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What we did on our summer vacation
Jun. 4th, 2006 01:27 amWell, on at least one. We're theoretically going to the Colorado Ren Fest the second to last weekend of July, followed by me going to Phoenix for a game convention, then Russet flies to Virginia to work with some people building a new instrument for her telescope, and then theoretically I might meet her in Atlanta for DragonCon.
Gonna be a busy summer!
Well, on to some stuff about the trip that we just completed.
I’m not going to do a day-by-day recap of our recently completed vacation, but I do have some things to write about.
First off, it’s REALLY different driving in the east along I-40 than it is driving in the southwest. Bear in mind that I’d lived in Phoenix for 43 years, and with the exception of one driving trip back in ’91 up to Portland, all of my driving has been to San Diego, LA, New Mexico, Texas, and Vegas. We took a big family drive back to the eastern seaboard then up to Niagra Falls and back in the early 70’s, but I really don’t remember much about the drive.
A couple of things struck me. First, green. Everywhere I’ve driven in the past has been desert. Even coming back from Portland, once you start heading south from the Columbia river down to Idaho, it’s largely identical to Arizona desert. So once we started hitting Arkansas and points east, I was kind of struck silly by the amount of green on the ground. I mean, is that legal? They’re actually allowed to have all that? Then later, most notably in North Carolina and heading north into Virginia, the corridors of trees and bushes lining the interstate. It actually felt kinda strange.
I saw a few interesting things along the way. One, pretty much only of significance to Phoenicians, was we drove by the Harkins Cine Capri movie theatre in Oklahoma City. It would have been cool to stop and see a flic, but there wasn’t time. We ran in to two nasty stretches of construction, the last day in Colorado Springs, but early when we crossed the Mississippi into Memphis. Their freeways were really torn up, it took a while to get through it, and to make matters worse it was at rush hour. But we saw the giant pyramid of Memphis, which I’m convinced is the landing platform for a space ship from the early seasons of Stargate One. So that was cool.
One of the really cool things that I saw was a truck. Yippee, he saw a truck. Well, it wasn’t just any truck. I first saw these trucks on Modern Marvels, they did a show on the storage and transportation of dangerous materials, I think it’s actually a two-parter. There is a company somewhere back east that specializes on transporting dangerous items. In particular, they transport bad things for the government, including old and decaying explosives. Their trucks are sort of a pea green color, and if you know what you’re looking for, not difficult to spot. They have custom trucks that have cargo areas designed to hold these unstable explosives as they move them to an incinerator facility for destruction. These trucks don’t have trailers, they’re a single unit. They also have tons of security features, the ones they showed on the program were pretty cool.
Unfortunately I can’t get at the Modern Marvels web site right now, so I can’t track down the company and post a pic.
We also saw a huge flock of Fed Ex trucks going to and from Memphis, it’s one of their central breeding grounds IIRC.
More later.
Gonna be a busy summer!
Well, on to some stuff about the trip that we just completed.
I’m not going to do a day-by-day recap of our recently completed vacation, but I do have some things to write about.
First off, it’s REALLY different driving in the east along I-40 than it is driving in the southwest. Bear in mind that I’d lived in Phoenix for 43 years, and with the exception of one driving trip back in ’91 up to Portland, all of my driving has been to San Diego, LA, New Mexico, Texas, and Vegas. We took a big family drive back to the eastern seaboard then up to Niagra Falls and back in the early 70’s, but I really don’t remember much about the drive.
A couple of things struck me. First, green. Everywhere I’ve driven in the past has been desert. Even coming back from Portland, once you start heading south from the Columbia river down to Idaho, it’s largely identical to Arizona desert. So once we started hitting Arkansas and points east, I was kind of struck silly by the amount of green on the ground. I mean, is that legal? They’re actually allowed to have all that? Then later, most notably in North Carolina and heading north into Virginia, the corridors of trees and bushes lining the interstate. It actually felt kinda strange.
I saw a few interesting things along the way. One, pretty much only of significance to Phoenicians, was we drove by the Harkins Cine Capri movie theatre in Oklahoma City. It would have been cool to stop and see a flic, but there wasn’t time. We ran in to two nasty stretches of construction, the last day in Colorado Springs, but early when we crossed the Mississippi into Memphis. Their freeways were really torn up, it took a while to get through it, and to make matters worse it was at rush hour. But we saw the giant pyramid of Memphis, which I’m convinced is the landing platform for a space ship from the early seasons of Stargate One. So that was cool.
One of the really cool things that I saw was a truck. Yippee, he saw a truck. Well, it wasn’t just any truck. I first saw these trucks on Modern Marvels, they did a show on the storage and transportation of dangerous materials, I think it’s actually a two-parter. There is a company somewhere back east that specializes on transporting dangerous items. In particular, they transport bad things for the government, including old and decaying explosives. Their trucks are sort of a pea green color, and if you know what you’re looking for, not difficult to spot. They have custom trucks that have cargo areas designed to hold these unstable explosives as they move them to an incinerator facility for destruction. These trucks don’t have trailers, they’re a single unit. They also have tons of security features, the ones they showed on the program were pretty cool.
Unfortunately I can’t get at the Modern Marvels web site right now, so I can’t track down the company and post a pic.
We also saw a huge flock of Fed Ex trucks going to and from Memphis, it’s one of their central breeding grounds IIRC.
More later.
