, Subject = "Coast-to-Coast"
| Coast-To-Coast-To-Coast-To-Coast TravelBlog, starting May, 2005. ... rev 08.29.2005 |
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We put an offer in on a house and it was accepted.
We should be back in Cupertino on Wednesday morning, July 27, to begin all of the logistics to move and to put the house on the market.
Coast To Coast, 12 days and nights Back to Cupertino,
July 19: Drove to Ashville, NC, about 250 miles.
Hot, humid, and arrived just before a wonderful thunderstorm. Biscuit, our small border collie mix, squirmed out of the car at the first loud thunderclap... through a back window open not more than 4-5 inches wide! Now we set the windows to two inches when we leave them in the car for a few minutes... Thank goodness Shiloh, our Golden, didn't fit through the opening, or at least didn't try to...
The bed at the Holiday Inn in Asheville had the most comfortable mattress we'd slept on in months! Since home in Cupertino. Nice staff, and even let me modify their lobby PC so that I could print out something related to the house purchase, sign it, and give it to them for a [free] faxing back to Raleigh. Five Stars. The dinner at the restaurant was great, too. Nice staff and delicious food.
July 20: Drove to Nashville, TN, about 300 miles.
A few sprinkles on the windshield, and people in Tennessee use directional signals less than drivers in any other state we've been in, but road construction delays were minimal and traffic moved well for the whole trip. There are lots more trucks on I-40 than I-10....
Arrived ok, but felt really cranky, and everything and nothing pissed me off. One moron insisted on pulling up close behind the Prius, not more than a foot from the bumper, I'm certain, and would take no hints to back off. Running a red light left him behind me. Dinner at Dalfour's included really good food, but a very noisy environment.
July 21: to Memphis, TN, about 205 miles.
Got out early enough to play in local traffic for a while, and be mesmerized by the amazing number of ways that I-40 can fork and merge as it goes through Nashville... However, after about twenty miles, we both felt light, happy and enthusiastic again, after a full day of "downer" the prior 24 hours. But why? Then the New Age answer came to me: you hear people talk about "positive energy" sources welling up out of the earth. Places like San Francisco, places in India, etc.? Well, if there are positive outflows from the earth, there must be negative inflows somewhere else, to balance 'em out, right? We think we found one of them: Nashville. One of the homes of Country Music, whose basic themes are: my wife/girlfriend/lover/whatever left me and took my pickup truck, dog and whatever else, and life sucks....
Right?
Makes sense to me. And as soon as we got about 20 miles west of Nashville, we felt light, happy, cheerful.... all the good things we'd felt in Cupertino and Raleigh. Go figure.
Got to the La Quinta in Memphis just before some heavy storms hit just east of the city. As usual, scared the poop out of Biscuit, and Shiloh never batted an eyelash.
One sour note: La Quinta seems to allow local management to make changes to their "dog-friendly" policies. In Florida, we ran into a local manager who changed the weight limit for permitted dogs because of a bad experience there. We had to go next door to the Hilton [bummer... it was better]. Now, we ran into a manager who said that they'd had a problem with someone leaving a dog or two alone in a room, and the incessant barking of the dogs caused them to have a bunch of people move out, costing them well over a thousand dollars in fees.
So, not only did they ask us to sign a contract that "at no time would the dogs be left in the room alone" but that if "they found any dog fur on the bed, they's assess a $25 charge to clean it up." Now, somebody please explain to me the pricing model for running one of those little sticky rollers over the bed adds $25 to their cost structure, please? Or do they now have to dry-clean the comforter, rather than.... hey, wait a minute! Did they put a fresh comforter on the bed when the room was made up? If we find dog hairs on the comforter when we arrive, are we exempt from the fee? Should I start taking time-stamped photos?
That really pissed me off. It also meant that we couldn't take the dogs to the room while we brought up our luggage, we couldn't leave the dogs in the room while we went to dinner or even used the array of pools that they have on-site: indoor, outdoor, whirlpool, etc.
Well, that little number cost the local restauranteurs somewhere between $50 and $75 tonight, and I plan to make my views known to La Quinta's managment. I can understand that a dog or two can cause these kinds of problems at a hotel. What bugs the hell out of me is that they show no flexibility in their "new rules" after that. It's just as stupid as the kid that falls off their bike and never gets back on again. It implies that they'll now lead the rest of their life that way, governed by one bad incident with one bad dog, years in the past, and that untold numbers of guests from now on will suffer this inconvenience.
The other thing it means is that from now on, when we stay at any hotel and bring our dogs along, we will now have to ask whether the dogs can be left alone in the room before we make a reservation. This, of course, will raise a question in the hoteliers' minds, making it more likely that in the future, the answer is "no." Next time this happens, we'll move to another hotel, on the spot. We've already seen that along the Interstates, hotels and motels generally cluster together at prime interchanges, often within just a mile of each other.
From the looks of all the weather maps, we'll be driving from hot to hotter for the next few days... Whew!
July 22: to Russellville, AR... oops... Fort Smith, AR, about 310 miles.
What smooth roads there are in Arkansas! Once out of the Memphis road construction areas... [why does every state we've been through have lots of road construction projects... except California?].. smooth roads and light traffic, for the most part. Huge expanses of farmland as we crossed the Mississippi and continued westward. Rice [why do they grow rice in California when it rains so much in Arkansas?], corn, and a few others we couldn't figure out... just cover the countryside. Mostly flat for most of the east part of AR, then uphill into the foothills of the Ozarks, and with the proverbial headwind, fuel mileage dropped a few more points into the low 30s. Temperatures also cruised into the 100+ mark, and the A/C was working hard to keep up with the demand.
And if there is any place in the USA where they use directional signals less than in Tennessee, it's Arkansas. On the other hand, one very bright spot on the Interstate is that if anyone is trying to merge onto the highway, people are very good about clearing out of the right lane to make room for them! In NC, the joke is: don't use your directional signal at all ---- it warns them so they can cut you off. Here, anyone merging from an on-ramp onto the interstate, whether they're driving a Prius or an 18-wheeler.... people clear room for them! If that degree of sensibility were copied into California, probably half of the merging slowdowns at on-ramps would be done away with.
And the people in Arkansas are so nice. Even nicer than Canadians, in my experience! One guy and his wife were trailering a small Austin-Healey Sprite: bright orange convertible. I complimented him on the car and by the time he and his wife had talked about cars, dogs, geology of Arkansas and what to see around Siloam Springs on our return trip east, we had extended our rest stop visit from about ten minutes to over half an hour. And we waved and honked when we caught up and passed them again on I-40. What a nice environment... [except right now, it's cooler in Raleigh than it is here.]
We got an early start today, and discovered that I can drive pretty much straight through to about 2 or 3 pm. But if we start at 10:30, I can drive straight through to about 2 or 3 pm.... We're going to see if we can skip Oklahoma City and make it as far as Amarillo, TX, tomorrow. That will shave one day off the trip, and if there are other stretches where we can do 300-400 miles instead of 200-250, we may get home two days earlier than we'd planned, or more!
July 23: to Oklahoma City [or maybe Amarillo, TX, or somewhere in-between.]
July 23: to Amarillo, TX it is....
Yep, made it to Amarillo today... 437 miles in about eight hours. Got the lowest mileage on this tank of gas that the Prius has ever gotten: about 28.5 !!!
Remember two things, though... from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, it's two things: uphill and upwind. And I ran at about 72 mph in the 70 zones, too, and "with the pack" at lower posted limits [which were generally ignored by the natives in the "pack"] so average speeds today were higher, too. Uphill plus headwinds plus more air resistance due to higher speeds = lower gas mileage. Almost as low as the Camry would do on the highway with no trailer! :)))))
And at higher fuel consumption rates, the tank doesn't go as far. This was a 360-mile tank, unlike the more usual 390-450 mile range...
But it also whacked one day off our return schedule, and proved that if we get out earlier, we can go much farther before pooping out from the afternoon sun beaming in through the big windshield. We've re-done our remaining itinerary to get back to California earlier by doing more miles per day. Getting on the road early makes a huge difference for us.
July 24: to Gallup, NM, about 430 miles. Yup, it is Gallup tonight. Future drives will be shorter, but it still looks like three days to Cupertino!
Again, every state we've driven through has been repaving the Interstates, and in some cases, like Albuquerque, completely revamping interchanges and overpasses. Wonder what's happening in CA.
Found one new game being played on I-40 westbound, today: one truck [eighteen-wheeler, usually] will be overtaking another. The second truck will slow down, and so will the one doing the overtaking, until they've dropped down from the legal limit of 75 to sometimes as low as 55 or less. This bottles up all of the little "four-wheelers" which could have gone up the same damned hill at 80 or more. Not a nice game. But it can be played both ways, if you bottle up a tractor-trailer the same way.
Anyway, with a lot of uphill grades today and a nice headwind or crosswind to struggle with, the Prius got the lowest gas mileage ever for the tank today: down to nearly 30 mpg. Were it not for some downhill grades entering Albuquerque, the number might have been under 30, too! But the net is still good, and we're still pleased with how the car has operated. Only in one location, up a fairly steep hill at an elevation of about 5400 feet, was it unable to maintain 75 mph!
We gained another hour today, so we've got an hour to wait before the hotel restaurant opens, so Claudia's kicking back and watching the Sci-Fi channel, and I'm in the lobby.... the rooms with wireless and wired have all been sold, but there's a nice wireless connection in the lobby, so here I sit. Sure beats PC withdrawal, anyway....
Enough for now... time to see if the connection is better than last night's. That one kept going down every few minutes, and was really frustrating. I thought it was my laptop's fault, but from the looks of the connection right now, "they" had a problem.
July 25: to Kingman, AZ, about 330 miles.
More smooth roads, for the most part. A lot of downhill and not much uphill brought this tank's average back to the mid-30's. We're driving away from most weather, though we saw some heat lighning tonight as we walked a block or so east to get some dessert after a wonderful afternoon nap. It's in the 90s here, but "it's a dry heat."
Darn those time zones, again! We arrived here at what we thought was 2pm, and found that it was really 1pm, and no rooms were ready. What to do for an hour? We'd picked up lunch in Flagstaff, but found that Arizona has closed virtually all of the Rest Areas on I-40. Maintenance? Remodeling? Who knows. Except for one that had a Closed sign on the "Rest Area Ahead" sign, but was open anyway.... Unfortunately, I was in the left lane when I noticed that it was open. Anyway...
We drove a mile or so along the strip here, looking for a green place for the dogs. And lo and behold, to our wondrous eyes, did appear a city park! I pulled in, and Clauda exclaimed, "Dog Park!" Part of the city park was a dog park, as well appointed as the ones near Cupertino! We had our lunch there and talked to several other pet owners. One had moved to Kingman three weeks ago, from Michigan [no more winters!]. Another had lived all around the country, and chose Kingman. They were having a house built, and the builder was way late in finishing it... months and months...
The husband said that the builder had two groups of about 30-35 homes, and of all of the people who'd bought or put money down, all but about a half dozen or so were from California! From Yuba City to San Diego, and everywhere in-between.
And for me, the really good news is: a hardwired 100 Mbps link, much better than last night, so I could collect email and update the website files with little grief.
July 26: to Bakersfield, CA, about 340 miles.
Some beautiful country between Kingman and Bakersfield; lots of beautiful hills, volcanic areas with lava tubes and sink-holes readily visible.
Then we got to Bakersfield. My gut reaction, as soon as we pulled off the first exit from I-40 was: I'm in LA, and this sucks. It was hot,humid [lots of trees pumping moisture into desert air], lousy signage on the highways and rude drivers. Let me outta here! We had a nice dinner and a comfortable room, but wasted no time packing out the next day for the final leg of our journey "home."
July 27: to Cupertino, CA, about 250 miles.
A funny thing happened on the way to Cupertino. We discovered that we were bored with California. Sure, it's got some great coast, but that's expensive and crowded; sure, it's got some great lakes and mountains and National Parks, but that's crowded, too. And the places that aren't crowded are too far from airports and live theater for us. We're done. We're ready to move. Drivers on 101 don't know to move left for cars or 18-wheelers merging in from on-ramps. Only the motorcycle policeman was nice enough to not even stop us for a warning, let alone a ticket, but just yelled in the window, "Trailers are not allowed in the HOV Lanes!" Ooops, forgot about that one. I guess that makes sense, even in the anti-rush-hour direction [see my Soapbox page on CarPool Lanes for how I really feel about HOV lanes and the folks that run them.]
Finally back to the house at 884. It doesn't feel like our house any more, just a place to stay and pack before we leave for the third cross-country jaunt. It'll probably take two or three weeks to pack, and then we'll be on the road. [Just in time for the Labor Day traffic, right?]
Well, I guess that's all for this page... On to the next phase... Getting the CA house ready to sell..
| , Subject = "Coast-to-Coast" |