When we arrived, the beach was deserted**. After Erica finished mostly missing her mouth with a cream cake and Sam got most of his cake out of his mustache, we wandered the shoreline, narrowly avoiding getting stung by a dead jellyfish. At that point, we realized that the beach was probably empty due to the ubiquity of poisonous things...everywhere. Dangerous stuff seems to be a recurring trend on this continent.
Sam really, really liked this jellyfish.
This seagull liked the idea of cake almost as enthusiastically as Ben himself.
Although the beach may have been great, it pales in comparison to the collective genius that came up with the idea of grilling steaks for dinner. While we were at the grocery store, I tried channeling Ben by saying "be reasonable," as we proceeded to buy 3.3 pounds (2.343 metric tons) of steak. It was ridiculous.
Anyways, our hostel-cooked meal included:
- Steak with mango-onion-cilantro chutney
- Grilled Garlic Bread
- Roast Potatoes and butter(mmmmm...butter)
- Raw Passion(fruit) for dessert
and Marvin! was still hungry! To be fair, he had already had dinner. Nonetheless, it was an awesome day. Tomorrow, it seems that this tourism madness will end as we gear up for this whole solar car thing.
*Marvin! and Ben still seem to need to prove their eating abilities. I accept this....they do not. It's something I'll recommend to their therapists.
**I'm very proud of this pun
Marvin!
by Ben
Marvin! looks into the future of the solarcar
Check out the gallery for more photos
Melbourne!
by Ben
Almost all the team is now assembled in Melbourne. The most recent member to arrive was Marvin! who showed up while we were having dinner at a Chinese dumpling restaurant. Completely without warning. And without any apparent means of transport. Which leads us to believe he wasn't actually in Portland like he had been telling us. Either that or he can teleport, which is far more likely, as our sources indicate Marvin! would immediately turn turquoise if he ever told a lie.
D minus 4 and counting until the car arrives. We decided the most efficient way to prep for the race was to head straight for a church and pray, so we arrived at Melbourne cathedral and took photos.
Melbourne cathedral
Later we ended up in a filmy arty museum thing with the most awesome version of pong ever created. It was black and white and amazing.
Even later we wandered around Melbourne, ate, bought a pair of Kawasaki*s, ate some more, randomly found Marvin!, and crossed a bridge in an unlikely manner...
Crossing Yarra
Team photo
In Australia At Last
by matt
This morning (and a few days ago in the case of Ben and Marvin), we arrived in Australia.
More specifically, we mechanically arrived at the Melbourne Airport. When we were going through customs (with lots of extra solar panels), we met a man. Said man was a drunk military contractor. Said man told us to put thin film on top of our array and enquired about the relative merits of "nitrogen bearings." Said man also did a bad job of scaring us of "drop bears."
Drop Bear Attack
Upon passing through customs, we had some trouble with our solar panels. The customs officer asked what the large box had in it (it was already labeled). I told him that there were solar panels in the box. He replied, "What panels." I answered, "Solar Panels." Also, we had some trouble in the Sydney Airport when the guys behind the x-ray saw a grenade in Nathan's backpack. Nathan took the grenade apart and tried to explain that it was a LEMO connector, with pins for both power and data. They asked him to repeat, but were still confused, so they had him take it apart. He then said the magic word ("World Solar Challange") and they let him through.
The flight was really and long cramped, and interrupted at random intervals by meals in a completely illogical order: Dinner, Lunch, Breakfast. I asked the waitress and she mumbled something about the international date line.
Here's the sun rising on Saturday/Sunday, we're not sure which day because of this arbitrary line that enables time travel:
Sunrise Over the Pacific
The Cast of Tonight’s Show
by Nathan
Welcome to the Awesome Australian Adventure Blog! This hourly* updated blog will most likely feature pictures, details, and rescue requests from our most likely adventurous travels! Failing that, we'll post funny stuff that happens. First, I should introduce our intrepid team of highly-trained bloggers and partially trained Stanford Solar Car junkies. They are, in order of relative hunger:
- Marvin! (Marvin will always be listed in this way, with an exclamation mark. Note: he just ate dinner.) Marvin! hails not from any specific team, but from the Marvin! team, which has the primary responsibility of being Marvin!. all the time.
- Ben (Ben's humor is more subtle and British, obviating the need for such punctuation.) Like Marvin!, he also just ate some dinner. Unlike Marvin!, he is no longer hungry. Ben hails from the Electrical Team, which prides itself in finding Mechanical solutions to electrical problems. They also make the solar car run. on occasion. Ben likes to spend as little time on the ground as possible. He does a good job of this.
- DC (Whose first name is not Daniel.) DC is part of every team, but mostly after everyone else has gone to sleep. It's an important role. DC is very meta, as you can tell from this meta photograph.
- Matt ("MARVIN!?!?!?") Matt is part of the mechanical team, and so enjoys long walks on the beach immediately after disassembling/reassembling the suspension for the third time tonight. Also, for the record, Matt: 0 Carbon Fiber: 4
- Nathan (still dumbfounded that wordpress is not a mill, but remains undeterred.) I'm part of the mechanical team. My role is somewhat limited to finding mechanical solutions to every damn problem everyone else comes up with. This is a picture of me pretending to be Marvin!. However, I'm not particularly good at being Marvin!, especially when it comes to eating**
*by hourly, we mean whenever we send carrier pigeons to the internet with the appropriate data. This is known to be necessary in South Africa (http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSTRE5885PM20090909) as sending large amounts of data by carrier pigeon will be faster than the internet in some countries we will visit.
**Marvin! and Ben may have consumed twice the amount of burger than I did in one sitting. In the interest of fairness, Marvin had already had dinner.
That being said, we will try to update and post pictures of what happens when these five people encounter these five countries: Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Nepal, and Japan (just me :p). Until then, a shoutout to our esteemed team leader.
SASHA!!!!!!!