Lorraine Jean Hopping • Hopping Fun Creations

The best part of my job as a writer is traveling to interesting places and talking to fascinating people. Among my favorite interviews:

   • a pilot who flies through hurricanes, routinely as part of his job (but not always so routinely).

   • two scientists who chase tornadoes across Texas and Oklahoma, and, one time, a tornado chased them!

   • an ice-jam engineer who tiptoes across rising ice-covered rivers to determine if they're about to flood a town, and knows exactly what she's doing (so it's perfectly safe . . . )

   • a scientist who deliberately triggers avalanches to make slopes safer for others and another avalanche expert who buries himself in snowslides (protected only by a wooden shack) in order to study their behavior.

   • a lightning scientist who climbs mountains to release weather balloons into the heart of dangerous thunderstorms. (Why do these scientists do such risky things?)

   • an American rescue worker who crawled under an apartment in Turkey that had been "pancaked" flat by an earthquake to save the life of an eight-year-old boy.

You can read about these and other real-life science adventure stories in my Wild Weather series and Wild Earth series (links at right).

Whenever I've been home too long, I look at a map and say, "Where next?" Then, I tell myself, "Just go there." On a road trip from Michigan to New Mexico, I decided to take the long and winding route there and back. This beautiful redscape is near Devil's Tower, Wyoming.

In the Galapagos Islands, I learned that, if you tickle the neck of a giant tortoise, it will extend its head a couple feet out of the shell. Here, I'm playing this trick at a Reptile Park in South Dakota. (It's a bad hair day for both of us.)

Is this me? Believe it or not, it is! At the generous invitation of two of my English language students, I visited the busy, stunning country of Morocco, North Africa. I'm sitting near a beautiful pool and garden at the edge of Marrakesh. Behind me is an olive grove and, immediately beyond it, stretches a vast desert peppered by Earthy-red colored homes. Wearing a scarf is optional for Moroccan women, but my friends are traditional Muslims and, as they say, "When in Rome . . . "

I'm standing on stone that's 90 million years old and so littered with fossils (dinosaurs, crocodiles, turtles, eggs, petrified plants, etc.) that paleontologists only bother to collect the best and rarest. (photo: courtesy of Sergio Stinco)

I'm extremely happy to be holding a dinosaur egg fossil at a dig site called Lagos Barreales in Patagonia, Argentina. One of the paleontologists just handed it to me, and I nearly dropped it. It's very heavy and surprisingly round—like a bowling ball without holes. (photo: courtesy of Sergio Stinco))