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One of the things that frequently bogs me down in blog posting is when I have a post to make that has a ton of photos, I end up not doing the post for weeks because I don't have the time to put together to edit, crop, and prep them. So the really good, dense posts end up being the ones that slow things down. So for this post, I'm just going to split up the posts, and do the image editing and writing when I have time to do them separately. So this is part 1 of something, maybe 3 for the whole trip.
In March of 2015, I took a trip to a conference in San Jose, California for work. The conference went the entire week, starting on Monday evening and going through Friday. The airline flights lined up in a wierd way; there basically wasn't any way to construct the trip to fly out of my normal airport (Knoxville, TN)(TYS) without adding several hundred dollars, so the base price ticket would have been flying out of Louisville, which more than I want to normally drive.
So I set the cost of the base ticket by the Lousiville flights. But if I'm driving out of Lousiville, I might as well drive slightly farther and fly out of Atlanta. That gives me MUCH more flexiblity in picking flights. In fact, it gave me enough flexibility to actually add a whole leg to the trip by only kicking in a bit more on the tickets myself. So instead of flying directly to California, I flew out of Atlanta to Minnesota first thing on Saturday, spent the weekend visiting family and friends, and then flew from Minnesota to San Jose on Monday.
Just about to leave the house at 04:20 in the morning. It amuses me
that the clock with four hands (the long red one is the 24-hour hand;
it's just after 08:20 GMT) are all pointing in basically the same
direction.
It was first thing on Saturday morning, and it was a relatively warm
spring-like day. There were a ton of people out at that time of the
morning towing boats; I presume for the first outing of the spring.
By the time I got to the I-75/I-40 split on the west side of
Knoxville, the sun was a bit up.
My suitcase, notable because it's bright red (easy to spot if they
tell you the wrong carousel by one) and for having a tag for a
conference that hadn't happened yet.
And it got interesting when we got to the airport. Enterprise rental
at MSP apparently had a surplus of cars, so they were offering to
upgrade to anything on the lot for a very small sum. They had an
electric blue almost-new Ford Mustang on the lot, so I took it.
The dash on the Mustang was interesting. The center box can be
configured for a number of different things. It can display text
gauges:
or quasi-analog gauges:
The "vacuum/boost" gauge is amusing. One, because I'm pretty sure
that car wasn't turbocharged. Also, I paid attention to that gauge
while driving. It probably was connected to some sort of manifold
pressure sensor, but it definitely wasn't reading true, or else the
zero was (possibly deliberately) way off. To get the gauge to come
anywhere close to 0 vacuum, you should have to bury the accelerator,
and I could get it to hit "zero" with only moderate acceleration. Ah
well, probably for the best.
So I visited family on Saturday. But I decided that with a magnificent car like that, it was a moral imperative to a least do a little road driving with it. It would be a shame to have something like that and just stay around the Twin Cities. So I pinged a college friend, who also lives in the Cites, and proposed that we take a Sunday morning road trip down to our alma mater. She was game, so I headed up to her house first thing Sunday and we did some driving across the state. The photos from the trip itself will be from the next post.
The Minneapolis skyline over the hood of the Mustang.
Me, ready to road trip. I kept me in this photo mostly because it
amuses my wife.
This trip continued in a future post.