Vacationing in an oat box

It's been a slow summer at Casa de ChemGuy what with The Girl having UC summer school all season. That means we didn't have any sort of actual big vacation like we've had the past few years. Instead, I got to drop down to Houston and over to Indianapolis to teach a couple of ASM Materials Science camps. In neither city, however, did I get to see any real part of the city. They're working trips where I'm hanging in the lab from seven to seven, grabbing a quick bite to eat, and heading back to the hotel to look at the next day's PowerPoint.

This week, though, I got to take a three-day vacation to picturesque Akron, Ohio.

No, The Girl didn't come along. This was just me and twenty-seven of my closest friends hanging at the National Center for Education and Research on Corrosion and Materials Performance to learn about the national problem that is corrosion. G'head and ask me just about anything about corrosion and how I'm gonna teach my students about it this year. I'm a frickin' expert now...

The coolest part of the trip, though, was getting to stay at the Quaker Square Inn, the second oddest hotel in America.

See, it's a freakish hotel that's inside the old Quaker Oats factory where they just carved into the concrete silos to make the rooms. It's more than a little odd with the whole cement murals in the lobby, and elevators in one of the silos, and the first floor rooms having fourteen-foot ceilings with a set of electrical outlets at thirteen feet from the floor 'cause...um...'cause it's odd.





The place was opened in 1976...



...but now it's half hotel (the first three floors) and half dorm (the other five floors)...very odd...



Seriously, though, if you get the chance to take the corrosion camp, you should do it. The field trip to AZZ Galvanizing alone is worth it.