Saturday, September 15, 2012
September 15, 2012
On the road again, and the road problems attendant. I left Aurora on what I think is route 76, but the Florida-grade road signs say it could have been any one of four, take your pick. It took four hours to get out of Colorado, driving northeast toward a place called Julesville, where I could not find a coffee shop. The motorcycle weather was perfect, so I lost a good two hours driving time poking around the sights.
Traveling America is a far different experience from thirty years back. There are no mom & pops, unless you really get so far off the freeway they don’t need to post their hours. All the locals know when Sally closes up to take her sister to the AA meeting. And it is easy to run out of gas on a motorcycle in Nebraska. I understand the grand picture that gas stations cannot be more than a half-tank distance from each other. But the freeways don’t announce gas stations until one mile before the turnout. Thanks for the advance notice.I made good time until I had to turn off at the big “GAS” sign at Overton. Except, the station went belly-up months ago, so you just wasted a quarter gallon pulling into their tumbleweed lot for the turnaround. And just then, a trucker flies past and sprays me with a shower of stones. Within twenty minutes, my speedometer quite, my starter died, and my rear marker lights were gone.
That explains why instead of my intended destination, I pulled into Lincoln. I passed big cities like Grand Isle that I did not even know existed, like sailing the Amazon. Try to find a motel in useless York, or a gas station open after five in Elm Creek. But I did drive at night, risky business even in an auto. The reason was the lack of, well, lack of anything in Nebraska once you are outside city limits. Since I cannot repair a starter, or even the market lights while on the road, it looks like daylight travel only for the remainder.
The good news is that I made 546 miles. A month back, 350 a day was exhausting. Today, the limit was not my endurance, but the dark, the cold, and the difficulty finding services. I took I-80 after the first hour on my planned scenic route. Nebraska is so featureless, I didn’t miss much by climbing up to 70 mph, which by the way, the Honda can do all day long. But not all night. The Honda cloaking device means people cannot see you. Time to enlist the robot club for a solution, but I never did much like night driving.
Why didn’t I take pictures of me unditching the sidecar? I stopped at a river crossing that looked mild, I wanted to wade into the ice cold water. That was at the same Elm Creek just said above. But the terrain was deceptive. I got half through the siding to the water when I hit a huge pothole and high centered. Fortunately, I had my $30 pneumatic jack to wiggle out.
I met up with a biker on the way to Lincoln, his wife and kids were ferrying him on his Harley. We buddied up and drove the after dark stretch, but I called it off after 44 miles. To risky, if not downright dangerous. I don’t mind the trucks that whip past you at 85, it is those numbskulls that creep past you at about a half-mile per hour advantage, buffeting you knowing if anything goes wrong, they outweigh you a hundred to one. Get out of the way, you automobile scum, the truckers own I-80.
I finally bedded down near the airport in Lincoln. Where all the motels charge the identical rate of $58.95. I had a coupon for Quality Inn, but with the fake price advertising and the rip-off tax, it still came out to that price. So I chose the motel that had the free breakfast. I’ve decided not to do any repairs on the trail. It seems to me the problems are all electrical, except the entirely mechanical speedometer. So I’ll push start until I get back, there are always plenty of people who will push start a sidecar.
In total, today cost $150, which crimps the budget and limits my choices. The biker recommended that I take 75 through Kansas, “a much better road”. That means a bit of a backtrack in the AM but I need to get to of all places, Muskogee, OK. The weather went frigid right at sunset, which I watched in the rear view. That means I head south until the air stays warm at night, and the nearest town at the correct position is Muskogee, which also connects to I-65.
ADDENDUM
Have you ever noticed how you can tell the computer of a complete idiot? This is the laptop I bought from Dave-O. I should have just redone it but I thought he might want it back. Now I’m stuck with it until I find time to reinstall everything. What are the signs of a no-tech user? Start with Google tool bars, enough to blot out the top third of your screen. Over time, an idiot user allows all manner of useless settings to take over the machine. DoScan, RTVscan, startup apps, TSRs, Java updates, the limitless crap they don’t have the brains to deflect.
They get used to being stupid, so you don’t dare fix it. They won’t be able to use a properly configured machine. All the stupid shortcuts are enabled. What kind of moron needs a computer to capitalize the first letter of a sentence? Or how about the left-click set to select the letter instead of the whole word. It makes sense when you consider a true idiot might actually need to spellcheck the letter “a”.
