Route planning

Sometime in the not too distant future the S.O. and I are going to hook up the 5th wheel (also referred to as Magee) and head South, destination Hot Springs, Arkansas. We know how to get there. US-41 to M-28 to US-45 to WI-17 to US-51 to I-39 to I-55 to I-40 to I-30 to US-70. Nice logical left, right, left, right, left, right, right, right, and right. 

The question is do we really want to go through Rockford, Illinois, again? Rockford itself isn't bad since there seems to be a lull this year in the endless construction projects, although the toll way is now kind of mysterious if a person doesn't have an EZ Pass (and we don't; why would we?). When we went down in April there no longer seemed to be an actual cash money lane for folks who are just passing through and don't plan to ever get on an other toll road in Illinois. 

But I can live with mysterious toll ways. I had actually been exploring alternatives to I-39 for awhile because there's a stretch of highway just south of Rockford that is remarkably rough -- it made the Guppy bounce around so much back in 2020 that the stove almost got jolted on to the floor, and it hadn't improved much when we went over it a few months ago. So, blue highways instead of Interstate. 

Google maps came up with one that involves zigging a bit west south of Madison, Wisconsin, and then doing some zigging east and then zigging west, all while more or less aiming south toward Bloomington/Normal while paralleling the Interstate. It didn't seem to make much difference in total miles, but I am of course dubious. The real trick is coming up with a route that will allow us to make reasonable stops, even if it's just in Walmart parking lots, because days have gotten shorter and it will be Real Winter by the time Magee is loaded and hitting the road. And we're old. 

Another alternative would be to skip Illinois and eastern Missouri completely. Just angle over to Minnesota or Iowa, go west until we hit I-35, and follow that down to where we could get on to I-49 and then aim for Hot Springs from the Fort Smith side of Arkansas. Maybe. A lot really will depend on the weather. The more miserable it is, the more likely we are to stick with a route we've traveled before.

So where is it?

We decided to linger in Springfield, Illinois for another day to avoid driving through freezing rain that was predicted for the St. Louis area and southeast Missouri. It's supposed to hit here, too, but so far all that's happening is it's gotten windier and grayer. Theoretically, the freezing rain hits here this afternoon, early evening, and then turns into just rain. Tomorrow is supposed to be sunny and above freezing so by the time we get our shit together and head out driving conditions should be fine. I hope. The older I get the more of a wimp I become.

The cow pilot my friend Teresa gave me  almost 20 years ago is still traveling with me. Think she's on her third dashboard.  

We're now into Day 4 of the Road Trip. We're convoying because we never got around to replacing the tow dolly that fell apart in Kansas three years ago. Allow me to say that I am not particularly enthusiastic about staring at the back end of the Guppy for 2,000 miles. That view gets old -- although the two legs had some potential excitement. There was still snow on the roof when we pulled into Springfield. Every so often a chunk of it would fly off. I was hanging back just in case a really big piece became air-borne but it never happened. No ice to speak of either, which surprised me. And, yes, we know that roof should have been cleaned off, but good luck doing that on an RV that's been sitting outside uncovered for multiple months.

Stop before getting to the highway so the S.O could check fluid levels. The snow on the bumper hung on until we were almost to Madison, Wisconsin, about 300 miles from home. There was still snow on the roof when we got to Springfield, about 575 miles. Which isn't bad. A few years ago there was still snow on the Guppy when we got to Farmington, Missouri, over an hour south of St. Louis.  

Got a late start on Tuesday, thanks to the combination of one final dental appointment and the inability to put anything that might be damaged by freezing into the Guppy too far in advance. I think when we were loading the Guppy the temperature in it was in the mid-20s. I had pre-packed all the canned goods, but even so . . . we had a lot more stuff than I would have believed before we started packing it all up. We did not get far the first day; wound up in a motel in Rhinelander feeling exhausted and vowing to never start a trip in mid-winter again.

Pulled into the Illinois State Fair grounds Wednesday evening. This is probably a pretty busy "campground" in warmer months: it's a convenient location and it's cheap. Right now it's rather dead. The fair grounds do extended stays so there are some RVs parked here that have obviously been sitting here for awhile. The folks to the north of us have skirting in place and enough dust-covered clutter around that it's clear they haven't moved  in a while.

I don't think I'd want to do extended stay here. The campground is fine as a transient, but considering it's basically a series of large paved parking lots it wouldn't be real pleasant for more more than a few days at a shot. The sites are full hook-up in the summer (right now they're electric only) but there isn't much space between them. I can see where when it's really busy here (like during state fair week) the "campground" would bear a strong resemblance to a RV dealer's sales lot. The people with slides would have a hard time extending them. It is also huge -- 300 total sites, most of which are full hook-ups in warmer weather.

S.O. in a typical vacation pose. 

On the positive side, the showerhouse is super clean, water pressure is excellent, and there's plenty of hot water. The fairgrounds do have security, and the grounds are fenced with limited access. It's also fairly cheap. We'd stay here again if the timing was right.

It is kind of neat seeing the fairgrounds. Really nifty old exhibit buildings and barns. It's an interesting site -- definitely not level, not at all the sort of topography where one would expect a fairgrounds to be built. It has an over-sized statue of a young Abe Lincoln, a sculpture that bears a strong resemblance to a muffler man but thinner. Muffler men are rather muscular; beardless ax-wielding Abe Lincoln is definitely lean. No photo because it's just too damn cold -- one thing I was not expecting was that central Illinois would be more frigid than the U.P.

We did play tourist yesterday and visited Lincoln Home National Historic Site. It was a gorgeous sunny day -- colder than the proverbial witch's tit but totally clear with an amazing blue sky -- but will do a separate post with photos. We skipped going to gawk at Lincoln's Tomb. I've seen it before and the S.O. wasn't interested. We also skipped the Frank Lloyd Wright house (the Dana-Thomas house). I've always thought Wright is overrated -- what's the point of designing eye candy if it's impossible to maintain and really hard to live in? -- and the S.O. has never been as keen on architecture in general as I am.

Crowder State Park, Trenton, Missouri

It's becoming pretty clear there are no bad state parks in Missouri. There are parks that are attractive for different reasons, there are some parks that have better management than others, and there are some parks that see a lot less use than others, but so far I've yet to see a bad one.

When we did our preliminary itinerary for this road trip, we planned a stop at Van Meter State Park. It's reputed to be not particularly busy, at least not for camping, with a fairly small campground (only 22 sites on a single loop), but it also sounded interesting. It was the site of a Native American settlement and has what is said to be a nice little museum. As it turned out, we had been overly optimistic about how far we could get before running out of daylight at this time of year. We wound up looking for a site at Crowder State Park instead.

Like a lot of Missouri parks, Crowder is located next to water. I'm not sure what the river is (and am too lazy to Google it at the moment), but there's a backwater/slough/sort of lake in the day use area. There's a small beach for swimming. I have no clue just how popular that beach is in the summer. The day use area looked nice, but the water had kind of an ominous quality. Do they have alligators in Missouri? I know they have humongous snapping turtles. Still, if you're local and used to water looking a tad murky, wading and/or swimming at Crowder probably wouldn't faze you. I, however, am used to the crystal clear waters of Lake Superior. Brown water makes me nervous.

A few campers had gotten into the Halloween spirit.

I had actually looked up Crowder on-line as a possibility so knew it's popular with families. Pulling in there on Halloween weekend when the weather has been so unseasonably warm made me a little nervous. A number of the state parks do plan Halloween activities for families; I had no idea if Crowder did. As it turned out, the campground was looking pretty full. All the electric sites were taken. We did find a basic site that also happened to be a pull-through, a definite plus when we planned to be there for just one night. I figure one reason it was vacant was it was close to the privies.

There was several back-in sites close by that were also vacant. It was kind of the reverse of what we'd seen at Montauk. At Montauk, the people who did first come, first serve in the basic loop liked being close to the toilets. At Crowder, it was like those were the last sites that were going to fill up. Odd, but it worked out okay for us. There was also a water faucet close by, so for a couple of geezers it was a remarkably convenient site. No long walks for anything.

Then again, it's possible those sites were among the least desirable because whoever used them would have to do some blocking. They had more slope than usual. One thing a person camping at Crowder will never have to worry about is flooding -- the campground perches on top of a hill. Even on the pull-through site the Guppy had a distinct list. Not enough to worry about for just one night, but definitely a list.

The one quibble I might have about Crowder is the layout seemed a little tight. The sites seemed close to each other and the parking pads looked short. I have no idea when the campground was put in, but it struck me as being from the days before Leviathans (gigantor Class A motorhomes) and humongous 5th wheels with multiple slide-outs. It's a great park for people who like to tent camp, have a pop-up, or smaller trailers and motorhomes; it might a tad claustrophobic for someone who insists on camping using large equipment.

Bottom line: This wasn't a park we'd planned on visiting, but it turned out to be one we'd stop at again if we happened to be close-by while traveling.

Intimations of mortality

Over the years, I've occasionally thought about various possibilities that could lead to my demise: car accident, insane co-worker, being shot full of penicillin by someone who ignored my "but I'm allergic" protests, . . . it's a lengthy list, and one that tends to grow even longer as one ages. After all, one rarely contemplates the possibility of a myocardial infarction or a cerebral hemorrhage in one's teens, but when you hit your golden years and old school chums start dropping from "cardiac events," your outlook changes.

One thing, however, never crossed my mind. Death by asphyxiation from breathing in the fumes of burning piss. What's that you say? Urine doesn't burn? Well, it does if an exhaust pipe shifts position and melts the bottom of the black water holding tank on a motorhome. To say it's a rather acrid aroma would be putting it mildly.

We were bouncing along merrily in the Guppy, a mere 5 or 6 miles from the truck stop where we planned to stop and refuel both the vehicle and ourselves. This was supposed to be the Last Night on the Road; we were going to live adventurously and boondock (aka dry camp). Our goal, more or less, was a Walmart parking lot near Plover, Wisconsin.

I could almost taste the country-fried steak at the Iron Skillet in the Petro truck stop when two things happened, more or less simultaneously. I thought I smelled something burning and the smoke alarm in the Guppy went off. We pulled on to the shoulder, I turned off the smoke alarm, and we started trying to figure out what was burning. By the time, we rolled to a stop and the engine was off, the Guppy was thoroughly full of smoke with fumes so thick I worried about the cat getting asphyxiated.

It is, incidentally, a rather strange experience to be cruising down the highway and have a smoke alarm start shrieking in your ear.

Anyway, we stopped, opened a bunch of windows, and started trying to figure out where the smoke was coming from. No clue. The S.O. popped the hood -- everything looked perfectly normal in the engine compartment, at least the part he could see. Didn't seem to be a wiring problem on the RV side -- we had a DC-powered cooler plugged in; it was okay. All the lights functioned, too, and the RV battery wasn't hot. So we decided to see if we could make it to the truck stop. We start off, everything is fine. . . for maybe half a mile. The S.O. keeps driving; I go back and turn off the smoke detector and sit on the floor for the remaining mile or so to the parking lot. That's when I see smoke seeping out from under the engine cowling.

We decide to pull into the Day's Inn parking lot rather than the gas station. At this point I'm thinking we're going to be sleeping in a motel room instead of the Guppy. It was after 7, there wasn't much daylight left in which to solve the problem, and we were tired and hungry. After we're parked, the S.O. decided to pull the cowling off to see if we can figure out just what's going on. There is absolutely no sign of any problem with the engine itself, but we discover various snacks mice and squirrels have stashed on it: pine cones, spruce cones, chokecherry pits. So maybe the problem was that the engine got hot enough that some of that crap started smoldering? It's hard to see, the light is getting dim enough that we're not sure if anything looks scorched or not. I get us checked into the motel; the S.O. clears as much rodent food off the engine as he can find. We convince ourselves that was the problem: rodent leftovers trying to catch fire on the engine. After all, it doesn't take much material to create a lot of smoke, especially in an enclosed space.

Morning comes, we resume our travels. We're maybe five miles down the road when the smoke alarm goes off again. This time I move fast enough that I see a thick plume of smoke coming out from under the refrigerator. Brief moment of total panic -- that's where the furnace lives. No problem visible in the furnace compartment so obviously the problem is under the Guppy.

Mystery solved: approximately 3,000 miles of travel that included bouncing over some truly rough pavement led to the exhaust system loosening up and twisting. Instead of being directed away from the Guppy, hot exhaust was aimed right at the bottom of the black water tank. There's no way of knowing just when the twisting first happened, but by Monday evening after a full day of travel there was plastic dripping on to a hot exhaust pipe, followed by leakage from the tank. End result? Burning piss and some truly nasty fumes.

The good news, such as it was, is that there was nothing mechanically wrong with the Guppy. The S.O. was able to do a temporary repair with safety wire and sometime this summer will rehang the exhaust system, making sure all the hangers are solid and the tailpipe is aimed in the right direction. We were lucky in that there wasn't much in the holding tank -- we'd avoided using the Guppy's toilet after using the dump station at Fort Richardson. The bad news, of course, is that we have to replace that tank. I guess when we're complaining about the cost (approximately $300, depending on the size and dealer) we'll have to remind ourselves it could have been a lot worse.

Now to invest in massive amounts of Febreze and see if it's possible to get that odor out of the Guppy before the next time we go camping.

Speaking of coincidences

We've kind of vanished into Intertubes no-man's-land. Not really feeling much like keeping up with blogging when I've got to do it at the McDonald's closest to the campground.

Which, incidentally, is in Startzville, Texas, if anyone is interested. We're at the Crane's Mill Park on Canyon Lake. Your tax dollars at work -- it's operated by the Corps of Engineers.

It's a nice campground, but expect a longer post at some point in the future on the folly of relying solely on less-than-ambitious "park hosts" to do routine maintenance.

And, yes, the bluebonnets were amazing this year.

No more photo ops

I'm going to miss seeing this machine in our driveway.

We had enough snow build up that the grader operator decided it was worth coming in here the other day. It was perfect timing on his part -- we hadn't dug the Guppy out of the snowbank yet so it was out of the way, and now the weather forecast is such that there probably won't be a reason for him to come in here again until sometime next week. And by then we'll be gone in search of Spring. 

The grader turning around by the barn. 

In the photo above, the Guppy is kind of hiding behind the grader, still securely tucked into the snow. In the photo below, the Guppy has (obviously) moved.

I thought taking that tarp off would be a real pain, but it turned out to be surprisingly easy. The S.O. had used old Chevy hubcaps to cover the plumbing vents on the roof; because they were rounded, there was nothing for the tarp to get hung up on once we started pulling it off. The worst part was getting hit with solidified chunks of snow that tended to slide right down the tarp and up my jacket sleeves.

Pictured above is the space the Guppy emerged from. The tow dolly had been parked right behind it, truly buried in the snow close to the storage shed. The S.O. wound up doing a fair amount of shoveling to get to the point where he'd be able to drag the dolly out with his POS Dodge plow truck once the Guppy was out of the way. 

With the Guppy out of the way, the Dodge is now parked in that space for the foreseeable future. Unless something dramatic changes in the next 24 hours, the S.O. will not be plowing any snow again until, oh, maybe October. November if we're lucky. 

The Guppy is now positioned for loading, the tow dolly is directly behind it although not yet attached. 

The above is my last grader photo for this year and probably forever, at least on our driveway. As of November 1, 2015, we'll be solely responsible for snow removal on our property. If I want to take grader photos next winter, I'll have to chase Billy around Herman hoping to get some decent photos as he's clearing county roads. I don't think I'm that ambitious. Or obsessed. 

Later today we'll finish loading the Guppy, getting the beast ready to head South toward slightly warmer weather tomorrow. I did get the new curtains done, both the ones to block the cab from the rest of the interior and the "kitchen" curtains for the living/dining area. I'm not sure what era that fabric is from, probably the 1960s, but once again I'm thinking my aunt Thelma had odd taste. I must confess, though, that those curtains are growing on me. I started off thinking it was some of the ugliest stuff I'd ever seen, but it's amazing how attractive fabric can become when it's Free. And it is a cheerful pattern. 

We still have a bit of a curtain problem in the bedroom. The ones that came with the Guppy were in sad shape, adequate but just barely, so I replaced them with some curtains that had been in the guest cabin when we bought it. Turned out they work fine on two of the windows but are about half an inch short on the third. Not a big deal, but still something I'm going to want to deal with eventually. Now that the ugly, filthy valances are gone, we need to move the drapery rods up a couple inches anyway. I'll just plan on doing new curtains that are custom-fitted to each window so I can be sure each set is exactly the right length. It'll be a good project for this summer. Although who knows? Maybe I'll get lucky and find something ready-made and easily adaptable at a Home Goods or other store in our travels. I didn't have any luck when I looked around here, but when the retail options are Family Dollar and Shopko Hometown I wasn't expecting to. 

All politics are local

We're now barely a month away from the November general election and I'm noticing the same thing here in Missouri that I noticed in 2012: if I use yard signs as evidence, people care the most about what's happening closest to them.  I see a lot of yard signs for local offices and almost none for state-wide or federal office. Who's running for U.S. Congress here in Farmington? If I relied solely on yard signs, I wouldn't have a clue. I haven't seen a single sign promoting anyone for Congress. I also haven't noticed much advertising on television, and what there has been hasn't been for anything happening here in Missouri. The political ads airing on the St. Louis stations all seem to be for candidates running in Illinois.

Although you know what's weird about those ads? I've yet to see one that's for a candidate. We keep seeing ads bashing the heck out of some guy running for Congress -- or maybe Senate. I'm not sure because the ads talk a lot about what a disaster he'd be if he got to Washington, but they never come right out and specify that he'd made a lousy Senator or a lousy Representative. The only thing that's sort of clear is he's running for office in Illinois. I have not, however, seen an ad actually talking up either the target of the attack ad or the guy who's running against him. It's bizarre. Makes a person wonder if the ballot will have a line for a candidate named "Not That Guy,"

I will say, however, it's nice to be here in Missouri during these last few weeks before the election. No matter how annoying political ads might get, we can ignore them all. They won't be pushing any candidates we care about. If we were still up on the tundra, the mailbox would be filling up with campaign literature and every other commercial on television would be telling us that Governor Snyder walks on water. Down here? From our perspective, it's a non-issue. We still have to fill out our absentee ballots and get them in the mail, but from our perspective the election is already over.

I kind of wish we could plan on a similar escape from politics in 2016, but given the hype and speculation already swirling around potential presidential candidates, I'm thinking the only way to escape politics then might be to plan on spending half the year in some other country.

We drove right past Spring into Summer

And now we're back to Almost Winter -- the forecast when we returned was "snow with possible rain mixed in." Note that it's not rain mixed with snow; it's snow mixed with rain. And it was May 14.

On the other hand, one of the first things we did when we got home was fill the hummingbird feeder and, snow in the forecast or not, we do have hummers flitting around the yard. So maybe it really is Spring, or what passes for Spring, here in the U.P.

We spent not quite two weeks imposing on the Younger Daughter in Missouri. We did some appropriately touristy things -- wandered around the historic town of Ste. Genevieve, went to an Azalea Festival that had no azaleas, checked out the ruins of the Einstein Silver Mine near the Silver Mines campground on the Mark Twain National Forest -- but mostly we just basked in the weather. When we left the U.P., temps were just barely above freezing. It was in the 80s in Missouri. As the S.O. put it, we went looking for Spring and drove right past it into Summer. It was wonderful. High water pants, sandals, the risk of sunburn . . .

The Einstein Mine site was interesting. It's one of those places that looks like it's been untouched by the hand of man until you start looking a little more closely. . . and then you realize that what looks like a natural rock formation is actually cut stone or the remnants of poured concrete. I looked up the Einstein Mine; it was a fairly large industrial complex, although you'd never know it from just looking at the ruins.

Einstein Silver Mine site, May 2014

I went looking for historic images on-line. This was the only one I could find:

It's probably circa 1900 or a little earlier. 

The mining complex also includes a dam: 

For a sense of scale, embiggen the photo. There are people on the rocks on the other side of the St. Francis River. We arrived at the mine site just in time to witness a rescue by local emergency personnel of a person who had apparently fallen while scrambling down those rocks to get closer to the dam or the river. There was a group of high school age boys camping; one of those kids probably over-estimated his ability to scramble down some fairly steep rock slopes. 

We checked out some other campgrounds while we were in the area, including Hawn State Park. The next time we visit the Younger Daughter we plan to use the RV. If we're at a campground, she won't feel obligated to feed and entertain us. Even better, we won't be stuck sleeping on an air mattress that's seen better days. 

On the road again

Iris in full bloom in a garden in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri 

After staring at the snow melting ever so slowly, the S.O. and I decided that maybe it was like that old saying about a watched pot never boiling. You know, as long as we were watching it, the snow wasn't going to leave. So we hit the road for Missouri. We've been down here for about a week now, and it has been a pleasant break from the mud season. Up north I can't even tell where the flowerbeds are; down here lilacs, bearded iris, peonies, and a zillion other things are in full bloom. We've done a little bit of playing tourist, a little bit of shopping, and checked out several of the campgrounds that are close to where the Younger Daughter lives. It's been nice. We wandered around historic Ste. Genevieve one day and checked out the ruins of the Einstein Mine on the Mark Twain National Forest. We even managed to stumble across an event the S.O. could get enthusiastic about: the 47th Annual Azalea Festival in Fredricktown.

The Azalea Festival was interesting. It had a lot of things going on -- a carnival (complete with a tilt-and-hurl), an arts and crafts fair, a children's pet show with the pets all dressed up in various costumes. I wasn't sure if it was possible for a dog to look truly embarrassed until I saw a vizsla dressed in a hot pink tutu with matching hot pink nail polish on its toes. The one thing the Azalea Festival did not have was azaleas -- the crafts fair was set up in "Azalea Park," which was basically just a big flat green open space down the hill from the courthouse square. No azaleas, at least none that I could see.

Up the hill from the carnival, the arts and crafts, and the dogs dressed in strange costumes was the one event that interested the S.O. It was a pretty decent car show with a wide variety of entries, although based on the photos he took, I think he was most interested in the classic hot rods.

 Monday we'll be heading home to the tundra. If we're lucky, the worst of the Mud Season will be over.

Maybe I'm overthinking things

A couple months ago the S.O. and I bought a used motorhome, a 1989 Rockwood, so we could pursue my fantasy of becoming VIPs (Volunteers in Parks) now that we're both totally retired. Seemed like a simple enough plan: we'd buy a motorhome, we'd do some research and put in some applications, and then we'd hit the road. Except maybe it isn't quite that simple. The date for hitting the road is getting closer and of course I'm starting to obsess.

We're going to be living in that thing for several months at a stretch. Just what exactly do we stock it with? What all do we bring along to amuse ourselves with? Books, dvds, my knitting and quilting stuff, the laptop, . . . the list keeps growing. It has occurred to me that this might be the ideal time to invest in a tablet, something even more portable than the laptop, and that we can always buy e-books and movies, but I'm enough of a traditionalist to want a few real books around. With a hard copy of a book you never have to worry about batteries going dead. On the other hand, having a tablet would mean the S.O. and I would not be competing for the laptop, and that's a serious consideration. We tend to do our wandering around the Intertubes at about the same time of day.

The kitchen area has me mildly confused at the moment, too. Just what do we actually need when it comes to pots and pans and dishes? We're unlikely to be hosting any dinner parties so will the bare minimum (two plates, two cups, two cereal bowls) be sufficient? Depending on where we are, we might not have a whole lot of water so avoiding washing many dishes might be a good idea. . . but I also don't want to be using tons of paper plates and throwaway plastic forks. I wanted to have a real oven, which this Rockwood does have, so does that automatically entail muffin tins and pie pans? How much actual baking will I do when the "kitchen" has about two square feet of counter space? Is there even enough room to roll out a pie crust?

And then there's the clothing question. How many pairs of shoes? What about seasonal stuff -- it's going to be winter when we leave here, but we're heading South so I'll need high water pants and sandals before we're home again. We're going to be stuck relying on laundromats so just how much clothing should we try to cram into the tiny closets and minuscule drawers? Some of the stuff I wear actually requires ironing -- if I bring the iron, does that in turn demand a real ironing board? What about stuff like lawn chairs and a folding table for when we're set up at a campground with the canopy out and the faux patio with its patch of astroturf waiting to be used? I'm already having fears one thing will lead to another, and we won't so much cruise on down the highway as waddle.

Some of those questions would have been answered if we'd acquired the beast a little earlier in the year. We could have done a shakedown cruise of some sort, wandered off to spend a week or two camping here in the U.P. or northern Wisconsin and figured out what was going to work and what wasn't. As it is, when we hit the road in February, we're going to be learning as we go. It could be interesting.

At least one thing I shouldn't have to worry about. The S.O. should have no problems driving the beast, even with our car in tow. He has a CDL and used to drive over-the-road. If he could manage to maneuver a semi with a 53' trailer in to loading docks located in alleys not much wider than the trailer, he's not going to have any problems with this RV.

Random road thoughts

It's going to be hard to get used to driving 55 again after spending a few weeks in Texas. The State of Texas posts roads at 70 mph that would be 55 at best here in Michigan and that would, in addition, have caution signs on every curve warning you not to exceed 35.

There are some things Texas seems to do really well, and other things are just plain odd. Example of a good idea in Texas: if it's a state maintained road, the Texas Department of Transportation is in charge of providing a mail box post. You bring your U.S. Postal System-approved mailbox to the local DOT and they do the installation. It means all the mailboxes on the busier roads are on posts that won't turn into air-borne weapons if someone goes off the road and hits one, and it also means all the mailbox posts have highly visible reflectors on them. Much as I'm a fan of roadside eccentricity (mailboxes mounted on welded chain, old metal wheels, chunks of twisted wood, etc.), I've got to admit the Texas DOT had a good idea. Not only the mailboxes safer, there are no visual distractions.

As for the just plain odd, why are the breaker boxes for the power mounted on the outside of so many houses in Texas? Why put it right under the meter where the service enters the house? Isn't it going to be a real pain in the behind to have to go looking for a tripped breaker in the middle of the night or in the rain? Whatever happened to the concept of putting the service panel in a utility room or in a closet wall? Or this all just part of the personal freedom Texans enjoy from little constraints like building codes and licensing requirements for electricians and other contractors?

Not content to skin tourists at the casino, the Choctaw of Oklahoma are determined to get them at the gas pumps, too. Gasoline prices were relatively low and dropping all the way from Fairmount, Texas, up into Oklahoma. And then we hit Broken Bow and the Choctaw Nation. The highest prices we saw in that state were all within a few miles of the Choctaw casino. Came as a bit of a shock. Here in the U.P., the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community is universally hated by all the private gas station owners and distributors because KBIC always has the lowest prices. If gas is $3.89 in L'Anse, it'll be at least 20 cents lower at the KBIC-owned station over in Baraga.

On the other hand, the drive up US-259 to US-59 to Sallisaw was quite scenic. Not sure if the Ouachita Mountains really make up for getting gouged at the pump, but it was a pretty drive.

Oklahomans really, really hate Texas. Evidence?

Speaking of politics, Claire McCaskill has some great ads running in Missouri. Here's hoping they help her. Other than McCaskill's ads, though, the political advertising in Missouri was bizarre -- there were ads being paid for by Republicans that tried to make it sound like Democrats are planning to do (or have done) all the things the Republicans actually want to do (privatize Social Security, for example) and ads being run by Democrats that you'd swear were written by Karl Rove. The typical voter in that state has to be thoroughly confused; the advertising in general was both dirty and misleading.

The amount of political advertising we saw while watching network television in motel rooms en route made me quite happy to be heading back to television via the Internet only -- it's not as convenient as being able to just turn on a tv and click around with the remote, but it does eliminate most advertising.

And now we're home, back at the ranch and getting ready to deal with whatever weirdness may have occurred during our 3-week absence. One more cup of coffee and I may have the energy to go looking for problems.

Road tripping

Ghost ad, downtown Mass, Michigan

On the road, heading South, posting is going to be rather sporadic for awhile.

Heading north

Later this morning we'll be throwing the suitcase back in the truck and heading north towards Wisconsin. It's been an interesting few days here in east Texas. Wound up being here longer than originally planned due to the Younger Daughter's car blowing a head gasket this past Friday. She'd been hoping to nurse that Ford Tempo along for a few more months (it only had 235,000+ miles on the odometer) but no such luck. So instead of just being here for the weekend, we stayed longer to drive her around to banks, car lots, her insurance agent, and the garage where the tow truck driver had dumped the Tempo. (Slight digression -- had the rare experience of seeing an honest mechanic. Instead of trying to persuade her to spend a ton of money on an engine rebuild the man told her to junk it, which is what she was planning to do anyway but it was still nice to not have the garage owner try to persuade her it was fixable.) She managed to find a used Chevy Cobalt that is now the newest and nicest car she's ever owned, so she's happy.

Our visits to shade tree mechanics and various car lots was not exactly the type of tour itinerary the local chambers of commerce would probably recommend for visitors to the Texas pine forests, but it was interesting. Got to see several very sad looking downtowns, the courthouse squares that once were the center of economic and community life for towns like San Augustine and Hemphill but now just look abandoned. San Augustine's is actually healthier looking than some I've seen (Jasper's is like the aftermath of a disaster; completely ringed by vacant buildings with not even a bail bondsman or a lawyer's office to be seen), but even in San Augustine there's one entire side of the square lined with empty store fronts, and quite a bit of the rest is occupied by "antique" stores. I don't think there's anything in any of the buildings on Hemphill's square -- maybe an insurance agent, but that's it. No stores, not even a coffee shop that people with business at the courthouse might stop in before or after going to pay for license plates. It's not as derelict looking as the Jasper square, but not by much.

It's a shame from a historic preservation point of view, of course, because those empty decaying buildings are often quite interesting -- much more fun to look at than the basic metal pole shed that gets thrown up these days when Family Dollar comes to town. Nothing against Family Dollar -- I'd rather shop there than at the Evil Empire -- but they don't exactly have the 21st century equivalent of McKim, Mead & White designing their stores. Not that Family Dollar would ever locate on a courthouse square; Family Dollar, just like its bigger box competitors, wants to be on a busy street or highway and not tucked away where there's less vehicle traffic. It's an old pattern, of course. This country is full of town sites where communities dried up and blew away when traffic patterns shifted. In Hemphill you can even date when the shift away from the square began -- there's a very nice 1960s brick bank building done in a kind of futuristic heavily influenced by the Jetsons style that's oriented toward the highway that bypasses the square about two blocks to the east. It seems likely the Texas DOT re-routed the highway circa 1960 to bypass the square instead of looping around it, and businesses began mutating towards strip development instead of being centered on a square shortly after.

So what happens when people start doing less driving? Good question. They're still not going to be walking to the local town squares, not in rural areas like this one. The YD tells me that when she first got here last fall and asked about where to shop, she was told most people in this area go to Jasper (~45 miles away) to shop at the Evil Empire because the Brookshire Brothers store in Hemphill isn't very good. Having been in that Brookshire Brothers store exactly once, the only problem I saw with it then was it's a whole lot smaller than the Publix I'd gotten used to in Atlanta, but perception is everything. And, given the love affair Texans seem to have with both trucks and driving, gas is going to have to get much, much higher per gallon before they start re-thinking driving anywhere -- one of the problems we ran into while car shopping was that 90% of the used vehicle inventory on most car dealers' lots was trucks. Big trucks. Full size or better trucks with quad cabs and dual rear wheels.

I would love to know how people are managing to buy those vehicles. Texas is not noted for high wages in general and the cost of living doesn't seem to be appreciably lower here than anywhere else in the country. YD pays as much in rent here as she would for a comparable house in Omaha. Maybe it's more creative financing, like with the strange schemes the mortgage industry developed to fuel the housing bubble. Or maybe the reason those quad cabs are popular is that for more and more people the trucks are becoming their primary residence. I have a lot of days when I wonder just how average people, the ones who fall someplace close to or below the median household income for the U.S., manage to survive.

In any case, the Texas phase of the vacation is about to end. Did not get to do the one thing I had hoped to while here -- confer with the owner of the sawmill house -- as he's on a fire detail somewhere out west this week, but that can always be done via telephone or e-mail. Overall it's been a nice visit with YD, and, if the weather forecast wasn't for 90s with humidity to match, I'd say I hate to leave.

The news has been on in the background as I've been getting the morning caffeine fix while typing this, and I am tempted to do a rant about feckless weasels like Scott McClellan (as in "where were your balls when they would have done the country some good?!") but I'm not even going to do a link. Anyone who's reading this and is interested has either already done his or her own rant, or simply doesn't care. Besides, it's time to get dressed, throw the suitcase in the truck, and hit the road.