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Jul. 19th, 2022 12:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psipsyRoadtrip is completed and I'm back home after a bit over 6100 miles in 12 days. I've had to scale back on a few things and be less ambitious, and that's okay. That leaves a few things for other trips in the future, and it means a few things I don't have to do in future trips. I was able to at least see/do some of the things I really wanted to.
I had gotten one phone call from a direct coworker on How To Do Thing, so I coached him through it and got that taken care of in a few minutes. I can only imagine that at some point on the first day I was out from work, someone had frantically sent me an email asking me to fix something only to get an automated response saying that I won't be back until the 19th. I'll know for sure when I go back.
-Pioneer Car Museum. Spur of the moment thing when I was zooming down I-90 in South Dakota, which has a posted speed limit of 80MPH. This turned out to be worth the time. Most of what's on display are old cars and farm equipment (did you know Lamborghini and Porsche got their start with farm tractors?) with a lot of other "this is how things were in the late 1800s/early 1900s" items. There was also a small display of old electronics, including some old computers. Which some of them were newer than what I have. Oh, and they had a portable CD player on display that was exactly like one I have. Oh, and a couple of the cars on display are newer than Ai.
Following the self-guided tour, I got a Moment of Zen when the owner of the museum, an elderly gentleman, sat down to talk with me. He used to be a car salesman, and before that also sold heavy trucks. We were talking about cars, and he brought up some very good questions about electric vehicles that others have certainly asked but no one wants to answer.
Where are we going to get all the rare earth metals needed for all those batteries?
How are people with low incomes supposed to afford a car that starts at $30k and only gets more expensive, while they can get a cheap gas-powered beater for under 1/10th of that? If you want any chance of affording a $30k car, you'll need to earn at least $60k and to have your financial situation under very good control.
What about the weight of batteries, especially for heavy trucks? He pointed out that with tractor-trailers, they get on average 6-7 miles per gallon, which isn't great but that stays the same whether or not they're fully loaded, and when the tanks are full, that can be enough for as much as a thousand miles of range. By the time a truck has a large enough battery to move enough freight enough distance, the battery packs alone would put it over the legal weight limits. And think about how long it would take to charge that.
Mind you, this place and the people running it are in South Dakota, so any benefits to EVs are lost there. EVs would be great for dense urban areas, where there's limited range and pre-planned routes, but for the middle of nowhere or for long-distance hauling? They start running into limitations very quickly. Point is, EVs and internal combustion are going to need to coexist for a very very long time yet. They'll NEED each other.
-Wall Drug. It's a tourist trap and it knows it, doesn't hide it. See also: South of the Border. 'Nuff said. I probably won't visit this again, unless I'm riding with someone in a future trip who really wants to see it.
-Mt Rushmore. Honestly, I wasn't all that impressed. Crowded as hell. The only thing to really do was look at the faces carved in the side of the mountain. I went, I saw, I took pictures, I got my fridge magnet, and left.
-Crazy Horse. This was a lot more interesting and a lot less crowded than Mt Rushmore. Maybe the same amount of people but more spread out. There was much more on display as well, and if/when the sculpture is completed, it should look really impressive, completely dwarfing Mt Rushmore. But at the rate they're going, it's not going to happen in my lifetime.
-Devil's Tower. Yeah, that place made famous by the movie "Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind". It's really impressive to look at up close. I walked around for a bit, bought some fridge magnets, and left. Mind you, in terms of height and circumference, humanity has constructed larger things. But the Devil's Tower will outlive anything we make.
-Bighorn National Forest. Absolutely beautiful. Going through this does require a car with some extra horsepower and the ability to gear down.
-Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody WY. HUUUUGE museum here. I could have easily spent a full day here if I tried.
After that, I did a counter-clockwise loop through Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon (then going back through the southern parts of Idaho and Wyoming).
North Dakota is an undefined level of The Backrooms. People don't visit North Dakota; they no-clip into it and then have to drive out. Same with the eastern part of South Dakota. And the southern half of Wyoming.
Montana lives up to the Big Sky nickname. Since the eastern part of the state is so flat and you can see for miles, the sky takes up a full 180 degrees. It's less prominent in the lumpier western part of the state. By the time I got to Idaho, I figured it was time to turn back so I wouldn't run out of days.
-Golden Spike Tower in North Platte, Nebraska. The tower overlooks the largest railroad yard in the world. Union Pacific trains go in to get broken up on the hump yard. A "hump yard" uses a small rise in the land, then an incoming train gets pushed up the hill, cars are uncoupled, then allowed to roll freely down the other side to their assigned siding, to form new trains that go onto their next destination. I learned Union Pacific is actively hiring for engineers and conductors.
-Cody Park, also in North Platte. A small city-owned park, but it has on display a Challenger locomotive (4-6-6-4, almost as big as a Big Boy) and an EMD DD40X, which was the biggest diesel locomotive ever built, weighing in at 271 tons and being equipped with two 16-cylinder diesel engines, and a fuel tank capable of holding 8200 gallons of diesel. When that part of the park is open, so are the engine cabs and the mail cars, which are also a museum.
-Spring Creek Model Trains in Deshler. I heard of this place, and while I wouldn't make a dedicated trip to it, I figured it wouldn't hurt to go out of my way a bit for it if I happened to be in the area. As model train stores go, it lives up to the hype. I found a bunch of things I was looking for.
-Iowa80. I didn't stay here long, just enough to get gas and a few other things. I had already been to this one before. The real thing to see is the truck museum nearby. There was a Trucker Jamboree event going on and parking was tight. If I just wanted gas, I might as well have just gone to the Pilot across the street.
Is Iowa80 a liminal space? I say it is, if only on the technicality that it still has the primary purpose of catering to truck drivers and those in transit. Never stay in a liminal space for longer than necessary, lest you become part of it.
-Jungle Jim's. Extremely large (and a bit chaotic) grocery store, with a strong focus on international foods. I didn't get much here (nothing perishable), because I still had a day's worth of driving left.
-In Western PA, in a near-dead mall that has started the process of returning to the Earth, as many malls in that area are wont to do, is another model train store, and in there I found an HO scale model of the DD40X that's on display in North Platte, down to the road number.
Once I got into the MidWest, I started noticing ethanol-free gasoline was common, mostly for premium. It's available here on the East coast, but only at select few stations and it's unreasonably expensive. I'm guessing the Midwest has a lot of older cars that can't handle any ethanol whatsoever. Miharu, being a 2021 model with modern fuel management, showed no preference to fuels with or without ethanol.
Much like my 2008 trip, I loved driving out West. I loved the ever-changing scenery, knowing that aside from the strips of asphalt linking pockets of civilization, on either side were vast stretches of terrain that have almost certainly never been touched by humans.
Out of the untold many places I stopped at for whatever reasons, I encountered only one place that required masks for entry, and that was the gift shop at Mt. Rushmore. Beyond that, mask usage by the general public was at most a tenth of 1 percent. The further west I got, the lower it got.
Moment of Zen 2: At a truck stop somewhere in Wyoming, I met a young man who used to be in a gang in Chicago, and was now driving around the country with his girlfriend for reasons I dared not ask. He had joined a gang because they were the only ones who took him in after he was kicked out by his mother and rejected by his father at the age of 13. The conversation lasted only a few minutes and we went on our own separate ways, but it got me thinking: Some people make terrible life choices because those are the only choices available to them.
Miharu's front bumper is completely blasted with dead bugs. I put her through a car wash about halfway through the trip and that helped clear off much of it. Then in a matter of days her front was covered in dead bugs again. Going through some intense rain storms also helped. I'll have to put a power washer to her. I still have to finish cleaning out all the road trip junk.
On one hand, I feel bad about putting her through that at just over 1 year old. On the other hand, cars are meant to be driven, and there's no point in worrying about the slings and arrows, the bumps and bruises, that time inevitably throws at us. Cars will age and things will happen to them no matter how well they're taken care of, so might as well enjoy them while they're new and everything on them works.
State-count: Now up to 45 out of 50. That leaves Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Alaska, and Hawaii. The southern three, I calculate I can take care of those in under a week. Alaska/Hawaii are probably going to be the Final Bosses since they're the most distant. I thought about driving to Alaska but now I'm not so sure. The Wanderbeast has unquestionably had its fill and shows no desire to get back on the road any time soon.
I had gotten one phone call from a direct coworker on How To Do Thing, so I coached him through it and got that taken care of in a few minutes. I can only imagine that at some point on the first day I was out from work, someone had frantically sent me an email asking me to fix something only to get an automated response saying that I won't be back until the 19th. I'll know for sure when I go back.
-Pioneer Car Museum. Spur of the moment thing when I was zooming down I-90 in South Dakota, which has a posted speed limit of 80MPH. This turned out to be worth the time. Most of what's on display are old cars and farm equipment (did you know Lamborghini and Porsche got their start with farm tractors?) with a lot of other "this is how things were in the late 1800s/early 1900s" items. There was also a small display of old electronics, including some old computers. Which some of them were newer than what I have. Oh, and they had a portable CD player on display that was exactly like one I have. Oh, and a couple of the cars on display are newer than Ai.
Following the self-guided tour, I got a Moment of Zen when the owner of the museum, an elderly gentleman, sat down to talk with me. He used to be a car salesman, and before that also sold heavy trucks. We were talking about cars, and he brought up some very good questions about electric vehicles that others have certainly asked but no one wants to answer.
Where are we going to get all the rare earth metals needed for all those batteries?
How are people with low incomes supposed to afford a car that starts at $30k and only gets more expensive, while they can get a cheap gas-powered beater for under 1/10th of that? If you want any chance of affording a $30k car, you'll need to earn at least $60k and to have your financial situation under very good control.
What about the weight of batteries, especially for heavy trucks? He pointed out that with tractor-trailers, they get on average 6-7 miles per gallon, which isn't great but that stays the same whether or not they're fully loaded, and when the tanks are full, that can be enough for as much as a thousand miles of range. By the time a truck has a large enough battery to move enough freight enough distance, the battery packs alone would put it over the legal weight limits. And think about how long it would take to charge that.
Mind you, this place and the people running it are in South Dakota, so any benefits to EVs are lost there. EVs would be great for dense urban areas, where there's limited range and pre-planned routes, but for the middle of nowhere or for long-distance hauling? They start running into limitations very quickly. Point is, EVs and internal combustion are going to need to coexist for a very very long time yet. They'll NEED each other.
-Wall Drug. It's a tourist trap and it knows it, doesn't hide it. See also: South of the Border. 'Nuff said. I probably won't visit this again, unless I'm riding with someone in a future trip who really wants to see it.
-Mt Rushmore. Honestly, I wasn't all that impressed. Crowded as hell. The only thing to really do was look at the faces carved in the side of the mountain. I went, I saw, I took pictures, I got my fridge magnet, and left.
-Crazy Horse. This was a lot more interesting and a lot less crowded than Mt Rushmore. Maybe the same amount of people but more spread out. There was much more on display as well, and if/when the sculpture is completed, it should look really impressive, completely dwarfing Mt Rushmore. But at the rate they're going, it's not going to happen in my lifetime.
-Devil's Tower. Yeah, that place made famous by the movie "Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind". It's really impressive to look at up close. I walked around for a bit, bought some fridge magnets, and left. Mind you, in terms of height and circumference, humanity has constructed larger things. But the Devil's Tower will outlive anything we make.
-Bighorn National Forest. Absolutely beautiful. Going through this does require a car with some extra horsepower and the ability to gear down.
-Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody WY. HUUUUGE museum here. I could have easily spent a full day here if I tried.
After that, I did a counter-clockwise loop through Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon (then going back through the southern parts of Idaho and Wyoming).
North Dakota is an undefined level of The Backrooms. People don't visit North Dakota; they no-clip into it and then have to drive out. Same with the eastern part of South Dakota. And the southern half of Wyoming.
Montana lives up to the Big Sky nickname. Since the eastern part of the state is so flat and you can see for miles, the sky takes up a full 180 degrees. It's less prominent in the lumpier western part of the state. By the time I got to Idaho, I figured it was time to turn back so I wouldn't run out of days.
-Golden Spike Tower in North Platte, Nebraska. The tower overlooks the largest railroad yard in the world. Union Pacific trains go in to get broken up on the hump yard. A "hump yard" uses a small rise in the land, then an incoming train gets pushed up the hill, cars are uncoupled, then allowed to roll freely down the other side to their assigned siding, to form new trains that go onto their next destination. I learned Union Pacific is actively hiring for engineers and conductors.
-Cody Park, also in North Platte. A small city-owned park, but it has on display a Challenger locomotive (4-6-6-4, almost as big as a Big Boy) and an EMD DD40X, which was the biggest diesel locomotive ever built, weighing in at 271 tons and being equipped with two 16-cylinder diesel engines, and a fuel tank capable of holding 8200 gallons of diesel. When that part of the park is open, so are the engine cabs and the mail cars, which are also a museum.
-Spring Creek Model Trains in Deshler. I heard of this place, and while I wouldn't make a dedicated trip to it, I figured it wouldn't hurt to go out of my way a bit for it if I happened to be in the area. As model train stores go, it lives up to the hype. I found a bunch of things I was looking for.
-Iowa80. I didn't stay here long, just enough to get gas and a few other things. I had already been to this one before. The real thing to see is the truck museum nearby. There was a Trucker Jamboree event going on and parking was tight. If I just wanted gas, I might as well have just gone to the Pilot across the street.
Is Iowa80 a liminal space? I say it is, if only on the technicality that it still has the primary purpose of catering to truck drivers and those in transit. Never stay in a liminal space for longer than necessary, lest you become part of it.
-Jungle Jim's. Extremely large (and a bit chaotic) grocery store, with a strong focus on international foods. I didn't get much here (nothing perishable), because I still had a day's worth of driving left.
-In Western PA, in a near-dead mall that has started the process of returning to the Earth, as many malls in that area are wont to do, is another model train store, and in there I found an HO scale model of the DD40X that's on display in North Platte, down to the road number.
Once I got into the MidWest, I started noticing ethanol-free gasoline was common, mostly for premium. It's available here on the East coast, but only at select few stations and it's unreasonably expensive. I'm guessing the Midwest has a lot of older cars that can't handle any ethanol whatsoever. Miharu, being a 2021 model with modern fuel management, showed no preference to fuels with or without ethanol.
Much like my 2008 trip, I loved driving out West. I loved the ever-changing scenery, knowing that aside from the strips of asphalt linking pockets of civilization, on either side were vast stretches of terrain that have almost certainly never been touched by humans.
Out of the untold many places I stopped at for whatever reasons, I encountered only one place that required masks for entry, and that was the gift shop at Mt. Rushmore. Beyond that, mask usage by the general public was at most a tenth of 1 percent. The further west I got, the lower it got.
Moment of Zen 2: At a truck stop somewhere in Wyoming, I met a young man who used to be in a gang in Chicago, and was now driving around the country with his girlfriend for reasons I dared not ask. He had joined a gang because they were the only ones who took him in after he was kicked out by his mother and rejected by his father at the age of 13. The conversation lasted only a few minutes and we went on our own separate ways, but it got me thinking: Some people make terrible life choices because those are the only choices available to them.
Miharu's front bumper is completely blasted with dead bugs. I put her through a car wash about halfway through the trip and that helped clear off much of it. Then in a matter of days her front was covered in dead bugs again. Going through some intense rain storms also helped. I'll have to put a power washer to her. I still have to finish cleaning out all the road trip junk.
On one hand, I feel bad about putting her through that at just over 1 year old. On the other hand, cars are meant to be driven, and there's no point in worrying about the slings and arrows, the bumps and bruises, that time inevitably throws at us. Cars will age and things will happen to them no matter how well they're taken care of, so might as well enjoy them while they're new and everything on them works.
State-count: Now up to 45 out of 50. That leaves Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Alaska, and Hawaii. The southern three, I calculate I can take care of those in under a week. Alaska/Hawaii are probably going to be the Final Bosses since they're the most distant. I thought about driving to Alaska but now I'm not so sure. The Wanderbeast has unquestionably had its fill and shows no desire to get back on the road any time soon.
