Tag: travel

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:
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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.
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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.

A Trip to Madison

Desperate for some sort of vacation and lacking anything formally planned (where has the year gone?) the stars aligned in such a way that I took a trip last week to Madison, Wisconsin. It ended up being quite a great place to visit on summer vacation - thanks to a little pre-visit Googling and my awesome tour guide, Dayna (thanks!). I experienced quite a range of destinations: ethnic food of all sorts, a vibrant and amazing farmer's market, touring the University campus and amazing capitol building, biking around downtown and along the Lakes, visiting progressive co-ops and bookstores, and visiting the pocket of friends living there who I never think to visit. And I still got a good amount of laying around done, too. It wasn't quite a beach vacation, but I do believe Madison is one of my new favorite places in the Midwest, and I'm grateful to have had such a great, restful time there.

4th of July ruined again: can't go to Bahrain

The U.S. State Department is issuing a warning cautioning Americans against traveling to Bahrain for fear of terrorist attacks, which means that once again my 4th of July plans for this weekend have been completely messed up. I guess they don't really understand that some people made plans a long time ago to visit various Persian Gulf nations, and that an advisory on the Friday before a big travel weekend just doesn't cut it. Dagnabbit!