Tag: travel

Another highway adventure

Trusty SteedToday I learned that the back seats of Ohio State Trooper cruisers are not at all designed for people like me with long legs.  In fact, to fit in it at all so that the officer could close the door to lock me in and take my statement, I had to sit nearly sideways!  You'd think that if someone is already being put in the back of a cop car, there's enough difficult stuff going on in their lives such that a little bit of leg room is in order.

About 45 minutes before I found myself in this situation, we were traveling down I-70 East in the heavily falling wet snow, gusting wind, and crowded highway lanes.  It was the kind of weather that should probably have kept us off the road, but if there's one thing that car culture teaches you, it's that nothing should stand in between you and your vehicle's destination, so there we were.

About six cars up, I saw headlights, and they were in my lane.  "Oh no," I thought, "not another one of these high speed car chases."  As I slowed us down, I watched the car spin out of control, cross over the median into the westbound lanes, cross back over the median and do two full spinning rotations, and then come to a stop.  We passed a split second later, and the driver appeared to be slumped over in her seat. Continue reading "Another highway adventure" →

The one where the plane failed to depart, twice

Chris and Mark arriving at SFOSometimes you see those weather stories on the evening news where they show a few seconds of airline passengers stranded in some airport looking like hell as they try to figure out how to cope with canceled or delayed flights, and usually you just feel a little bad for them and then move on. At the moment I'm feeling some appreciation for the misery that's displayed in those brief clips, having had a bit of a travel adventure myself:

It started with Mark and I barreling through the snow on I-70 toward the Dayton airport, wondering if planes would even be taking off at all today. But, my handy dandy text message updates from Delta.com declared the flight was on time, so we pressed on.

I should have known we were in for a special time when the guy at the ticket check-in counter (which has largely been replaced by self check-in kiosks) was delighted to point out how much cost cutting Delta has done. Me: "Do you have one of those little folders for these boarding passes?" Him: "No, they did away with those some time ago. Heck, all we've got left now are the airplanes! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" Right.

Continue reading "The one where the plane failed to depart, twice" →

Review of the Garmin Nuvi 360 GPS unit

I have long resisted the use of GPS technology for any serious or sustained navigating. This is partly because I don't like the notion of depending on an array of satellites managed by the US Air Force just to get where I'm going - to whatever degree I have any simplicity left in my life, it's one more way to add complexity and hidden costs to basic everyday tasks. I've also resisted GPS because I like the idea of being able to navigate with basic tools, instinct, and luck.

For my recent road trip, however, I got over these hesitations (for better or worse) enough to want to give the use of GPS a real spin, and I did in the form of the Garmin Nuvi 360. Here's my review.
Continue reading "Review of the Garmin Nuvi 360 GPS unit" →

Road Trip Vacation: Out West and Back Again

We've recently returned from a three-week road trip through the U.S. It covered around 5,400 miles spread over about 85 hours in the car and a 7,000-foot elevation change, with an average speed of 64.0 mph (max of 90.8 mph), across around 13 states, and using countless gallons of gasoline.

It's the kind of trip I've been wanting to do for a while, but have always had difficulty finding the time for, let alone the sense that it was the best use of money and energy (on that point, with the way energy prices are headed, perhaps it was one of the last opportunities for such free-wheeling). But we did it, and it was great, and I'm thankful for the privilege and resources that made it possible to see the land in that way.

You can view my photos of the trip, and then fill in the gaps and see some different angles from Anna Lisa's photos from the same.

Some highlights include:
Continue reading "Road Trip Vacation: Out West and Back Again" →

The one where we almost died in a high speed car chase

Just a few minutes before it happened, I had said, "You'd think people would pay better attention to what's going on around them on the road." We were barreling west on I-70, heading to a wedding in southwest Indiana, and I'd just watched the second police car in a row with its lights and sirens at full blast trying to get by a driver ahead of us who wasn't checking their rearview mirror enough. We didn't know what was up ahead, but I didn't have a good feeling about it. Perhaps in my own nervousness about what was in front of us, I apparently also stopped checking my rearview mirror frequently enough, because the next time I looked at it, there was a third police car right behind us, lights and sirens blaring, trying to get by. Not good.

A few miles up the road, the traffic in the eastbound lanes across the median were going very very slow. And not because of any apparent wreck or other barrier. We were trying to figure that out when I saw more lights up ahead - brake lights, flashing red and blue lights, and glints of sunlight off of surfaces that were moving in directions and patterns that just didn't seem right. A cop cruiser cut dramatically across the median, and then another came back across the other way, also really flooring it. "Uh-oh," I said. The cars ahead of us were coming to a full stop. Then we saw the white van weaving in and out of the traffic ahead, and then it was coming toward us on our side of the road, twisting and turning on and off of the pavement and grass.
Continue reading "The one where we almost died in a high speed car chase" →

Flickr Photos Featured

I love Flickr, which shows off the world we live in through the eyes and camera lenses of everyday folks. In the last week I've had a few of my photos posted there (most of which are released under the Creative Commons license) appear in some interesting spots:

  • Schmap Nashville Travel Guide: a couple of photos I took at the Tennessee State Museuem are apparently now a part of the fourth edition of this online tourist guide. There may be a print version too, but I'm not sure where to find it.
  • All Around Ohio for November 11: a photo I took of Antioch Hall at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio was featured in an article about the college staying open.

Bits and Pieces from Vacation

A few bits and pieces: I've recently returned from a great vacation. I took some of my time off to explore a few Richmond-area touristy type things that I haven't gotten to see yet, including a thorough tour of the Wayne County Historical Museum. They have quite an impressive collection, and I learned a lot I didn't know about this community. As a result I had one of those great moments of cosmic unity: I'd enjoyed reading about the history of the Wayne Corporation which was headquartered here in town. On Thursday, I was in North Carolina climbing onto a converted school bus for a whitewater rafting trip with the Nantahala Outdoor Center and thought to look at the bus's manufacturer label, and sure enough, it said "Wayne - Richmond, Indiana". Cool! (BTW, if you're ever looking for an awesome place to vacation in western NC, check out Earthshine Mountain Lodge - amazing place, people, and food.) And just a few months ago I was touring the Lincoln Park Conservatory in Chicago, and noticed that the metal winches used to open and close the glass panels were labeled "Quaker City Steel Works - Richmond, Indiana." Wowsers - this place really made a name for itself. Speaking of Chicago, I did several other museum tours there this time around, including a nice walkthrough of the Adler Planetarium (though the show "Stars of the Pharaohs" was minimally fascinating) and the Chicago Historical Society's exhibit Without Sanctuary, a visual history of lynching in America. The images of communities - men, women, children - laughing and smiling as they gathered to celebrate death were indescribably haunting. And finally, to end on a note of humor, if you haven't already, check out the June 22, 2056 edition of The Onion - hilarious.

Letters from Robert C. Hardie

From 1962 to 1965, well before I was born, my father served in the U.S. Army. Most of his time was in Germany based at Bad Aibling Station, a military intelligence listening post, which was closed in 2002. During this time he wrote many letters and postcards to my grandparents and other family members, which they took care to preserve. In 2001, I took the time to transcribe these letters into a database and then into a navigable set of HTML documents. Despite some trepidation about making them globally public, I'm now posting these letters on my website in hopes that they will be interesting or useful to visitors here. As I mention in my editor's notes, it was pretty amazing for me to learn about my father through this medium, and to follow his adventures which, in some ways, I have mirrored.

Enjoy!

Comair flight cancellations caused by a 16-bit counter

Over the holiday weekend, Comair had to cancel over 1,000 flights because of software problems. It turns out that, as I read in the F-Secure Weblog, the flight planning software they were using was using a 16-bit counter to keep track of flight staff changes...so after 32768 changes it would simply stop working. Details are available from an article in Cincinnati Post. This is the kind of madness I was expecting for Y2K, not four years later when we're supposed to have learned that lesson by now.