Happy Holiday!

Happy Labor Day, everyone (while you're enjoying that last hot dog of summer, remember that if it weren't for the labor movement, you wouldn't have paid vacations, sick days, emergency exits, weekends, or even bathroom breaks!). I'm using a bit of time this weekend to finally finish processing my photos from the summer travels. Here's the first. We took a roadtrip up to Chicago at the end of July, and our trip didn't start out very well (this is about two hours into our drive):

Happily, this cleared out all the bad juju and the rest of the trip was wonderful... great sights, wonderful food and fantastic company (we visited my brother and his wife). More photos are forthcoming...

ID4

Yesterday when I was driving to Carolina (I'm going to a wedding today), I came around a bend in the road and encountered this cloud centered over my route. I thought it looked a lot like the space crafts that settled over the cities in the movie Independence Day, right before the alien race started trying to destroy the planet.

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

White Line Fever

After spending four of the last six days in the car, I'm so over this view:

It was a fun trip, it was great to get to see (most of) the family and I'm very happy to be home for the (rest of the) summer. More later!

p.s. Rabbit rabbit and happy Aunt Kay's birthday, everyone!

Back!

I made it from Orlando to Chattanooga in just a little over 8 hours today. Just me. In the car. With my iPod.*

Tired. More tomorrow.

*There was caterwauling.

The Worst Cars Ever!

This week Time Magazine is featuring the The 50 Worst Cars of All Time (via Pam Spaulding). Have you driven one of these lemons/classics?

Wi-Fi Woes

Tonight is the second time I've picked a hotel based on their promise of in-room wi-fi and for the second time, it hasn't worked out. The first time was some hotel in Murfreesboro and it just plain didn't work. This time (at the Red Roof Inn), it works, but only if I go sit on the floor out in the hallway, next to the storage room that reportedly houses the router. Has anyone out there found a hotel that follows up on the promise of wi-fi?

Anyway, the good news is that we're just four or five hours from home, in Lexington, KY. We had a really enjoyable dinner and are looking forward to a good night's sleep before we race home in the morning to liberate the dog from the kennel. It will be great to be home and I have no plans to travel again any time soon. I have a lot of catching up to do...

Red Bank Traffic Cams: Safety or Greed?

Yesterday, Joe brought together some stories from around the country about the use of traffic cameras, and later found a discussion of the same over on Knoxviews, with quite the cascade of comments. The next time you're at one of those traffic cameras in Red Bank (and has East Ridge put up theirs yet?), you'll have something to do: count to see how many seconds the light stays yellow.

A Texas Transportation Institute study found that an extra second of yellow time added to the current ITE formula yields a a 53 percent reduction in the number of tickets issued along with a 40 percent reduction in accidents.

Update: interestingly, an article about the Red Bank Traffic Cams appeared in today's chattanoogan.com. Debbie Renfro, administrative assistant to the Red Bank Police Department, claims that safety is their goal:

The goal of the program is to control accidents and improve safety, she said.

But Red Bank was vague regarding how much they're raking in:

The program pays for itself. The cameras were installed for free. A portion of ticket revenues goes to pay for each $100,000 camera.

I'll be timing some traffic lights next time I'm in Red Bank...

Haulin' some stuff

We drove behind this truck for a while over the weekend as we were headed to the mountains. There was nothing in the back of the truck that was recognizable as something -- it was some kind of twisted metal tangle of snakes laying in a bed of rusty pillows. Who knows why this stuff needed to be moved...

At last, a truck...

It was a sad day, many months ago, when we suddenly and unexpectedly lost our workhorse of a truck. The insurance company didn't give us much for our trusty friend -- nowhere close to what she was worth to us -- so it took us a while to track down a suitable replacement that we could afford. I was starting to think that we wouldn't be able to find anything when this Dodge pickup surfaced on eBay. Relative to the Mazda when we lost her, this one is a bit bigger and more powerful and is a year younger with slightly fewer miles. With any luck, the Dakota can pick up where the Mazda left off.

This is quite the relief. It's really been driving me nuts to be without a truck this spring. After years of driving a truck, perhaps I'm spoiled -- I have to remind myself that I survived for many years before getting the Mazda and many people live their entire lives without a pickup -- or perhaps after so many years in the South, I'm finally becoming naturalized. In any case, I'm happy to be back behind the wheel of a truck again. I can move big things, get free mulch from the city (they only give it away by the truckload!), transport recycling, gasoline, oil and dirt without stinking up/messing up my car, haul lumber and other odd-sized items, get a Christmas tree home without the contortions and sap turds, and probably a bunch of other stuff that doesn't come immediately to mind (but has nothing to do with gun racks or dead game). Whew.

RIP, trusty truck

Oh, sad, sad day... DH was driving down North Market Street this morning and a huge suburban pulled out from one of those many side streets around Mia Cuchina right into his path. He tried to stop, and tried to swerve, but there was no avoiding the collision. We are very grateful that no one was injured in the accident, and also thankful that the other driver is fully insured. Unfortunately, it looks as though our truck has been totalled. This pickup, a 1988 Mazda B2200, has been with us since 1992, through thick and through thin. It has seen us through several moves (both our own and those of others) and countless hauling jobs, and was the vehicle Emmie used most often when she was learning to drive. It didn't have a gun rack, a rebel flag or a giant "3" on it (it did, however, have a stealie sticker!), but it still maybe made us yankees feel a little bit more like real Chattanoogans at a time when we were still acclimating to life in the South. It was a good, basic truck -- standard transmission, no computers or power windows or other fancy stuff that might go awry -- and therefore, a very dependable vehicle. I think the odometer was up around 150,000 miles and we had no plans to ever retire such a steady workhorse. We were worried we might lose her when Tennessee recently started emissions testing, but we actually made it over that hurdle just a few months ago. And now she's gone. We'll miss you, our trusty friend.

Back!

This is pretty much what most of my weekend looked like. We got an early start on Saturday morning and drove down to Florida for a family gathering that evening. It was a great party and we enjoyed hanging out with many super-cool people from G-Dog's side of the fam. Then this morning (Sunday), after a too-brief post-gathering get-together with same said kin, we made our way back to Chattavegas.

The 7 hours down and 7 hours back gave us plenty of opportunity to enjoy the sights along I-75, mostly in Georgia. Oh, wait... that's right -- if you stay on the interstate, there are no sights. We did watch a trailer on the back of an SUV in the next lane go veering across 3 lanes of traffic on the wheel rim after its tire exploded -- I don't know if that qualifies as a sight, though. And as it turns out, I didn't get to take a whole lot of photos. I saw some nice scenes with interesting light and cool colors, but most of them were racing by at 75 miles an hour. I did take a few action shots, like this picture of one of our fellow travelers, hauling his kill back to Whitfield Co, Georgia.

Even with the tedium of interstate driving, we still enjoyed the ride. The iPod provided background music, and there were plenty of things to observe and discuss along the way. There were a lot more trucks sharing the road with us on Saturday than there were on Sunday. Here's the back of one tractor-trailer. This kind of thing drives me nuts. How many approving people did this sticker pass through in its journey onto the back of that truck -- the creator, proofer, printer, purchaser, applier, and so on -- who either did not notice or did not care about what strikes me as a pretty glaring error?

Anyway, we're glad to be home and happy to have been on a fun adventure over the weekend. It sure did fly by.