gwax's rumblings

Being in San Francisco for so long, I have become accus­tomed, men­tally and phys­i­cally, to a sub­stan­tially less aggra­vat­ing envi­ron­ment than I had pre­vi­ously known. Being in Massachusetts – hot, muggy Massachusetts – again, I am recall­ing some of the things that I had left behind – some bad, some good. One thing that I had all but for­got­ten was mos­qui­toes; we don’t really get notice­able num­bers of mos­qui­toes in South of Market, San Francisco. Being here, and it hav­ing been rain­ing recently, the mos­qui­toes were out in full force, while I was work­ing on my boat’s trailer. As such, my sweet, deli­cious, George-blood has been con­sumed by a great many foul lit­tle beasts that have left behind their hor­ren­dous, anti-coagulating, inflammation-inducing, anti­gens of pain.

I’m not sure if my mem­ory is soft and mos­qui­toes have always been this unpleas­ant, if I used to be more adept at avoid­ing their painful bites, or if I had once devel­oped a tol­er­ance to their venom that has since sub­sided. However it may be, I hate mos­qui­toes far more now than I recall hat­ing them in the past.

I’m pretty sure that mos­qui­toes, like sand fleas, are some­thing that I wouldn’t mind sac­ri­fic­ing entire food chains to see go extinct.

I’m rather fond of keep­ing metic­u­lous data about var­i­ous things and the list of such things cer­tainly con­tains sta­tis­tics about my car. Having fin­ished the trip east, here are some num­bers from the trip:

Odometer leav­ing San Francisco, CA: 1715
Odometer arriv­ing Austin, TX: 3532
Odometer leav­ing Austin, TX: 3540
Odometer arriv­ing Atlanta, GA: 4730
Odometer leav­ing Atlanta, GA: 4730
Odometer arriv­ing Concord, MA: 5837
Odometer leav­ing Concord, MA: 5850
Odometer arriv­ing Woods Hole, MA: 5947

The fol­low­ing num­bers are a lit­tle off because I started and fin­ished with par­tially full tanks of fuel:

Total diesel con­sumed: ~115 gal­lons
Total cost of fuel: ~$340

The astute reader will notice that I have been get­ting fuel econ­omy in the upper thir­ties of miles per gal­lon. This is cor­rect and, when observed on a more gran­u­lar level it does seem to be show­ing a trend upwards, though that trend is likely not sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant. As I intend to con­tinue mea­sur­ing my fuel con­sump­tion for the life of my car, I will be able to give bet­ter data later, when I am more than 6000 miles and 15 tanks of fuel in.

Well, I’m sit­ting here in our house in Woods Hole, sip­ping a beer, read­ing an inter­est­ing physics paper about the holo­graphic prin­ci­ple, and I thought that it might be good to take a few moments to update you all on the past few days.

Having left Matt’s place in Atlanta on Friday morn­ing, I jour­neyed up through the Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and into Connecticut on Friday. Baldr and I slept at a rest area in the back of my car in Connecticut and then went on to my par­ents’ place in Concord, MA on Saturday. Saturday evening, after din­ner, I fin­ished the jour­ney down to Woods Hole, MA so as to avoid any morn­ing traf­fic on Sunday (the 4^th).

In the process, I man­aged to fin­ish Cloud Atlas and I am pleased to report that it was, in fact, quite good.

Anyway, leav­ing Atlanta, and dri­ving through Georgia for a while, I ended up in South Carolina. Driving through South Carolina on an inter­state, one sees quite a few signs adver­tis­ing the sale of fire­works. Initially, my reac­tion was mostly a ho-hum, fire­works are kind of fun but do I really care enough to stop and buy some. Thankfully, after pass­ing a dozen or so adver­tise­ments on the road, I came to my senses and real­ized that, of course, I want fire­works, big awe­some fire­works. Coming to my senses, and stop­ping at the next place I could find, I pro­ceeded to buy a bit over a hun­dred dol­lars worth of fire­works – pri­mar­ily mor­tars and bot­tle rock­ets as those are my pref­er­ence. We went through about half of the fire­works yes­ter­day while we watched the Falmouth fire­works from Fay Beach. A num­ber of youths (young­sters, teenagers, hooli­gans, what­ever you want to call them) clus­tered around us and we were nice enough to share my fire­works with them. It was rather pleas­ant to share fire­works with a younger gen­er­a­tion and I cer­tainly know that I would have appre­ci­ated it had some­one done so with my when I was that age; I couldn’t help but also feel good about pos­si­bly instill­ing some tiny amount of respect for the proper oper­a­tion of things that have labels like, “Warning: Shoots Flaming Balls”. Subsequently, Dave, Paul, and I played a rous­ing game of Power Grid, which is an excel­lent board game.

That’s most of what I have to report of the past few days; it’s nice to be here after so long away. I should be here for about the next three weeks so it’ll be inter­est­ing to see how things play out.

Although exceed­ingly warm by my stan­dards, Austin is not an unpleas­ant place. The pri­mary events of the 3^rd day of my jour­ney were lunch with Gautham and Ariel; the acqui­si­tion of nearly suf­fi­cient wardrobe items as will serve most of my needs for the sum­mer; a rather sub­stan­tial nap; and din­ner with Riad, Gautham, Cyrus, and Riad’s lady-friend.

Baldr has been hav­ing a good time hang­ing out with Nico and Shockley, as well as, gen­er­ally, not being in the car. Baldr mostly sits, stands, lies down, or naps in the car, which, prac­ti­cally speak­ing, is not alto­gether dis­sim­i­lar from what he does dur­ing the vast major­ity of other times.

Also, I fin­ished Moby Dick and it was awe­some. Moby Dick is, truly, a leviathan of lit­er­a­ture in every pos­si­ble sense.

Austin is serv­ing as a nice part-way spot to rest and, if it were the week­end, it might be pleas­ant to stay a lit­tle longer. In order to cover dis­tance, rather than wait while peo­ple work, Day 4 will, hope­fully, see the Louisiana shore and the city of New Orleans.

It’s 3AM Central Time and I arrived at Riad’s place in Austin, TX some­where between 30 and 60 min­utes ago.

It being 3AM, I shall keep this brief and, per­haps, go into greater detail tomorrow.

There were a few notable things that occurred dur­ing the day:

There was a US Border Patrol inspec­tion point on I-10E an hour or so East of El Paso, TX whereat I was first asked if I was a US cit­i­zen, then asked where I was from, where I was going, and what the pur­pose of my trip was. My car was visu­ally inspected from the out­side and sniffed by a dog. I was asked Baldr’s age and I was sent on my way. The line of cars wait­ing to be inspected, the time spent per car, and the inter­rup­tion to my cruis­ing speed prob­a­bly cost me a half hour or so. I’m not sure whether this is an indi­ca­tion that the ter­ror­ists or the anti-immigration crack-pots have won.

Somewhere in the midst of Texas, among the scrub­land and the mesas, in the mid-afternoon, I hit bore­dom for the first time; it was an odd, unpleas­ant feel­ing that I haven’t felt in a very long time but its explo­ration and com­ing through the other side are chief ele­ments of this vaca­tion. After hit­ting that point, I drove in my bore­dom with the music and audio­books off for a time before the bore­dom passed and Moby Dick resumed. Speaking of Moby Dick; I am on the 18^th or 18 discs, near­ing the final chap­ters and absolutely riveted.

Sometime shortly after my bore­dom passed I encoun­tered a rain of insects. Droplets, or what seemed to be droplets, began hit­ting my wind­shield at the rate of a mild shower but, some moments later, when I decided to use my wipers to remove the droplets, they merely smeared across the wind­shield. This hor­rid rain per­sisted for a good fif­teen to thirty min­utes, even­tu­ally leav­ing my wind­shield with sub­stan­tially dimin­ished clar­ity, in spite of many appli­ca­tions of wind­shield wipers with fluid.

Due to my own lazi­ness and my cars extreme econ­omy, those insects remained on my wind­shield through night­fall, on into the night, and only finally were extri­cated by an actual rain­fall about a hun­dred miles out from Austin. I say a hun­dred miles out because that is where the rain began; it was not, how­ever, very local­ized. For the last hun­dred miles of the drive, the weather vac­il­lated wildly between mild mist and rains so tor­ren­tial that I haven’t seen their likes since last I saw the outer fringes of hur­ri­canes in New England. I have heard that there is a trop­i­cal storm off the coast now and this truly felt like its outer edges.

There were plenty of other sights and events dur­ing the day but, as I said before, the time is late and I must sleep.

That I am in the Buckeye Motor Hotel in Buckeye, AZ should answer the ques­tion of whether or not I suc­ceeded in sleep­ing in the 90°F weather present at that rest area.

Overall, $55 ($45+$10/pet) isn’t a bad price to pay for a room with air con­di­tion­ing. Given my cur­rent needs, I prob­a­bly would have paid $55 for a 6.5’x6.5′ closet with air con­di­tion­ing; I’d be grip­ing about it in this post but I prob­a­bly would have done it. I guess, alter­na­tively, I could have left the engine idling and the air con­di­tion­ing on in my car; the fuel prob­a­bly would have lasted the night and on to the near­est gas sta­tion but the main­te­nance costs down the line would not have been worth it.

I’ve been tak­ing I-10E since LA, which passes straight through Phoenix. Since I’ll be dri­ving in the morn­ing, I have no desire to hit traf­fic, and Buckeye’s half-way between I-10 and I-8, I think that I’ll divert myself around Phoenix on I-8E so as to meet back up with I-10 south of Phoenix.

Ok, the air con­di­tion­ing seems to have cooled the room suf­fi­ciently that I can get some sleep.

With luck, my next post will be from Riad’s place in Austin.

Right now, I sit in my car, typ­ing to you on my work lap­top over my phone’s Internet, in a rest area where I plan to sleep, approx­i­mately 50 miles easy of Phoenix, AZ, hav­ing dri­ven 703 miles in just shy of 10.5 hours, hav­ing used less than two tanks of fuel.

So far, bar­ring two issues, it’s been an alto­gether pleas­ant trip. Due to tar­di­ness in pack­ing and clean­ing, I set out around noon-thirty, which was about three hours later than I had intended but there isn’t really any time crit­i­cal­ity to my jour­ney, so it’s not a big deal. A cou­ple hours into the jour­ney, when I set about get­ting break­fast, lunch, my first meal of the day, or what­ever you want to call it, that I had for­got­ten to bring Baldr’s leash and pinch col­lar; as a result, Baldr’s short walks dur­ing the trip have been either off-leash or using a bungee-cord as an impro­vised leash; I will have to buy a new leash and pinch col­lar some­time tomor­row; so it goes. We encoun­tered hints of traf­fic near LA but noth­ing too both­er­some and, oth­er­wise, have had smooth and fast paced travel.

I have been lis­ten­ing to Moby Dick on audio­book and am cur­rently on disc 8 of 18. I must, truly and hon­estly, say that this work of prose is truly an amaz­ing thing. Moby Dick is, at times, for that mat­ter, most times, rather slow paced, such that I expect I wouldn’t be able to man­age this degree of devo­tion were I not a cap­tive audi­ence with a great deal of monot­ony on my side. However, see­ing as I am a cap­tive audi­ence, I have been greatly enjoy­ing the work for its vari­ety, depth, descrip­tive­ness, phi­los­o­phy, and sheer grav­i­tas. At this rate, I should have fin­ished this mon­strous epic well before I make Austin.

Sometime, approx­i­mately two hours ago, I was think­ing about whether or not I would change my clothes while on the road when it occurred to me that I had no rec­ol­lec­tion of load­ing my suit­case into my car. On fur­ther inspec­tion, I can, in fact, con­firm that I also for­got to put my suit­case in my car. Man, do I feel like an idiot. Thankfully, my suit­case con­tains only clothes and toi­letries, which are rel­a­tively eas­ily replace­able for the pur­poses of such a jour­ney; though it is supremely both­er­some to have to do so unin­ten­tion­ally. My lap­top, charg­ers, and every­thing else are thank­fully in my mes­sen­ger bag, which leaves me still able to per­form the var­i­ous tasks that I intend to per­form and, to be entirely hon­est, I was think­ing, just yes­ter­day, that it was about time for me to buy some new clothes; call it unfor­tu­nate prov­i­dence, I guess.

I won­der what else I will come to dis­cover that I have forgotten.

Anyway, now it’s time to see if I can get any sleep in this abom­inable 90°F Arizona night; hope­fully it won’t dis­tress Baldr too much either.