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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.
Perfect is the enemy of good enough. I keep having these grandiose ideas of the really groovy stuff I want to blog about, but then I don't have the time to edit up the nice photo set, so the post gets delayed, and I don't write the post. I have trips in October and November that I have lots of photos that I want to document. Several interesting posts about airplanes and one about cars coming up.
One quick on that the pictures are ready for. I flew to a conference
in Seattle early in November. On the way back, from SEA to ATL, I
photographed this unique-looking river-convergence. Note the airport
marked with green dots:
I didn't have my iPad along on this trip, but I figured that this
formation of rivers, town, and airport had to be fairly unique.
It turns out that I was flying over "little Egypt", which is the very
southern tip of the state of Illinois. Here's that same spot on the
sectional on the screen of my iPad:
The town is Cairo (pronounced "kay-row", by the way). I find it often
tough to figure out where you are when you're looking at stuff from an
airliner, but this time I got lucky and managed to figure it out.