Along this blithe pilgrimage, Mr Peck has acquired many fine friends and some very neat kids.

Here's Kid One: Alison has performed a miracle by sorting herself out after hard times and completed her PhD in astrophysics, radio astronomy to be more exact, at New Mexico Tech in Socorro, New Mexico, home of the NRAO - National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Then, having discovered a number of high-energy things way out there whilst serving a post-doctoral posting at the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie in Bonn, Germany, where Mr Peck was temporarily able to see her more often, Alison went off to the Mauna Kea observatory in Hawaii (USA), as the Staff Astronomer on the Sub-Millimeter Array (SMA) project of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, part of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, for some time. Thence she traveled on to Chile, where she's presently the Deputy Project Scientist for the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array project (ALMA). What with at least one meeting or another in Europe every year, Alison comes to see the Old Dad fairly frequently -- here are the links -- and one of these days we're going to go visit her as well. You can view some baby pictures, too.

Kid Two: Deirdre is no longer with us, but when she was, she was the greatest. We won't even try to describe what she was like. For more pix, click on the photo here.

Kid Three (left): Marlowe's the youngest -- she spent her first decade in Switzerland, then lived in England for three & a half years and came to visit every other weekend throughout that time. When she was here, we went for walks in the Jura mountains, played computer games (Age of Empires, Civilization, Settlers III, AD1602, SimTower), and read P. G. Wodehouse "Jeeves" books to each other, which was a great step up from Nancy Drew. Then, alas, in November 1999, she moved with her mother to the malls of the USA -- fewer visits twice monthly!! This is a picture of Marlowe getting smooched by her Papa (left) in the mountains of Switzerland in March 2000; click on it for more photos and a little unfinished autobiography, with index . Not too long ago, Mar and her inamorato Dima got married in Vermont, July 2006 and are still hanging out in Ottawa, Canada, and she's has been over for a visit to Switzerland in June and July 2007. Coming again soon, we hope.