Maybe he’s thinking that a nearby doper might want to drop by and say hello, in the evening? You’d want to give a pretty exact coordinate.
The big unknown is how much ground I can travel.
Out west with 75mph speed limits I am a day ahead of schedule, hence why the diversion to Telluride was a great addition…
The schedule is based on 4hours at 60mph.
The next firm date is Washington on July 1st which seems quite achievable with some wriggle room.
There is also a pencilled in catch-up with @feppytweed in Memphis on Saturday.
Whatcha got?
I’m enjoying looking up the location based on the three words. It’s amusing.
Day07 11:00 Central Abilene cooks.attend.pounding
Commentary above noted. I was of the mind that only my patron saint @Mamma_Zappa was following progress anything other than obliquely and that if she knew precisely where I was then the gods were likely smiling on this nomad.
But there are others reading this quasi-blog! Whodda thunk that?
So we’ll stop being a smug git and be more inclusive.
If you look at my profile image, you’ll see why a land filled with undulating stuff and rocks draws my attention. Conversely as the I-40 US60 an US84 take you into Texas I see similarities. However you got hills that Thule doesn’t.
After about an hour beetling along at good pace I’d gone through my Spotify playlist at least twice so dialled into the local FM radio channels. Bloody hell, isn’t Christian Rock an abomination? For me, Billy Connelly nailed it.
Reacting To Billy Connolly ranting about Christian rock and religion - YouTube
(skip to 0:55)
For a break, stopped at Fort Sumner at the “Billy the Kid” Museum and then visited his gravesite. As I parked by the museum the playlist started the Cruel Sea’s “You better get a lawyer, son; You better get a real good one.” Told you it was pycho-telekinetic. Have no dog in the fight over Henry McCarty’s status. I am bemused that Joe “Texas Reds” Grant, regarded as Billy’s first kill, is interred in the same cemetery just a few metres away.
But the big surprise of the day to the north of Abeline on or me was the banks and banks of wind turbines along US83 seemingly outnumbering the reciprocating oil pumps. Had no idea.
As mentioned previously most rural/farm buildings out in your West don’t have gutters or rainwater tanks. They also are profoundly lacking in trees. At home virtually all established homesteads are surrounded by groves of trees to protect the house from winds and take the edge off the summer heat. Consequently, homesteads are usually concealed from the road. Here it’s more of a “Little House on the Prairie” exposure.
Spied a few feedlot dairies along the road but I’ve only seen a handful of beef cattle either grazing or in lots. I did see what I could convince myself was a pronghorn, but they usually go about in herds not solitary, right?
Yesterday at Telluride I put my hand in a patch of snow beside the roadway. Today its 110F in Abilene. Good baking dry heat too. Had my first visit to Walmart. I expect Walmart inventories are tailored to the local market but I thought it was one of those stores where you could by a pram, a kitchen sink and a gun whilst picking up your weekly groceries. The Abilene store seemed to be carrying more conventional lines. I walked all the aisles twice and couldn’t find a marker pen/sharpie. I did buy out their stock of flash drives as the dashcam is generating 30GB per day, my hard drive is chocka and my comms prevents me uploading to dropbox as I planned.
Ate out at Dennys tonight. Apparently, something has gone bung kilter with their procurement system or possibly they are on a major cost cutting exercise because they didn’t have any chicken, salmon or corn. On the other hand the t-bone steak was a triumph.
Heading for Austin tomorrow and am expecting a much more consistent vista.
Will include a glossary/itinerary below.
If somebody wants to look at the forward schedule with the possibility of hooking up its:
Accommodation and activities are booked only for localities marked ###
Stop #
09 Austin, Texas
10 Morganza, Louisiana
11 Memphis, Tennessee (@feppytweed ?)
12 Lynchburg, Tennessee
13 Mountain City, Tennessee
14 Appomattox Court House, Virginia
15 Washington, DC ### (inc Dopefest?)
16 Gettysburg, PA ###
17 New York, NY ###
18 Easton, PA
19 Niagara Falls, NY
20 Detroit, Michigan
21 Chicago, IL
22 La Crosse, WI
23 Sioux City, or Sioux Falls tbc SD
24 Custer Ste Park, SD
25 Devils Tower, WY
26 Yellowstone, MT
27 Glacier, MT
28 Seattle WA (@Lancia ?)
From there I wind down the Pacific coast at a rate dependent on how much slack remains
Day00 Sydney sofa.even.notices
Day01 Los Angeles stars.frog.atom
Day02 Boulder City Hoover Dam onion.softened.training
Day03 & Day04 Tusayan Grand Canyon sounding.famously.worm
Day05 Kayenta Monument Valley shapers.northward.abacus
Day 06 Alburquerque via Telluride known.builds.since
If you come through Bozeman, MT, wave.
I think the combination of both the city/area and the three words is the perfect solution. – and I bet that sofa’s going to be appropriate when you get back to Sydney!
And I’m also reading it; partly out of general curiosity and because it’s a good story, and partly to find out whether you wind up coming anywhere near the Finger Lakes. – looking at that intinerary, I guess it depends on how you’re getting from Easton to Niagara Falls. Which may depend on how much time leeway you feel you have at that point.
Ooh, La Crosse – that is where I work and near where I live – what have you planned?
Brian
Driving through parts of Indiana (not likely on your proposed route though), we encountered hundreds of them as well. Pretty cool. We were once on a highway near a truck that was carrying just a single BLADE from a turbine - longer than a regular truck, this thing was basically held by two truck “carriages”, like this:
https://scontent-iad3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.6435-9/118850780_10157834227169716_7667783184693647502_n.jpg?_nc_cat=103&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=730e14&_nc_ohc=UfmbKPP7wKoAX_Rh3bl&_nc_ht=scontent-iad3-2.xx&oh=00_AfBZydRrRR5xxI2Oo1_5lo7f1jWN8SRj-i18LDk9UMnFHw&oe=64BAB9FA
Those suckers are a LOT bigger than they look in the distance.
This was likely the facility we drove past.
Music: oh, yeah. When we did our big trip in 1985 (we are OLD), there were many parts of the country with no radio signal at all. We recruited all our friends to record albums we owned onto cassette (not sure why we didn’t do it ourselves - maybe we didn’t own a turn table at the time) so we’d have something to listen to. Madonna’s Like A Virgin was being played, CONSTANTLY, when we were able to find a station and we were thoroughly sick of it. So when we found a station - in Tennessee, I think - that was just finishing up playing it, we were thrilled - wouldn’t have to listen to it again. Then it started up again. WHAT??? Turned out to be Weird Al Yankovic’s Like A Surgeon. I’ve been a fan ever since.
I don’t recall that we got stuck with any Christian radio - likely we either kept on looking, or just put in a cassette. Chances are, any place that had such stations had alternatives as well.
The Texas panhandle may as well be the homeland of horrible Christian rock. It’s a lot of open nothing (okay, to be fair, that’s a lot of the Southwest) punctuated by a lot of rural farming/ranching areas, and as far as I can tell, a lot of the limited radio stations are being run on a shoestring of a budget and staff, who aren’t going to be paying for anything recognizable as music.
I used to drive from Colorado Springs CO to the Lubbock TX area every other year for family reasons, and once you get off I25 and head east from Raton NM, you planned to not expect much reception until you reached the range of Amarillo.
I’m sorry our OP wasn’t close to us in the Springs, but Telluride is absolutely worth the view - and as a former resident of Albuquerque, there are a ton of fun spots there. But all take more time than such a packed travel plan allows for. And I wouldn’t rate any of them higher than the time spent at the Grand Canyon.
22:00 Austin, TX boarding.manages.breezes
Well, lets be frank … after the last couple of days itinerary the run from Abilene to Austin is pretty straightforward …ish.
First thing after refuelling was a visit to T-Mobile on TX-351 and with minimum fuss via the technical skills of Manager Coltan the comms issues were resolved and everything is humming in unison. Fan-bloody-tastic
After a couple of hours rolling through rolling verdant hills of Brownwood where there seem to be lots of ranches and not many cattle, I twigged that I’d left my stash of supplies for the day in the fridge in Abilene. Damm.
So my in-car emergency snack rations are the eclectically chosen Wiley Wallaby Hot Cinnamon Licorice, and Smoky Bacon Pistachios, One failure, one success…
In domestic travelling, my standard travelling beverage is iced coffee. The only option I’ve yet found here is Starbucks and it tastes like condensed milk ie S.W.E.E.T. and ghastly. I stay with water.
Then we come to the town of Early. (pop 2,762), named after the benefactor who donated the land for the school. When the town expands I guess they might set up the Early Early Childhood Education Centre there.
For a quick snack and to wash down the pistachios I dropped into the Aroma of Hope Coffee shop in Goldthwaite. The lady barista and manager there produces the best latte I’ve had on these shores then went back to knitting a beanie of which she makes 1,500 annually for charity including in support of people in Belize.
Fireworks: I’ve never seen so many outlets along the road. Is this a “cottage” small scale industry? I would have thought the nature and regulations would have made it a job for big outfits?
Another constant along the road are billboards for the ambulance chasing lawyers. Is this an indication on how lucrative this business is or just a vanity exercise?
About an hour further on the I-183 and while doing a handy, on the speed limit 75 mph, a white Ford pickup looms large in my mirrors. The prat at the wheel tailgates me for a couple of miles. Couldn’t quite make out whether there were slotted or Phillips head screws holding the numberplate. When we reach the next overtaking bay he roars past me as I was parked. Good riddance. There’s a profanity about American freedom painted on the drop board. Cute. Five minutes later he’s parked on the verge and a black Ford Crown replete with flashing lights is stopped behind him.
With freedom comes responsibility, son.
Negotiating the Austin freeways will probably save me shaving tomorrow. One minute the locals are winding their way through moderate traffic doing 75 like it’s Indianapolis and the next we are in a near crawl for 30 minutes.
Get to my digs and the heat from the bitumen of the carpark is stifling. Apparently the “feels like” temperature has reached 120F. But glory be, while everybody else parks their vehicle near reception in full sun, I find a spot under a tree.
Now as the evening closes in we get an electrical storm with rain which will cool things down nicely for tomorrow’s adventure to Morganza, Il and see how the US Army Engineers Corp keep the Mississippi flowing through New Orleans.
Day00 Sydney sofa.even.notices
Day01 Los Angeles stars.frog.atom
Day02 Boulder City Hoover Dam onion.softened.training
Day03 & Day04 Tusayan Grand Canyon sounding.famously.worm
Day05 Kayenta Monument Valley shapers.northward.abacus
Day 06 Alburquerque via Telluride known.builds.since
Day07 Austin cooks.attend.pounding
It’s a business that demands large numbers of clients, because each is likely to only yield a fairly small settlement (despite the ads showing clients who claim the lawyer got them a multi-million dollar settlement). So these types of lawyers advertise widely, and not just in Texas. I’ve seen similar billboards all over the US.
A, schadenfreude!!
There are articles tying large numbers of bumper stickers etc. with aggressive driving. I guess this proves that!
Re the fireworks: Any state where they are legal to sell, you’ll see these popup vendors. They’re typically there for only a few weeks before July 4th. I personally do not partake, having had some morons with illegal-in-our-state rockets nearly burn our house down, one fine New Year’s Eve. You’ll see lots of signs for such places when you pass through South Carolina - when we had our incident, the inspector who came to write up the report said “Huh. Not legal here. Closest place that MIGHT be legal is in South Carolina”. Luckily for us, the damn thing bounced off the siding, and landed in a pile of damp mulch in the yard; had it gone about 18 inches either way, it would have gone through a window and into our house.
I’m praying this means something different in Australian slang than American.
They’re also common, sometimes as all-year operations, just over the border between states in which most fireworks are legal to purchase and states in which most of them aren’t. People drive down to the state where it’s legal, usually stopping just over the border at one of the collection of fireworks shops there, fill their trunks, and head back home; possibly distributing to friends and neighbors. This isn’t legal, but they’re rarely caught.
(I live in New York State, which bans most fireworks except for professional operators; and not all that far from the border with Pennsylvania, which doesn’t. I’ve never bought fireworks illegal in NY – but, judging from the sound and light level around the 4th of July and Labor Day, quite a few people in the general area do.)
Until around 5-10 years ago there was a custom in Texas that while on a 2 lane highway (i.e. 1 lane each way), if you were out in the middle of the country and someone was approaching you, even if the opposing lane was clear, you’d move over to the shoulder so that they could pass you while using a minimum amount of the opposing lane. But I’m assuming that it is no longer the custom since no one has done that for me the last few times I’ve been in Texas. Maybe the person is old school and wanted you to move over anyway, but I wouldn’t recommend it since you never know what debris or bumps could be on the shoulder.
But probably they were just jerks. A few years ago in Texas it was twilight and I was going several MPH under the speed limit because I was low on gas, and a sports car started to close with me at a high speed. Since the light was low I wondered if they just didn’t see me, so I flashed my lights (even though I was ahead of them), so that they could take advantage of the completely empty left lane, but they did not. They went right up on my bumper for like 3 seconds, and then suddenly revved up and swerved around me. What a weird and dangerous flex.
Your journey tomorrow is a good 7-8 hrs of driving from Austin to Morganza.
If you go down 71 and then get onto I10 to head west you can enjoy the widest freeway at 26 lanes at the i10 / beltway 8 interchange. Depending what time you get through there I’ll likely be caught in the same traffic jam, I’ll wave. It’s freeway all the way though and should be easy going the rest of it. Just keep an eye on gas station fill up locations after you get past lake Charles ( where you need to pay attention to speed limits) and fill up after Lafayette. There are a few long stretches there of causeway freeway over the swamps. Lots of heavy trucks on the road as well.
If you take the northern route 71/290/8/69 etc it will go through a lot of towns with traffic lights .”, again watch for the slow down in speed limit in and out and through the towns , they fund the towns with speeding tickets.
The northern route is likely more interesting, but a longer haul on a long day.
Be sure to stop at a buc-ees. Massive travel stations with famously clean toilets and Beaver Nuggets. You will probably prefer the gasoline prices there as well. Should be one on the way into Houston on the 290 and I 10 routes and one on the way out on the I 10 route.
Bathrooms and gas stations in Louisiana are different.
Ahh I see I may be a little late on the advice, you are during this leg now I guess.
22:00 Central Livonia superego.needed.terms
A couple of hours weaving through a concrete corridor.
This is largely unavoidable in the circumstances of the trip. On the more scenic B roads I just can’t cover the ground necessary in the timeline. I ran the simulation and it took nearly a week longer to complete unless I drove consistently 6+ hour days. That’d make me a prime candidate to become a road stat.
So we do the big interstates where we have to and the B roads when we can.
For the motorheads Rog, my Nissan Rogue and I have now covered a bit over 2,600 miles, used 74.4US gallons of 87 octane at an average USD3.6/US gallon and 35.5mpg which isn’t too bad when you consider I’ve been giving Rog plenty of wellie.
In the last half hour of the trip I turned off the highway and meandered my way to my overnight stay in Livonia
Livonia is a revelation. From the heavy industrial I-10E to the winding, agrarian, 45mph, near deserted back roads in just a couple of minutes. There are crops of corn, rice, sugarcane and cotton. Might have also seen tobacco. Located on the edge of Atchafalaya Reserve, there are seemingly unending bridges over rivers and watercourses and flood plains. The contrast to the bare rock buttes and mesas of Utah is total.
Everything is green and growing like beanstalks. The naturally forested areas of the reserve seem rather close to impenetrable, and we haven’t got to the bayous yet. The reaction of the German settlers caught in John Law’s Mississippi Co Ponzi scheme in 1720 must have been utter bewilderment.
On the recommendation of Manager Patel I took my evening meal at “The Crawfish Hole”. An intriguing set up. You turn off the road, park in front of a corrugated iron shed with a porch. At the back of the porch is a bar where you can drink and eat local seafood etc.
Apparently, it’s the end of the crawfish season so they aren’t at their best. Had a sample which I thought were pretty good though a lot of work. On the other hand, the fried catfish platter was excellent.
On the big screen was the college baseball MCWS semi-final with the local LSU playing #`1 ranked Wake Forest. The punters and staff roared them home to a 2-0 win. An excellent evening.
Tomorrow I visit Morganza, cross the Big Muddy and then on to Memphis for a mini-Dopefest
=============================================================
Day00 Sydney sofa.even.notices
Day01 Los Angeles stars.frog.atom
Day02 Boulder City Hoover Dam onion.softened.training
Day03 & Day04 Tusayan sounding.famously.worm
Day05 Kayenta shapers.northward.abacus
Day 06 Alburquerque via Telluride known.builds.since
Day07 Abeline cooks.attend.pounding
Da 08 Austin boarding.manages.breezes
Home of my alma mater and the Crayola Attraction. Despite what those Lehigh people say, Lafayette is not one of the Crayola attractions.
I might be in the area. I’m anyway been reading along - it’s fascinating to see the daily thoughts of a visitor. I especially like your descriptions of the differences. Can’t wait to read your reactions to Yellowstone, Glacier Peak, plus Niagra Falls and Devil’s Tower.
I’ve been to many of the places on your list, but 20-40 years ago. I’m getting a hankering for another American road trip. For now I’ll just keep following along.
I find the three words fascinating and I appreciate having the town name as well.
Wow, you made it to Michigan in record time!