Showing posts with label road trip. Show all posts
Showing posts with label road trip. Show all posts
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Friday, July 11, 2008
WY IAm Seldom NE-where MT-haNDed. It's MN-inently How I Was RaiSD
I'm on my road trip to Minnesota via Montana...
I hadn't even started Thursday evening when a severe thunderstorm blew through the Chicago area. I waited it out until it cleared in my area, but only an hour or so on my way...
This eerie-looking storm-front loomed, threatened and eventually got me.
I stayed right at the edge most of the time, but then the road curved
and I drove into the thick of it.
I pulled into Des Moines, Iowa, a little before midnight and stayed in an Econo-lodge. It wasn't pretty, but it was comfortable enough.
Iowa
Nebraska
You know damn WELL that I scoured the road atlas for Hardy
(there's one in Arkansas)!
Why is the road pink?
Any guesses as to what this is?* (O'Neil, Nebraska)
I guess this town thinks it's Irish. (O'Neil, Nebraska)
In case you ever wondered exactly where that was (not to be confused
with Themiddleoffuckingnowhere, where Professor lives).
I'm not sure what this place is called, but apparently they have
large toilets. (Ainsworth, Nebraska)
I love this town...I'm just not sure why.
White, now? If I had ever asked someone how the roads were in Nebraska
and South Dakota, I never would have expected the answer to be "colorful."
The hay-rolls on their annual westward migration.
South Dakota
Badlands!
And so I pulled into Wall, South Dakota, hoping to take a gape at Wall Drug, the attraction for which you start seeing billboards as far east as Illinois. I figured I would spend the night in that town, but when I tried to get a room there were none left. There were smoking rooms, but I had a little time to be picky. That time ran out, however. I wound up driving to Rapid City, but just about everywhere I looked was booked or had their honeymoon suites available for $200/night! I got the last room available at a Fairfield Inn and bedded down for the night.
*It's a single blade for one of these!
I hadn't even started Thursday evening when a severe thunderstorm blew through the Chicago area. I waited it out until it cleared in my area, but only an hour or so on my way...
This eerie-looking storm-front loomed, threatened and eventually got me.
I stayed right at the edge most of the time, but then the road curved
and I drove into the thick of it.
I pulled into Des Moines, Iowa, a little before midnight and stayed in an Econo-lodge. It wasn't pretty, but it was comfortable enough.
Iowa
Nebraska
You know damn WELL that I scoured the road atlas for Hardy
(there's one in Arkansas)!
Why is the road pink?
Any guesses as to what this is?* (O'Neil, Nebraska)
I guess this town thinks it's Irish. (O'Neil, Nebraska)
In case you ever wondered exactly where that was (not to be confused
with Themiddleoffuckingnowhere, where Professor lives).
I'm not sure what this place is called, but apparently they have
large toilets. (Ainsworth, Nebraska)
I love this town...I'm just not sure why.
White, now? If I had ever asked someone how the roads were in Nebraska
and South Dakota, I never would have expected the answer to be "colorful."
The hay-rolls on their annual westward migration.
South Dakota
Badlands!
And so I pulled into Wall, South Dakota, hoping to take a gape at Wall Drug, the attraction for which you start seeing billboards as far east as Illinois. I figured I would spend the night in that town, but when I tried to get a room there were none left. There were smoking rooms, but I had a little time to be picky. That time ran out, however. I wound up driving to Rapid City, but just about everywhere I looked was booked or had their honeymoon suites available for $200/night! I got the last room available at a Fairfield Inn and bedded down for the night.
*It's a single blade for one of these!
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Read This Blog! (No, not MINE...)
Quite often I lament the fact that I have a very small readership, and I occasionally resort to cheap gimmicks to stoke the feeble flame of random surfer hits… which reminds me… excuse me for a moment… teens sex tits babes hot… okay, back to my post… but I guess that's what you get when you write a boring blog...
But this post… oh, wait… I forgot dripping wet …okay. That should do me good for a week or so. So. Where was I? Oh, yeah. But this post is about NOT reading my blog. As one may notice at the bottom of my list of Better Blogs Than Mine there's one called "Contains Mild Peril," written by a young man – Ultra Toast Mosha God – in Bristol, UK. The tracks left by visitors here rarely show any indication that people leave my blog for his, but I wish to point out here and now that such a neglect is a serious mistake. Not only is Toast a most excellent writer – often funny, usually deeply insightful, and with a very fertile imagination – but now, and for the remainder of the next four months, Toast is on our continent! He and a dear friend of his are on the adventure of a lifetime, as they have scrimped and saved for years, have quit their jobs, have sold all but the most useful – and portable – of their worldly possessions and are spending the warm northern hemisphere months trekking through northeastern Canada, down the US eastern seaboard, through the deep south and southwest, up through California and ending their sojourn in western Canada!
And the best of all? Ultra Toast Mosha God is blogging the whole thing! They've been in Canada for just shy of two weeks, now, so you're not so far behind that you can't catch up quickly. Start here to see and read about the Canadian-American-themed send-off party he threw with his friends the day or so before they took to the skies.
Don't miss out on this opportunity to read a truly gifted young writer's take on our cultures – the Canadian and the American – and the characters he encounters along the way. It has already proved colorful in the few days they've been ashore on our continent. They seem to have a gift for meeting people.
But this post… oh, wait… I forgot dripping wet …okay. That should do me good for a week or so. So. Where was I? Oh, yeah. But this post is about NOT reading my blog. As one may notice at the bottom of my list of Better Blogs Than Mine there's one called "Contains Mild Peril," written by a young man – Ultra Toast Mosha God – in Bristol, UK. The tracks left by visitors here rarely show any indication that people leave my blog for his, but I wish to point out here and now that such a neglect is a serious mistake. Not only is Toast a most excellent writer – often funny, usually deeply insightful, and with a very fertile imagination – but now, and for the remainder of the next four months, Toast is on our continent! He and a dear friend of his are on the adventure of a lifetime, as they have scrimped and saved for years, have quit their jobs, have sold all but the most useful – and portable – of their worldly possessions and are spending the warm northern hemisphere months trekking through northeastern Canada, down the US eastern seaboard, through the deep south and southwest, up through California and ending their sojourn in western Canada!
And the best of all? Ultra Toast Mosha God is blogging the whole thing! They've been in Canada for just shy of two weeks, now, so you're not so far behind that you can't catch up quickly. Start here to see and read about the Canadian-American-themed send-off party he threw with his friends the day or so before they took to the skies.
Don't miss out on this opportunity to read a truly gifted young writer's take on our cultures – the Canadian and the American – and the characters he encounters along the way. It has already proved colorful in the few days they've been ashore on our continent. They seem to have a gift for meeting people.
Saturday, May 03, 2008
Another Gas Post
As the owner of a SUV – a 2002 Nissan Xterra – and with my ailing father nearly 90 miles away in the Veterans' Home, I have become acutely aware of the price of gasoline. Throughout its life with me, most of the Xterra's driving was a combination of city and highway driving: the morning rush was almost always stop and go on the expressway, or on the surface streets in the city, until I got beyond the typical bottlenecks and into the suburbs where the cars thinned out and highway speeds were attainable. It was almost exactly a 50-50 split, roughly 12 miles of stop and go, and then roughly 12 miles of open highway, over which I routinely exceeded the speed limit. The range on a tank of gas averaged out to about 255 miles, which works out to roughly 16 miles per gallon.
Those numbers didn't change with my move to the suburbs and my commute being reduced to 3 miles each way. My driving habits were unchanged…hard accelerations, speeding, and eating food while talking on the phone while reading the newspaper while fixing my makeup…but I digress.
Ever since the national speed limit was reduced to 55 miles per hour back in the 1970s, partially as a forced effort to conserve energy, I have been skeptical about the numbers the government gave concerning fuel efficiency and simply slowing down, and I never cared enough to test the theory, especially when road-rage flared up and I was not about to let "that idiot" cut in front of me. But lately, since the amount of my highway driving has been significantly reduced, I've been driving at a more relaxed pace.
The day before my father's recent move to his new digs I had filled the Xterra's gas tank in preparation for the drive down to be on hand for the move. I had to hit the road early on a route that, as it turns out, is against the rush hour traffic, so I was able to maintain highway speeds for most of the trip. As I had allowed myself plenty of time to get there, I didn't bolt from traffic lights, I didn't try to jockey for position in traffic, I only ran the air conditioner while at highway speeds (shutting it off and opening the windows when I was at 40 mph and slower) and I never exceeded 60 mph the whole way down. There was perhaps a twinkle of thought about fuel savings, but it was mostly because I didn't feel rushed, so why rush?
After getting Dad settled in I did some exploring around the area of the cemetery where my maternal grandfather is buried (more on that later), and then I headed home, maintaining that same relaxed pace and keeping my speed to 60 mph or below. I was mildly shocked when I got home and noticed that I had put about 160 miles on the Xterra, but the gas gauge indicated that I had just above half a tank of gas left. I was on pace for 300 miles on one tank of gas! The rest of the driving on that tank was more "city" driving than anything else, so I probably got less than I could have, but all the same, when I felt it was time to fill up it was at 298.8 miles!! The math shows that the Xterra, on that tank-ful, achieved 18.8 miles per gallon. It sure doesn't sound like much more, compared to 16 miles per gallon, but it resulted in nearly 50 miles more than the six-year average!!
Hypermiling
It was only last week that I first heard the term "hypermiling", which refers to the use of certain techniques to get maximum mileage from a car, to exceed the federal EPA ratings for that particular model. Driving at slower speeds is only one of those techniques, some of which seem absolutely radical in comparison. But it certainly seems to have made a difference. Of course, I undid all that savings by going to the wrong gas station Friday afternoon. After passing the local Marathon station – a brand which is usually several cents lower per gallon than the Big Three oil companies – and their mid-grade fuel priced at $3.919 per gallon (I was trying to reach that symbolic 300 mile mark), I decided I had better fill up before I got on the highway on the way to my brother's house, and at 298.8 miles I stopped at another Marathon station, about 10 miles from my house…and paid $4.119 for mid-grade. TWENTY CENTS MORE! Boy! Did I feel stupid!
So the next time you have to drive somewhere, allow yourself a few extra minutes to get where you're going, employ whatever zen or meditative techniques it takes to find your calm center, and then drive serenely, taking care to ignore the assholes around you who seem to think that the morning commute is a race that must be won, and those who seem to think that intimidating other drivers makes them the kings or queens of the road. Accelerate smoothly, keep your speed at or below the posted limits, and get to where you're going safely.
You might squeeze a few extra dollars out of your tank.
Road Trip
One can imagine this is where my thoughts will be in July when I'm off on the road trip I'm planning. One of my nieces is getting married in Minnesota in the middle of July. I originally asked just for that weekend off from work, but after further thought I decided I would make a full-blown vacation out of that week, culminating in the wedding.
I was stationed in Montana for 16 months in 1984 and '85. Though I'm neither a hunter nor a fisherman, I really enjoyed my time there. Still, in the latter quarter of the 20th century, there was a frontier feeling there, with the lone prairie just a few minutes' drive out of the bigger cities (and the lone prairie IN the smaller cities!). So, to continue my big nostalgia trip, to follow up my recent return to Germany over the holidays, I will return to Great Falls, Montana, to see how much has changed there, and how much remains the same. I intend to make haste getting out there in order that I can spend the rest of my time moseying around all the haunts, perhaps cruising through the missile field that I once called my own, and then meandering across the plains through eastern Montana, with a possible visit to Themiddleoffuckingnowhere if Professor hasn't moved on from there by then. I'll continue to mosey, either through North Dakota, which I have never visited before, or through South Dakota, a drive through which I mostly slept through(!) back in 1984. I regrettably bypassed Mount Rushmore at that time, and I intend not to make that mistake again. Granted, it pales in comparison to Ultra Toast's adventure of a lifetime, but it pleases me to plan it, nonetheless.
Hopefully, with little other than highway miles on my trip, I will get a clearer understanding of the true range of the Xterra's gas tank. I know, in the grand scheme of life, that such information is trivial, but when you're driving through the vast, featureless expanses of the northern tier states, you need something to occupy your mind!
Those numbers didn't change with my move to the suburbs and my commute being reduced to 3 miles each way. My driving habits were unchanged…hard accelerations, speeding, and eating food while talking on the phone while reading the newspaper while fixing my makeup…but I digress.
Ever since the national speed limit was reduced to 55 miles per hour back in the 1970s, partially as a forced effort to conserve energy, I have been skeptical about the numbers the government gave concerning fuel efficiency and simply slowing down, and I never cared enough to test the theory, especially when road-rage flared up and I was not about to let "that idiot" cut in front of me. But lately, since the amount of my highway driving has been significantly reduced, I've been driving at a more relaxed pace.
The day before my father's recent move to his new digs I had filled the Xterra's gas tank in preparation for the drive down to be on hand for the move. I had to hit the road early on a route that, as it turns out, is against the rush hour traffic, so I was able to maintain highway speeds for most of the trip. As I had allowed myself plenty of time to get there, I didn't bolt from traffic lights, I didn't try to jockey for position in traffic, I only ran the air conditioner while at highway speeds (shutting it off and opening the windows when I was at 40 mph and slower) and I never exceeded 60 mph the whole way down. There was perhaps a twinkle of thought about fuel savings, but it was mostly because I didn't feel rushed, so why rush?
After getting Dad settled in I did some exploring around the area of the cemetery where my maternal grandfather is buried (more on that later), and then I headed home, maintaining that same relaxed pace and keeping my speed to 60 mph or below. I was mildly shocked when I got home and noticed that I had put about 160 miles on the Xterra, but the gas gauge indicated that I had just above half a tank of gas left. I was on pace for 300 miles on one tank of gas! The rest of the driving on that tank was more "city" driving than anything else, so I probably got less than I could have, but all the same, when I felt it was time to fill up it was at 298.8 miles!! The math shows that the Xterra, on that tank-ful, achieved 18.8 miles per gallon. It sure doesn't sound like much more, compared to 16 miles per gallon, but it resulted in nearly 50 miles more than the six-year average!!
Hypermiling
It was only last week that I first heard the term "hypermiling", which refers to the use of certain techniques to get maximum mileage from a car, to exceed the federal EPA ratings for that particular model. Driving at slower speeds is only one of those techniques, some of which seem absolutely radical in comparison. But it certainly seems to have made a difference. Of course, I undid all that savings by going to the wrong gas station Friday afternoon. After passing the local Marathon station – a brand which is usually several cents lower per gallon than the Big Three oil companies – and their mid-grade fuel priced at $3.919 per gallon (I was trying to reach that symbolic 300 mile mark), I decided I had better fill up before I got on the highway on the way to my brother's house, and at 298.8 miles I stopped at another Marathon station, about 10 miles from my house…and paid $4.119 for mid-grade. TWENTY CENTS MORE! Boy! Did I feel stupid!
So the next time you have to drive somewhere, allow yourself a few extra minutes to get where you're going, employ whatever zen or meditative techniques it takes to find your calm center, and then drive serenely, taking care to ignore the assholes around you who seem to think that the morning commute is a race that must be won, and those who seem to think that intimidating other drivers makes them the kings or queens of the road. Accelerate smoothly, keep your speed at or below the posted limits, and get to where you're going safely.
You might squeeze a few extra dollars out of your tank.
Road Trip
One can imagine this is where my thoughts will be in July when I'm off on the road trip I'm planning. One of my nieces is getting married in Minnesota in the middle of July. I originally asked just for that weekend off from work, but after further thought I decided I would make a full-blown vacation out of that week, culminating in the wedding.
I was stationed in Montana for 16 months in 1984 and '85. Though I'm neither a hunter nor a fisherman, I really enjoyed my time there. Still, in the latter quarter of the 20th century, there was a frontier feeling there, with the lone prairie just a few minutes' drive out of the bigger cities (and the lone prairie IN the smaller cities!). So, to continue my big nostalgia trip, to follow up my recent return to Germany over the holidays, I will return to Great Falls, Montana, to see how much has changed there, and how much remains the same. I intend to make haste getting out there in order that I can spend the rest of my time moseying around all the haunts, perhaps cruising through the missile field that I once called my own, and then meandering across the plains through eastern Montana, with a possible visit to Themiddleoffuckingnowhere if Professor hasn't moved on from there by then. I'll continue to mosey, either through North Dakota, which I have never visited before, or through South Dakota, a drive through which I mostly slept through(!) back in 1984. I regrettably bypassed Mount Rushmore at that time, and I intend not to make that mistake again. Granted, it pales in comparison to Ultra Toast's adventure of a lifetime, but it pleases me to plan it, nonetheless.
Hopefully, with little other than highway miles on my trip, I will get a clearer understanding of the true range of the Xterra's gas tank. I know, in the grand scheme of life, that such information is trivial, but when you're driving through the vast, featureless expanses of the northern tier states, you need something to occupy your mind!
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