Suresh wrote:
Bruce wrote:
>> Now I need to go find something constructive to post. I don't
>> suppose anyone cares for a trip report of ... 8500 miles across
>> America by car?
The road trip, sure!
I live in Orlando, Florida, in the southeast corner of the US. I wanted
to attend a convention in Portland, Oregon, in the northeast corner.
Fortunately, my car is a Prius that gets 47 MPG (20 km/l). Add to that
the lowest petrol prices in half a decade and it's not all bad.
Then SWMBO (She Who Must Be Obeyed) redefines the trip. She added a week
at Yellowstone National Park, three nights at Disneyland, and two more
in New Orleans. So my 6000 trip is now 7000 miles (9700 to 11,000 km).
Add six days of driving all over Yellowstone and the total comes to 8500
miles (14,000 km), and takes us through 20 of the 48 contiguous states.
To put this in perspective, that's five days hard driving to
Yellowstone, two more to Portland, three to Disneyland, four more to New
Orleans, and one big 12-hour day home. Yes, fifteen of the thirty-one
days were spent on the road. <sigh> It's a big country.
Summer is "Orange Barrel Season" on US highways. Because of cold
winters, most construction has to be done in the warm weather. We also
neglect our bridges, and one 100-mile detour was needed to get around
one that fell down.
Add the use of 53-foot trailers and triples (20 to 25m long when the
tractor is added), and you get "Orange Barrel Slalom" where you try to
dodge the potholes, the barrels, the trucks, uneven pavements, and the
usual assortment of bad drivers without a collision. Sure, it's fun at
first, but after ten hours on the road it becomes rather less so.
Yellowstone is pretty damn magnificent. Primarily the cauldron of one
monster volcano, it has 3/4 of all geothermal features on the earth.
Geysers, bubbling mud pots, thermal pools with rainbow edges from
extremophyle bacteria, and thousands of steaming fumaroles. Add the
faint whiff of excitement from the potential for another explosion that
could blanket all of North America in ash and introduce a decade-long
winter, and you don't even need the Grizzly Bears for excitement.
In addition to all the road hazards listed above, Yellowstone also has
bison (aka buffalo). BIG bison. 2000 pound (900 kg) bison. Bison with
attitude. Bison who migrate from one end of the park to the other each
year. Using the roads. At about 2mph (3 kph). Bison who couldn't care
less if 50 cars are backed up behind them.
When a short delay, this can be fun. When it lasts half an hour, less
so. When one day is declared "Bison on the Road" day and one gets
delayed five times, there's hardly any fun left at all.
And the attitude I mentioned? The week before we arrived, some moron put
her cell phone on a selfie stick and leaned up against a bison for a
photo. She does not have a photo. She does not have an unbroken cell
phone. She does not have all her blood on the inside any more.
Two weeks before that, a man with years of experience in the park went
off alone to look for bears. Not smart. He got between a cow and two
cubs and was turned into bear food.
I mean, what part of "wild animal" do these people not understand?
Same with the thermal features. In many areas, the park has built
boardwalks to keep tourists from burning their feet or damaging the
fragile scenery. The pools are often at the boiling point, and sometimes
the ground is too. On one tour, our ranger guide asked what we should do
if we see someone tossing something into a thermal pool. She didn't much
like my answer, "Make them go get it!" but I think she wanted to.
Portland is an interesting city. It's the center of the craft beer
movement in the US, and that has some interesting effects. For one, I'm
used to a multi-page wine list at restaurants with perhaps half a dozen
beers. In Portland it's just the opposite. Not bad, but takes some
getting used to, and I often needed help from whatever the beer
equivalent of a sommelier is.
California's I-5 is a freeway built between the Bay Area and L.A. that
passes through nothing. Okay, there's a gas station every 20 miles, but
that's about it. I drove it on the first day the US enacted a 55 mph (88
kph) speed limit. It was a bit surreal to go that slow. This trip it was
posted for 75 mph (120 kph), which was better, but still not fast enough
considering how little there is to look at.
Speaking of nothing to look at, we traversed 850 miles (1400 km) of
Texas. 'Nuff said.
New Orleans is an amazing city, particularly around the French Quarter.
It has some of the most amazing food in the country surrounded by
sidewalks that smell worse than your average sewage treatment plant.
It also has restaurant servers who take their jobs seriously. Where
that's a rarity elsewhere, here it's the norm. If restaurant managers
only knew how much that enhanced a meal experience (and ultimately their
income and retention rates)....
This was not an entirely enjoyable trip due to the long hours behind the
wheel, but my 5-year-old Prius behaved very well, and we only got lost a
dozen times -- that because SWMBO doesn't like the "bitch" who lives in
my GPS, but even she admitted that it got us places ... when she turned
it on.
Would I do it again? Well, I drove about the same route three years ago,
so I'm probably good for it again once I forget the discomforts. But
next trip we plan to not plan, instead relying on serendipity. We passed
signs for so many interesting things that our schedule wouldn't permit
us to visit that I expect we won't know our next destination until we
get back. Should be fun.
Cheers,
Bruce
