In hindsight, I could have attended the entire NSS convention had I left the Sequoia in Houston and just hitch-hiked straight to Albuquerque.
The data below is just to give someone an idea what can happen on a ill-fated road-trip: Below is a rough summary of my expenses so far: Gas to drive to Decatur: $ 40 Money given to my ride $ 100 1 Day Pass at NSS $ 60 Motel in Decatur $ 73 Motel in Rhome. $ 65 Mobile mechanic $ 500 Bus ride $ 59 Misc expenses. $ 20.75 City bus fare. $ 3.25 Albuquerque casino. $ 10 Approximate total. $ 931 Craigslist rider credit. + $ 76 Approximate subtotal $ 855 The casino loss was stupid, but I will just skip casino trips to Lake Charles and lotto tickets for a few months to make up for that. The $ 60 to the NSS is a worthy expense. Right ?? I might have missed 2 days of potential work. I certainly missed 2 days of relaxing in my motel in Houston which was already paid for. I did learn some road-trip concepts that would help me on future trips, if I had some common-sense and were not so hard-headed stubborn. The 2 unecessary motel fees were something that I did not budget for, and were due entirely to me compromising my route in order to carpool with a quasi-caver. But I think it seems obvious now that trying to get from Arcola, TX to Rio Rancho, NM for a 4 day vacation road-trip was a really bad idea and the odds of success were very low. The mechanic still has not done a compression test or been able to get the Sequoia to come close to starting and they have had it 26 hours. The mobile-mechanic had it driveable in under 2 hours, but it only started briefly once again before it would no longer start. I heard a rumor that the NSS made about $ 80 of my LED light donations. I did say "Howdy" to over a hundred people at The Howdy Party, but only briefly spoke to about 10 cavers, as I knew very few people there. There is a girl that I had really hoped to see at the convention and I did get to talk with her for about 3 minutes. That sort of has intangible value, even though she probably doesn't know me, or worse, thinks negatively of me. I often wonder, if my life would have been different had I married a girl that likes caves, instead of one that doesn't like caves. She was someone I would have like to have known when I was a bachelor. Unfortunately, I paid for all of the above on credit. So the aftermath of the reality of the damage has not hit me yet. David Locklear
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