Some Vacation Highlights

Well, my wife and I are back in Vegas after a six-day California road trip. Here are some of the highlights:

We started out by driving down to the LA area, where we stayed with an old friend from my New York days who now manages a neuroscience lab at UC Irvine. The next day we drove up to Biola Univ. and met with Tom Crisp, who teaches philosophy there. Tom and I have been corresponding via email over the past two months on issues related to presentism and truthmaker theory. We had a good discussion about some of Tom's current research. He's working on the 'cross-time temporal relations' problem for presentism--basically, the problem is that some relations appear to obtain between things at different moments of time, so if the obtaining of a relation entails the obtaining of its relata, then there have to exist things at different times, contrary to presentism. Anyway, Tom's working on a response to that problem and plans to come out with a book on presentism in the next few years.

After that, my wife and I drove north, working our way up the famous Pacific Coast Highway. Along the way we stopped in Solvang, a quaint Danish community; Santa Barbara, where we toured the mission; and Hearst Castle, where we took the overview tour. We stayed a couple days in Monterey, where we toured the Monterey Bay Aquarium and had dinner on Cannery Row. After that, we continued north through Gilroy (the garlic capitol of the world) to Santa Cruz, where we toured the fascinatingly bizarre Winchester Mystery House. From there we worked our way north through San Francisco into the Sonoma area, the heart of wine country. We only had time to stop at a couple of the many area wineries, though. We then headed south to Fresno and were planning to spend the next day exploring Sequoia National Park, but heavy snow had closed the park down, so we came back home instead. All in all, a fun and relaxing trip.