Month: June 2018

63,000 Missing Free Electrons

I guess the CTBNL was jealous of the Ladybug because she went for a trip across the country while he was left behind all alone in a dark garage for a month, so it ate all the free electrons in its battery. Last Friday morning I went to pop open the trunk for something and it didn’t open, at first I thought it might be the fob, but when I opened the car door to pull the lever to open the trunk the “dome” light didn’t come on.

I hooked up our cheap-o battery charger and let it run until that night. The dome light still didn’t come on and it is an LED, so you know the battery was really dead. Turns out the charger is more of a maintainer for car batteries, so it is something I should have hooked up before we left for a month. Saturday morning we went down the street to an Advance Auto and bought a new battery.

The starting of this post has been sitting in the drafts folder since April 25th, which is longer than the CTBNL sat unattended in the garage and is when it crossed the 63,000 mile milestone.

Wendover Will

On Day 12 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip we spent the night in the town of Wendover, Utah. The town sits right on the border between Utah and Nevada and just across the literal line in the sand sits the town of West Wendover. In 1952 West Wendover, Nevada replaced a bright light on a tall pole that State Line Service (a cobblestone service station), right on the border, had used to attract visitors with a 64 foot tall mechanical cowboy outlined in neon lights.

Probably hundreds of thousands of people have taken pictures of Will and even themselves with Wendover Will over the years, but now the town has created a page where if you submit a selfie photo with him they’ll post it with a digital pin on the map of where your from. I, of course, thought it sounded like fun, so I took a picture. It is not a very good picture overall and shows that I need a lot more practice at the selfie thing. Take a look and see if you can find me: Wendover Will Visitor Map

Is This The Straw?

Last year when we went to visit family in Washington state Donna came back from the trip determined that we should move out there. She even had a town all picked out, Sequim (pronounced skwim), it is out on the Olympic Peninsula which is close enough, but far enough from little Scott and family. It is small town, only 6,600 people, so we wouldn’t have the selection of restaurants or shops to choose from we do here. The temperature ranges are similar to Aiken and they actually get less total rain than here, but it is cloudy for twice as many days as Aiken with only 130 predominantly sunny days a year.

This year when we went to visit family out west Donna came back from the trip determined that we should move out there. She even had a town all picked out, Carson City, NV. The temperature is generally cooler year round as it is high desert at 4,100′ above sea level. It is a lot colder in the winter though with an average of 17″ of snow a year. It is a bigger town than Aiken with a population of about 50k, so there is that, but real estate is a bit more expensive, we’d end up with less house.

After a few weeks the fever to move wanes because it would be a monumental hassle, with trying to sell a house, move everything we own, including two cars 3,000 miles away, buy another house, pick out a new set of banks, doctors, insurance agents, etc. Besides we do generally like it here.

The photo above is of the closed Ridgecrest Coffee Bar. We drove by there the other day and were devastated to find that while we were gone this time the place closed. According to the sign on the door the owner was having legal issues from a previous location and landlord troubles at this location, so she pulled the plug. We have taken an early morning bike ride and ended up here for breakfast for nearly every Sunday for the last 4 years.

We have a backup plan for Sunday mornings, Dunkin Donuts1, but anything available there pales in comparison to the the breakfast panini we know and love, plus the bike riding out that way is not as nice. This loss may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and gets us to move out west somewhere.

Fun with Figures

Day 2 of Not Being on our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

We were gone for 31 days and of those, 20 were spent driving from one place to another. There was a day in west Texas visiting Donna’s brother, a couple days in Albuquerque, seven days in Lake Tahoe and another day in Louisiana visiting a friend. We filled up with gas 18 times and used a total of 190 gallons for the 7,291 mile trip for an average of 38.4 miles per gallon.

The Mini uses premium fuel and I never really shopped around so take these numbers for what they are worth. The cheapest gas (besides the original fill up at home) was in Pelham, AL at $2.95 a gallon. The next cheapest was in Albuquerque, NM at $2.96. The highest was in Reno, NV at $3.72 a gallon and the second highest was also in Nevada in West Wendover at $3.63. For the trip we averaged $3.21 a gallon and spent a grand total of $677.05 on fuel.

Like I did 9 years ago with a rental car when we went out west, I attached a static cling travel bug to the back of the Lady Bug for our drive to and from the west, And just like that one no one spotted it on the car and logged it. I dipped it in about half of the geocaches we did along the way to rack up some miles anyway. Because the mileage for travel bugs is tallied in a “as the crow flies” manner between caches it only totaled only 4,834 miles compared to the 7,291 the car itself traveled.

We geocached for 17 of the 31 days on the trip. We looked for 70 caches. We found 63 and DNF’d seven for a success rate of 90%. Our biggest day was finding 12 caches, missing 2, on a Tuesday in Albuquerque2 while walking along some trails near the Rio Grande River. We found the most, 23, in surprise, Texas the state we spent the most time in. We found the fewest in Louisiana, just one on the way back thru and by grabbing 15 caches in Nevada we added another state cached in to bring our total to 30.