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I took a road trip this weekend (including Monday) bewteen two weeks of training. I drove 526 miles up and 538 miles back today. It seems like a long way to drive just to sit on a couch.
Getting on I-39 where it begins at Bloomington. Driving dead
north--NOW we're getting somewhere!
There are a couple of big wind farms along I-39 in northern Illinois.
Here's a side shot. The camper is a random occurence; the "bend
backwards" stance amuses me. I presume it's because of the way the
camera raster-scans the image.
For quite a while here, it looks for all the world like the road is
goin to go between those two wind turbines, like the Gates of
Argonath from the Lord of the Rings.
But the road turns eventually.
Some closer shots of turbines:
This is either a Unicycle built by B.S. Johnson of the Discworld
novels, or else a new power line pillar with wheels for running the
new wires.
I love the mural on the back of this truck.
In Wisconsin, I-90, 94, and 39 run together for a while. I-39
continues to the north, but I branch off to the west with I-94 to head
towards Minneapolis/St. Paul.
It's been cold farther north. There's still snow on the ground.
And finally, at the end of the drive up, here's the river as I cross
into Minnesota. Yay!
The primary reason for going on this trip was to surprise my brother
by showing up to his 30th birthday party. Here's photographic
evidence. I'm on the left, my brother Dave is on the right. Would
you trust your computer to these guys?
The other reason I went was I visited Chippewa falls Monday (today).
One of my stops there was the
Chippewa Falls Museum of Science and Technology, which contains an
extensive exhibit of vintage Cray hardware.
I'm sitting on serial number 1 of the
Cray 1 Supercomputer. The
computer parts are in the tall cylindrical section behind and above
me. The wider part, that I'm sitting on, houses the power supplies.
It was awesome seeing this museum. The early Cray systems defined the
very idea of a Supercomputer, and were marvels of engineering and
computing design.
(At the left of the picture is a display with three floppy disks
illustrating how storage has gotten bigger over time.)
The end-of-trip obligatory speedometer shot.
I bought this car just about exactly 2 1/2 years ago, and I've already
put almost 55,000 miles on it. In a bit over 5,000 miles from now, it
will have passed even the extended warranty that I bought for it.
I have a post about a car, that's not mine and not even a Volkswagen! I rented it on a recent trip to the San Antonio area and I have to say I was intruiged and impressed. The car was a Chevy Malibou, which is not certainly not a car that I would gravitate to, but I picked it with my usual Zen method of car picking. It wasnt' even the model that I'd picked when I did the paperwork, but that's what I ended up with.
The first thing, which was surprising and neat, is that it was so quiet. I think it's close to the quietest driving car that I've ever ridden in. It was just whisper-quiet. I liked the way it drove...it was nice and smooth.
But that's not what I wanted to write about. The car's intstrument
panel was...different than any I've driven before. The numbers come
from lights inside the dash, and aren't illuminated when the car is
off; then the dials are just blank:
When you turn on the key, the dial nuumbers slowly fade in, like this:
where you can see the numbers are still dim. And here the self-test
is done; the numbers are fully bright.
Oh, and it has a USB jack on the radio for power:
And I have to say--I've always liked the status displays that tell you
that you've just engaged the cruise control:
Aaaaaaaand...if that wasn't neat enough, the dash status display will
give you the pressures in the tires. Awesome!
The Beetle's running great. I haven't assembled a second carburetor yet, but other than that my set up spare parts is getting close to done. Once that's done, I'll start working on taking it out on longer trips.
The heat's working great. I haven't measured it, but I suspect that driving down the highway I can get a 30 degree F differential above the outside temperature. To slightly imprive that, one of the things I need to do is get the rest of the air handling stuff finished in the front end in the luggage compartment. I worked on the gas tank a bunch last summer, and I really never got the rest of the trunk stuff re-assembled.
While I get a lot of heat out of the engine, the worst thing you can
have in a forced-air system is an open exit that doesn't go anywhere
useful. Most of the air tends to leak out there and mostly not go
where it's supposed to. Right now, on each front side of the car, two
of the defrost hoses are hooked up, but not all three:
What's missing are the vent assemblies that go from the vent box in
the middle top of the trunk area to the dashboard vents. Fortunately,
I was able to find the vents in their box that's been sitting around
the garage for a year and a half.
There's a box at the top of the luggage compartment that takes outside
vent and pipes it into the dash vents. It has valves to turn that air
circulation off, or a fan to blow the air if you're sitting still.
The fat tubes (blue dots) on the sides of the vents connect to the air
box. The end slots connecto the dash board and put air out into the
passenger compartment (green dots). The reason to connect these up
for winter is that the remaining defrost hoses also connect to the
vents (red dots).
There's going to be salt on the roads soon, so I don't know that I'll really get to driving it much more than I already have until spring rolls around again. However, this coming year, I should be able to start seriously using it and taking driving load off of my new Beetle. There aren't any significant maintenance items that are upcoming. The only one that I really should do soon is to lubricate the CV joints on the drive shafts, and that's something that can be done one at a time, fairly non-invasively. It's just messy.