What I learned today

Dad and I are planning a day trip for tomorrow and chose the Irazú Volcano as our destination. (He's already been to the Poas Volcano, which is also one of our stops on the Quilt Retreat.)

If you know Google Earth and you know my Dad, you know they're a match made in heaven and this was the perfect opportunity to introduce them.

After we had fun flying to my house, Lisa's house, the house Dad grew up in, etc., we checked out the Grand Canyon and, eventually, tomorrow's destination. Once we found it, I zoomed out a little and was surprised to see the placemark for my house pop up on the left side of the screen.

I figured I had zoomed out farther than I intended, but of course took the opportunity to measure the distance between the two. Imagine my surprise to find that Irazú is just 16 miles from my house in one direction, and Poas 15 miles in the other. (I knew we were close to the Barva volcano [6.5 miles, as it happens], but that's dormant so it doesn't count as much.)

So what I learned today is that, if you were to take a 25-mile-long string, tie a pencil to one end and pin the other end to the roof of my house, the circle you could draw would enclose five volcanoes (the red triangles in the photo below) and the epicenters of one or two seismic events (the white circles with red squiggle) ranging in magnitude from 4 to 6.2 on the Richter scale.

(Click on the photo for a larger view.)