No disguise for me, but the QC Symphony held a Halloween Pops Concert this year, and all of the symphony folk dressed up. At first glance, none of my mom's co-workers recognized her.
travel: October 2004 Archives
Total Miles: 522
Miles to Date: 4248
The miles, they keep on climbing. I'm back in Iowa now, and wondering WTF I could have been thinking. I packed a duffel full of shorts and t-shirts, and brought 2 pairs of jeans and a couple of sweatshirts, "just in case." Hmmmm, just in case I found myself in the upper midwest in late October? When the temp rarely climbs much above 50? Maybe summer will last until November? Clever, clever boy. Argh.
On another note, I added another little tool to the sidebar. They're called HitMaps, and I heard about them over at Monkeymagic. Basically this service reads the IP addresses of visitors, and plots them all on a world map, increasing the size of the dots as the number of visitors at that location grows. I suspect that it's more useful for "long tail" sites like this one than it would be for power bloggers, but it's a nifty little visualization tool, and it verifies my hunch about how popular I am in Australia.
I've got a couple of other entries to post, but I think this one is finished. I'll be in Iowa for a couple of weeks, resting up and preparing for the Convergences conference in NC at the beginning of November. Maybe a day trip or two in the interim.
Just outside of Des Moines now, and have spent part of this mini-leg wondering why the noun form of compel is compulsion. Why not compelsion? Or compulled?
I also participated in a little Presidential straw poll. There was a couple from Nebraska who, as they passed me, held up a Kerry/Edwards sign in the window, and then asked me for a thumbs up or down. They seemed pretty happy with my answer, but then they had a K/E sticker on their car. A few minutes later, I passed someone with a variety of anti-abortion bumper stickers on their rusted-out van, and I'm pretty sure that this person cancelled me out.
I've had cause to reflect upon how little I like grooved pavement. It always makes me feel as though I've got less control over my car than I actually do.
I also discovered at this rest stop that there are 44 "fun spots" in Iowa, where folks can partake of "boogying."
Finally, I think that there's a piece of Colorado tumbleweed stuck to the underside of my car.
Oh, that wasn't the last one. Down at Lori's, I found out that her mom and I share a compulsion. When we're in cars, we cannot help but read signs, often out loud. I don't think I'm breaking a vow of silence when I say that Lori and Lana find this terribly annoying. Fortunately for Lori, and others around me, I don't usually vocalize my reading, so she had no idea that I had the same habit (until I told her). I have noticed myself doing it on this trip, though. There's just something about all those words, just crying out to be read. Last night, as I was winding into Lexington, I saw a billboard well off the highway to the left, and as I passed it, I couldn't make out all the text on it, and felt mildly insulted to be teased like that.
Oh yes. I'm just a barrel of fun in the car, especially after a couple thousand miles. Davenport soon. That is all.
Well, no, but it does have wifi, which means that even though I've got a couple of hundred miles to go, I feel irresistibly compelled to post an entry, despite the fact that I have next to nothing to report from the road at the moment.
I can tell you that there were more road crews along I-80 in the eastern half of Nebraska than I encountered in 4 different states (counting the west half of Nebraska as a state) previously. Seemed like every ten miles we were slowing down to 55. Ugh.
No pictures to post, either. Just imagine being able to see miles in every direction. Got it? Okay. Now imagine everything the color of hay. Welcome to Nebraska and the western part of Iowa. I exaggerate, but only a little. At least today isn't windy.
Back to the road. That is all.
Total Miles: 439
Miles to Date: 3726
It seems like only yesterday that I was waxing eloquent about how lucky I was to be in New Mexico this time of the year. That's mainly because I hadn't yet had the experience of being in Colorado this time of year. Leaving Pueblo, it was sunny and in the low 50s. About an hour later, the temperature reading outside my car declined steadily into the high 30s, I saw snow dripping off cars, and I spent the next 400 miles or so being buffeted by serious winds. Ugh.
It felt like I drove much further than 400-odd miles today, mainly because the whole leg involved me gripping the wheel tensely, and hoping that a semi didn't wobble or weave at the wrong moment. Through most of the first half of Nebraska, I was treated to several rainbows, which would have been nice but for the fact that they came at the end of several cloudbursts. Blue skies to my left, blue skies to my right, but for most of the afternoon, I was driving straight into thunderclouds.
I haven't been sleeping that well lately, so I went a little lighter on the caffeine today, and as a result, spent most of the day yawning uncontrollably (just did it again). Hopefully, though, that'll help, that and the fact that I didn't really relax until I got out of my car this evening. I've got about 500 miles or so left until I hit Davenport, which I should do sometime tomorrow night. I'll have to make sure and keep myself from stopping by habit at the local Hampton Inn.
Until then...
Yes, that is snow on the roof of the little cabin to the right. Hard to believe that a little over a week ago, I was complaining about the high temperatures down in Austin.
Total Miles: 377
Miles to Date: 3257
I'm now in Pueblo, Colorado, which is where I'm posting both this entry and the last one, as well as the various pictures in between.
Got up fairly early this morning, with the idea that I would get to Taos in time for some lunch and some shopping. It took me a little longer than I'd planned. Yahoo maps tells you that it's roughly 70 miles or so from I-25 to Taos, and calculates the mileage as if you're averaging about 65 mph. What it doesn't tell you is that a good 30 miles of the trip to Taos is composed of narrow, mountainous, 2-lane highways filled with 30 mph squiggles and 20 mph switchbacks. I left Tucumcari thinking I'd get to Taos by about 11, and didn't actually make it until 1. Part of that was my fault, stopping for photos, but part of it was that the road to Taos is actually a pretty tough drive. I was happy that my car was fairly fresh, but even then it struggled a bit. There were stretches where I was literally slalomming up and down hills with frequent turns.
Still, it was gorgeous, and worth the trip. Since I was basically doing the tourist thing myself, I can't get too down on a town that's made such a central space for tourism. I did what I could to talk with the shopkeepers, though, and found out that there were actually quite a few New Yorkers there. I chatted up the guy who was "on duty" at an artists' co-op, and it turned out that (a) he sells a lot of his work to people from NY, and (b) he got a degree from Cornell in the early 80's. Yeah, I bought a small print of his, along with a few other things. A lot of small purchases for me, and a couple of mid-sized ones. Had some lunch at a local place that looked overpriced, but actually ended up being pretty good.
I did a little better job leaving Taos than I did getting there, but still it was a pretty tense drive. Not only is it winding road, but in a lot of places, you're a couple of feet from a pretty long drop. Combine that with the daredevils who push at you from behind, and it was a tense trip in and out. Once I got back to I-25, I managed a couple more hours of straightaway (albeit up and down quite a bit), before pulling up in Pueblo. Tomorrow, I'll be turning right at Denver, and making an I-80 run to Iowa.
[On a somewhat different note, maybe this service exists and I just don't have the energy to track it down tonight. But I'm less than satisfied with the fact that neither Yahoo nor Mapquest allows someone to input multiple points on a trip. I can get maps for Tucumcari to Taos and Taos to Pueblo, but not Tucumcari to Pueblo with a side-trip. Does anyone out there know of a multi-point trip tracker?]
I was incredibly lucky, I think, to hit this part of the country in October. All day long, it was in the low 60s and sunny, and all the trees were changing color. The entire drive, from about Las Vegas (NM) on, was simply gorgeous.
There's another of those "scenic overlooks" just past the border into Colorado. The light was fading, but I did stop and snap a few.
This is Eagle's Nest, a small town located in between the two difficult stretches leading to Taos.
Here's the view from Rte. 66. I think I'm heading north towards Las Vegas, NM, at this point.
Total Miles: 449
Miles to Date: 2880
On the road again...
I left Dallas Monday morning, heading west. I'd hoped to make it all the way to Taos in one go, planning on staying there a night, and moseying around for most of the day. As I hit New Mexico, though, I was more tired than I'd figured, and I hit a fairly steady rain, which made conditions less than ideal. So I pulled up and stayed the night in Tucumcari, not the least reason for which was that I liked the name.
The Texas leg of my trip was lo-o-o-o-ong, but on the bright side, there were a couple of pretty solid rest stops along US 287, which runs from Dallas to Amarillo. The first one was about 10 miles south of a town called Quanah (I think), and as I was heading back to my car, I was intercepted by the attendant. Turned out that he lived in Quanah, and his ride was 30 minutes late, so he wanted to know if I could give him a ride. We talked the whole time, without exchanging names (?), and it turned out that he had just moved to this little dinky town in Texas from Oakland, where he was in the process of taking a second crack at building a life for himself (he was 44). He ended up there because he had helped someone get there from California, and this woman's family helped him find a job, get a loan to help with his credit, etc. We talked a little about my trip, too, and by that time, we were where he needed to be.
About eighty miles later, there was another pretty nice rest stop. So I get out of my car, and walk towards the restrooms. As I do so, I walk past a pickup truck, and a middle-aged, red-haired woman who's clearly walking back to it. A conversation ensues:
She: Are you the New York boy?
Me, after a brief pause: That's me.
She: You're a long way from home...
Me: Yes. Yes I am.
I'm sure she must have passed me and noticed the plate, but I suppose there's also the possibility that New Yorkers are so rare in the ol' "Panhandle Plains" that word of my trespass preceded me.
Here come some pictures.
As I think is probably apparent, we had some trouble coordinating cats, open eyes, and smiles.
I didn't want to wait too long to get pics of Jenny and Shiva up here. Jenny's currently at Watson, but she has grudgingly approved a couple of these pictures.
