, Subject= "Coast-to-Coast"
| Coast-To-Coast-To-Coast-To-Coast TravelBlog,
starting May, 2005. ... rev 09.25.2005; 7:42 pm, EDST |
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Wednesday, 08.31...
Our second stop was McDonalds for some burgers. The adrenaline level was still high, but we were leaving about 4pm, heading for Truckee, so we expected a 9:00 pm arrival, barring lots of traffic.
Sorry, but no stop to see David and Rebecca and their new house in Sacramento; they're too far off I-80. And the traffic around Roseville and Rocklin made the quick phone call to Carrie in Rocklin a non-starter. Plus, we were pretty tired by then! On to Auburn for our traditional stop at In 'n Out Burger, but just a pit-stop this time. The McBurgers have kept us going well, so far. Up the hills and over Donner Pass and down the other side to Truckee, to stop at Vicki and Brian's.
There was lots of traffic. I-680 was mediocre, the Sunol Grade was actually not bad, Concord was jammed: a perfect example of needing 6 or 8 lanes each way, and being short about 2-3 in both directions. And, of course, a virtually empty car pool lane, with moron Californians worried about Priuses jamming the car pool lanes. What morons. By the way, it's illegal to tow a trailer of any kind in a car pool lane in CA. Run that by me again? With the right lanes jammed with cars crawling along at 5 mpg, it's illegal for me to tow a trailer at 35 mpg, because it's a trailer. What? It takes up too much space on the empty lane? Get a life, lawmakers... or a brain, whichever is more easily available.... probably a life.
Some construction delays and more traffic around Sacramento, and we finally got to Truckee at about 9:20 pm. Not really too bad, considering everything.
And off to sleep for all.
Thursday, 09.01...
And a lot more sleeping today. Where the heck is my shaving cream??? The grand-daughters are great, the parents are wonderful, and made a great dinner for us, and there's no end to amazing news around here. A local guy was cut off by a driver on a local road. He drove all over town looking for the driver, and found him. The local guy knifed the other driver, the local's wife kicked the driver when he was down, and there were lots of witnesses to the stabbing. So, what do you expect? He's pleading innocent. How?! Temporary insanity??? How temporary is insanity that makes you drive around a town for hours, looking for a car, then stabbing the victim repeatedly, just for having cut you off on the highway. I think it's time for temporary insanity to be thrown out as an excuse for any and all actions on the highway, especially "road rage." But that's a note for another Soapbox rant... Off to bed for some more catching up on sleep. We can feel the stress leaving our bodies, and we're ready for the next phase... the Cross-Country Drive to Home.
Friday, 09.02...
Stress is dropping, wine is flowing; Brian is a great cook and grillmeister. The grand-daughters are wonderful and beautiful, and photos have been taken. Sleep is still good. Dropping back dosage of Prozac.
Saturday, 09.03...
Lower dosage is great, so far. More sleep, wine, family; not necessarily in that order. A party tomorrow afternoon, but there's packing to do before that. Looks like we're heading to Elko on Monday. Maybe Black Raven will even get a short visit.
Sunday, 09.04...
Lots of sleep, relaxing, and an afternoon barbecue at V&B's friends' on the other side of the Truckee River. Beautiful home with beautiful views. Great burgers and stories to tell, too. Home to V&B's to check email, warn Blackraven and JR and family and MDL and family about our current plans.... always subject to change.
Now for some packing and repacking and ready to rock and roll eastbound tomorrow!
Monday, September 5: 321 miles, 5:15 hours: Truckee to Elko, NV.
After some tear-stained good-byes, we hit the road at 10 am. Mostly downhill from Truckee to Reno, with the appropriately excellent gas mileage. Reno is spreading out everywhere, and it looks like it has suburbs all around it for miles. Too high and too cold in winter for our taste. Raleigh is still the right choice.
After Reno comes some of the biggest, most desolate countryside in the USA. Salt or alkali flats, an occasionally swampy area, the occasional surprising stream or river, and the dual tracks of the railroad mark the landscape. I-80, for a large part of this drive, follows railroad lines. With their gentle curves and moderate slopes, I'll bet that the highway designers might have had a fairly easy time of finding the best route to lay the highways.
Several steep hill-climbs and down into the valley descents punctuated the ride, with most of the "up and down" in the final two hours or so as we approached Elko. This is a sizeable city for the area, with nice houses on the hills north of the town and many green trees bordering neighborhoods.
The dogs enjoyed the rest stops and drank water enthusiastically. So did we. Temperatures were only in the low 80s, but that was combined with a very low humidity. Rolling into the hotel's parking lot, we were tired and grouchy, but a few hours' rest and we were more cheerful and ready for dinner. The hotel is fully-equipped with a casino and restaurant, and although there was a 20-minute wait for a non-smoking table, the food was excellent.
Tomorrow, we'll be on the road earlier, and hopefully, there will be some Sprint cellular service, and we can stretch the distance a little and maybe make it to Colorado a day earlier. I'll let all y'all know tomorrow night if my laptop's connection is good. Here, when it's good, it's very good, but in between, it's intermittent. I still don't know if that's related to the LCD screen problem, or if many hotel wireless systems drop you off after a while...
Tuesday, September 6: 273 miles, 5:00 hours: Elko, NV, to Evanston, WY. [yes, further!]
Yep, all across Utah in one gulp. Traffic was light, for the day after Labor Day, and we didn't complain at all. The Bonneville Salt Flats and the Measured Mile were too far off the road to get more than some photos of the general area, and Utah does not put a lot of money into comfortable rest stops, either.
Not quite as far as I thought we might be able to go, because two of the towns with pet-friendly hotels had booked up by the time we found a city with enough Sprint signal that we could try to make reservations. Sprint is NOT the company to use for cell service in Utah. So, Evanston it was for the night. The Prairie Inn, on the far side of Evanston, was inexpensive and surprisingly spacious. The room was longer and wider than any we'd been in for months, it was clean, and cost less than many. A nice area to walk the dogs, right across the parking lot, and on-time delivery by Pizza Hut also made the afternoon and evening restful. The goal was to get out early and see if we could make it all the way to above Loveland, where Jon and Mary live.
Wednesday, September 7: 385 miles, 7:00 hours: Evanston, WY to Loveland, CO.
Woo-Hoo! We made it! Breakfast and lunch stops made the trip quicker than expected, and outside of some construction zones on I-80, travel was fast and traffic was light. Sprint is not the cell phone service to use in Wyoming, either! We didn't get a good Sprint signal until several dozen miles into Colorado, and then all was well.
The Loveland area is nothing like I remember from visits about 20 years ago to the HP sites near there. Loveland HP, Agilent, and other companies share the HP site. It's still as wooded and beautiful as it was, but the traffic is terrible and the traffic lights seem to do little to help anyone get anywhere. I felt like several intersections would be much better served by roundabouts or traffic circles. Developments after developments lined both the north-south interstate as well as the main road through town. And then there were more developments. Nice, attractive houses, and tons and tons of them! Mostly, the further you went up into the hills above Loveland, the bigger and nicer the homes were. Ridge-line homes were impressive, too, and the space between homes outside town was surprising, until we were told that the zoning for well-and-septic home utility homes was 35 acres. That explained a lot.
Further and further into the "wilderness" we drove, with me constantly trying to figure out if I remembered enough of the surroundings to pick out Jon and Mary's home. Wrong, time after time. We finally found the right driveway and the right house number sign, and eventually pulled to a stop in front of their garage. After a few minutes of gawking at the surrounding scenery, one of the doors to the garage opened and Jon came out, followed by Mary. Hugs all around celebrated our first get-together in what might have been about 20 years.
The talk of the afternoon included war stories from HP and other parts of life histories, many tales about dogs, as both Claudia as well as Jon and Mary were and are, respectively, involved in breeding and showing Samoyeds. Big fluffy, wonderful white dogs. A dinner built around buffalo-burgers followed, along with more and more talk, stories, photographs of their recent trip to Alaska, and so on.
Wonderful friends reunited after too long of a time. Now they're on the hook to visit the Tylerton house!
Thursday-Saturday, September 8-10: With Jon and Mary.
Mary is a better than wonderful cook. She says cooking is her hobby, and as one might expect, i think she could/should go into business. Maybe run a bed-and-breakfast... oh, she already did that....
Friday, Jon gave lessons to me on how to shoot his rifle and handgun. I did surprisingly well [Mary said "Wow!" when she saw my target.] Natural ability, they say. Claudia had her lessons on Saturday, and did really well with the rifle, too. Neither of us had fired a weapon in decades, and Jon is a very serious, careful and good instructor. We may pursue this more back in NC. Apologies to all friends and relatives in Truckee and NC... :)
Today, Saturday, after Claudia's target practice, Jon warmed up his John Deere diesel tractor and gave me a driving and hydraulic controls lesson. I handled the front bucket, gear shift, and back-hoe. The slow drive gear A was way too slow for me, so once about 50 feet away from my instructor, I stopped, shifted to the travel gear, C, and had a lot more fun. Turned around and drove back to the top of his driveway, got the back hoe instructions, and was then invited to dig a hole in his driveway. I felt a little nervous about that, but with Jon's encouragement, put about a half-foot by two-foot dig into the road. He then showed how easy it was to smooth out the rut, and parked the tractor back next to the garage. This tractor is considered "industrial grade" so now I can say I'm an experienced industrial heavy equipment operator.... LOL! Well, at least about 15 minutes' experience. :) Did you know they have automatic transmissions?!
Sunday, September 11: 80 miles, 1:48 hours: Loveland, CO to Lone Tree, CO.
Visit Michael and Nancy and their kids. Their little boy had a flu or something the night before, and Michael's wife had just flown in from Scotland a few days earlier, so those made for some not-so-ideal visiting conditions, though Nancy is a great cook, and did very well under the circumstances. Aiden felt better Monday morning in time for our farewell, and we truly enjoyed meeting some folks new to us and seeing their beautiful home in Lone Tree.
Monday, September 12: 80 miles, 1:48 hours:. Lone Tree, CO to Colby, KS.
Hey, when does the uphill end??? I kept promising Claudia that from Denver to the Mississippi River would be downhill and downwind! Where did they put the downhill?? Anyway, the downwind was good, producing some great average miles per gallon, and we'll log that tomorrow morning when we tank up again. Last tank-up was on the 7th. No driving at each visit point, plus some good tail-winds means no refill until tomorrow, the 13th! Miles and miles of corn and milo and sunflower fields punctuated our ride today. Very beautiful country, even if very flat, and very nice people everywhere. Beautiful clouds this evening; there must be some neat storms to the east. One huge thunderhead showed beautiful colors at sunset. We had a great steak dinner at the City Limits, just across the road from the Best Western in Colby. Claudia's 10 oz. Beef Tenderloin Filet was tender and delicious, and my 14 oz Rib-eye was delicious! There was a display of various kinds of barbed wire framed over our table, though Claudia says there's a museum in LaCross that displays 2400 varieties!
Tuesday, September 13: 287 miles, 4:42 hours: Colby, KS to Wichita, KS.
Kansas is flat, really flat. Well, not exactly. While I'd expected today to have a nice tail-wind and a downhill slope from 5000+ feet of altitude to 3000+ feet of altitude, every time we went downhill, there was another uphill in front of us. How is this possible?! I don't know, but the tail-wind that we started with was good for just a few hours. Then it turned into a cross-wind, and even when we turned south towards Wichita at Salina, it turned about ninety degrees and stayed a cross-wind! There were storms to the right of us and storms to the left of us. While they may have volleyed and thundered, we got just a few drops on the windshield all day, and that was over about ten minutes in the early afternoon. I saw several large fires burning off to the east of the interstate after noon, too, but it looks like Kansas doesn't worry much about open burning, although these looked big enough to be house fires. Nor do they, like several other states, do much about trying to capture or trap gasoline fumes when you're filling the tank. Straight pipe into the tank filler. Not even a rubber flap. Interesting. Checked into La Quinta just before check-in time, and was met by a nice lady who had everything in order. They'd lost their manager, so someone who called demanding to talk to the manager was out of luck. They got forwarded to the financial gal's extension.
When I tried to connect my pc to the local internet, nothing worked. No wireless; no wall plug. I phoned the front desk and asked what they meant by "high-speed wireless connection" on the little card in the room. "Dial-up," the guy at the front desk replied. I'm going to inquire about this some more with the parent company. Help me understand, please, what their idea of "high speed" means...
Dinner next door at a nice Chicago-style pizza and pasta place. The hotel didn't want anyone to leave pets in the room, unattended, so we locked the dogs in the car and went to dinner. It was near sunset, and the air was cooling off, and we cracked the windows about two inches [so Biscuit couldn't fit through the crack!], and they were fine. My pizza and Claudia's lasagna were delicious, but not as spicy as the kind we're used to on either coast. Is that a local phenomenon?
There were some more beautiful and big clouds to the southeast again, and the weather reports tonight spoke of quarter-sized hail and flash floods in Chatauqua County, several dozen miles to the southeast. Rain is forecast for tomorrow, so we'll probably get another free car wash. I tried to call Ted and Mahaila, and left a message on what I thought was their phone number's answering machine, but got no call back. If we can't contact them tomorrow morning or by noon or so, [Sprint cell connections permitting,] we'll try to go directly to Siloam Springs and surprise the heck out of Mike's folks. As I've tried to repeat, this is a very flexible schedule, and subject to change!!!
Ok, off to bed and up early tomorrow. La Quinta has the greatest do-it-yourself waffles, and I've missed them!
Wednesday, September 14: 176 miles, 2:55 hours: Wichita, KS to Tulsa, OK.
Visit with Ted and Mahaila, or continue through today to Siloam Springs.....
Well, Ted, anyway... Mahaila is in CA with Suze. Hi, Suze and Mahaila... maybe next time. Great chat and catching up with Ted, and a great dinner out at one of his favorite Mexican Restaurants. Yum! And, for anyone expecting email from me, it's still not possible for me to reply to emails via Outlook. I'll try to do a web-login and email from there. Spam filters make it impossible to send through my ISP when I'm on someone else's LAN. My ISP says, "No workarounds." Thanks, guys. Go figure out why your customers need some solutions here. Next email out is probably Sunday night.
Southern Kansas and northeastern Oklahoma are very beautiful. Many trees, rolling hills and farmland, and many two-lane roads that are on their way to becoming 4-lanes. It's also nice to still see some "grasshopper" oil pumps still extracting some crude from beneath the earth's surface there. Beautiful fields [more milo], horses, cows, rivers, streams. As we go south, it's a bit warmer, but the humidity is helping my painful sinuses, beaten up by the high, dry air of CO and WY. Never thought you'd hear me praise humidity, did you?
Beautiful sky show this evening with the sun setting as a fiery ball [--travelers, take heed!], with beautifully lit up clouds. Forecast is for heavy storms here around 3 am [Biscuit-dog is going to LOVE that...], and great chance of rain as we leave in the morning. I hope Larry and Ann have an umbrella or two... where the heck did I pack them?
By the way, another day of "looking for the downhill" without any luck. Somehow we've descended from 5000 feet to 3000 feet to about 300 feet above sea level, and it felt like uphill most of the time. The car's average of 33.3 mpg for the past 296 miles says that the downhill, wherever it was, must have been overwhelmed by head winds. Tomorrow might have some tail winds, but we'll be climbing into the Ozark plateaus, so the Prius may come across tomorrow as pretty thirsty. On the other hand, the rain should wash a lot of those dead bugs off the front of the car, and that's ok with me! :)
Friday, September 16: 84.8 miles, 1:29 hours: Tulsa, OK to Siloam Springs, AR.
Visit with Larry and Ann in Siloam Springs.
What a wonderful little town Siloam Springs is! We overshot one turn to their home and had to backtrack eight miles, but it was delightful. Rolling green hills and some housing developments, along with some large fine homes. This is one area where the average price of a home is around the average price of a home in the United States. Friendly folks. Some traffic jams where two-lane-blacktops cross and the cars are spaced out such that it's a game of Frogger to get across the intersection, but folks wait patiently.
Larry and Ann are the wonder parents of Mike of Houston, and we see more and more of Larry in Mike every time we see Larry. A wonderful property, garden, home, barn, and room for the dogs to run. Many nice photos of here were taken, and some more ideas of how to remodel and furnish the NC home were collected. Also, Ann is a great cook, and needs to be put in contact with Jon's Mary and Michael's Nancy!
And beyond that, we learned much about the local history of Siloam Springs, where an aunt and uncle of mine lived [or maybe they were my cousins... I've got to check some of my mother's records, or local history logs...]. Saw the house where they lived decades ago, and met one of Larry's sisters and her husband, who also knew them. Got some photos of the Uncle/Cousin in high-school/college yearbooks. He had been a WWII fighter pilot, married a girl from England, moved to Siloam Springs. His wife passed away, he remarried and moved to Florida, where he passed away, and his wife moved back to the NYC area, where she had family. This could be a long research project. Any Mormons in the audience???? Help!
Off to, hopefully, somewhere deep into TN tomorrow, and maybe Asheville the night after, which puts us into Raleigh on Monday night! Tuesday or Wednesday at the latest!
Now we've got more folks on our list of invitees to visit with us in NC. The next years should have us surrounded with new and old friends, and that will be wonderful.
Saturday, September 17: 343 miles, 5:54 hours: Siloam Springs, AR to Memphis, TN.
Made it! Arkansas is still green and beautiful, with some trees on the wooded hills j u s t starting to change colors a little. We saw fields of cotton and rice and a crop duster that looked like a large model airplane, as we drove along I-40 again. I even recognized some of the landmarks along the way.
We really enjoyed our stay with Mike's parents, Ann and Larry. They are two of the nicest people we've ever stayed with. The dogs loved to run around their property, and Shiloh loved to roll in the morning's dew-wet grass, which we didn't really appreaciate nearly as much, but she does love to be toweled off, so I guess it was a win-win on her side, anyway.
Ann's "cereal breakfast" was bacon, eggs, fresh-baked muffins with jelly, honey, peanut butter or butter. Strange idea of "cereal" we thought... but delicious.
Approaching the Tennessee border of Arkansas along I-40, we were startled to see flashing police lights at an exit ramp intersection. I first thought there'd been an accident, but as we got closer, we saw, turning south at the exit ramp's intersection, a seemingly endless line of police cruisers, all with their headlights on and blue and red light-bars blazing. Coming from the east, along the frontage road, were hundreds more! It went on for miles. I concluded that either there had been a terrorist attack a few miles south of there, or it was a funeral tribute. Later this evening, we saw on TN tv that it really was a funeral procession and tribute to a young police officer who had died, hit accidentally by another police cruiser as he was pulling up the tire-buster chains from a highway where they'd been chasing a driver. The driver ended up being charged with the death of the officer. I swear that there must have been five miles of police cars, nearly bumper to bumper, all with flashing lights, leading another long line of civilian cars.
We easily found our hotel, one of the Drury chain. Nice features: complementary wine or cocktails at six pm, along with soft drinks, popcorn, chips, juices or salsa. Hot breakfast in the morning, too. An hour of free long-distance, per room per day, and an included 10Mbps hardwired LAN link in the room. We just may be seeking these guys out in the future, although they're just spreading across the region now. Otherwise, they'd be our next target in Knoxville!
A nice dinner at Ruby Tuesday's closed the evening, with a cute young waitress who's engaged to a serviceman who's coming home [intact] after his humvee hit a land mine. He suffered partial loss of hearing in one ear, but both he and his comrades inside the humvee survived without serious injuries. The serviceman and waitress are going to have a large bunch of issues to deal with, but she sounded very grateful for his return, and is willing to be supportive during his recovery period, including therapy sessions for flashbacks, etc. Very pretty girl, too.
Sunday, September 18: 392 miles, 7:33 hours: Memphis, TN to Knoxville, TN.
Welcome to the Eastern Time Zone! All the way across Tennessee in one day. Tomorrow night in Raleigh, the Good Laird Willin'...
More cotton fields and swampland, hills and hollers. A few trees turning yellow; some just turning brown and dropping their leaves, as many of the trees on Tantau Avenue in Cupertino start doing about this time of year. Huge trees covered by kudzu, looking like giant topiaries. Learning that if you're passing a truck and you flash your high beams, it means it's ok for them to merge into your lane, NOT that you're trying to pass them. Tennessee drivers, on average, do not have directional signal controls in their automobiles. But the scenery is beautiful and once you're out of your car and in the hotel or restaurant, they're really nice people. By the way, it was worth a very long drive today to not to have stopped in Nashville, with its inherent negative energy. From the looks of tonight's sky, we may have some rain catching up with us, and it will be great to have that, so that some of the millions of dead bugs can be washed off the front of the car...
We're almost home! Now, where the heck are those house keys, and how soon can I get connected to the WWWeb ?!
Monday, September 19: 363 miles, 7:34 hours: Knoxville, TN to 8114 Tylerton Drive, Raleigh, NC 27613 !
Home at Last! Home at Last! Dear Lord Almighty, We're Home at Last!
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