The report from September

Nearly the end of September and I feel like I haven't done much this month. Until I look at the photos.

Due to a problem with my new truck, coupled with a 34 hour reset, I ended up spending four nights and three days in Augusta Georgia. Nice town, with an unpaved bike trail alongside the canal that put the town on the map.

I took a boat trip on the canal that explained the history of the area. Having lived in an old mill town in New England, it was interesting to visit the primary southern city to which most of the fabric mills in New England eventually moved. Also very interesting to me as a Yankee, Augusta was the center of the confederacy's industrial base.

This one canal, promoted and developed by the son of the town's mayor, way back in the 1850s, made it the ideal spot for the production of gun powder for the confederacy in the 1860s, among other things necessary for the war effort. Strangely, Sherman's march through the south entirely avoided Augusta. Hmmm.

While in Augusta, I happened upon an auction of stuff for the benefit of a newborn with heart troubles who's mother is the member of a local roller derby team. One of the items on auction was this "sword" (more like a long dagger), of exquisite design (and sharp as hell). I would have priced it at $200 or more, but the highest bid was only $10. So my $20 bid ended up winning. Since the last thing I need on the truck is a sixteen inch long dagger, I made a deal with the pub hosting the event: They keep the dagger on the wall of the pub until the next charity auction at which they must auction it off with the understanding that the buyer must again give it back to the pub to put back on the wall. Rinse and repeat. I told enough people about the deal that I trust the pub will honor my deal. I'll be very interested to come back in a few years and see how much money that dagger has raised.

I don't remember exactly where this was, somewhere in peach country, but a water tower shaped as a peach certainly caught my attention.

I picked up a trailer in Ticonderoga New York and after driving sixty miles along a road that should not have trucks on it, I spent the night in a rest area only to find in the morning that this is what two of the tires on the trailer looked like. Fortunately I was able to get them replaced within a few miles of the rest area. Yes, those are the steel belts showing through on the tire.

My typical day of food, sitting on the passenger seat.

I spent a week in the Bethlehem/Allentown PA region making local deliveries for C+S Wholesale Grocers to primarily A&P and Stop and Shop grocery stores in eastern PA and northern NJ. Fortunately, I had to do a 34 hour reset so I parked in Allentown.

Cute town. Very working class with a huge chunk of the population living in downtown Allentown. This tree-lined street was a bit unusual. Most of the town looks like 8th avenue in the 40s and 50s in Manhattan . I got to bike down the old mule path along the canal paralleling the Lehigh river to Bethlehem.

Bethlehem, once the capital of steel production in the US, has fortunately kept the old steel mills relatively intact but converted them into a civic center which was hosting a blues festival while I was there. Riding down the bike path on the north side of the river, the blues from the south side was like a siren's song for me.

Seen in a highway rest stop in Indiana.

One morning northwest of Lafayette Indiana in a region filled with wind turbines (though, knowing something about wind turbines, I wonder who would have been willing to endure a longer than 20 year ROI on these babies. There simply is not enough wind in Indiana to make these things cost-effective.)

I made a delivery to a grocery store on the south side of Chicago which had this sign on the wall. Go make something happen. I like that.

I'm now doing an unintentional 34 hour reset in the town of "State College" (believe it or not) Pennsylvania. I'm very glad I parked here last night instead of the truckstop 28 miles in the other direction from my drop-off point last night. Very cute town and home of Penn State. I got to do my laundry and bombed around campus on the bike, riding like a wild man and scaring the kids. LOL

Travels in August

My last month with England allowed me to get a bit off-route through some parts of the country I'd never seen before. I started the month in Fresno and headed back east.

This is the Very Large Array radio telescope in west central New Mexico. If you click on the photo and zoom in, you can see this is one of the three arms of multiple dishes in a row. It's a beautiful, desolate high valley completely surrounded by mountains, which is why this location is perfect for listening to radio signals from outside of Earth.

I spent a night in Roswell New Mexico, the Alien capital of the world (Google it if you haven't heard about this).

Even Walmart plays up the alien angle. Surprisingly, Roswell is a huge grower of Pecans. The northwestern outskirts of town are entirely covered by pecan tree orchards. Unfortunately, Roswell has been suffering from a great and long drought.

Abilene Texas where it was 104 degrees with almost no humidity. I biked eight miles into town and had to sip water every few minutes to keep my throat from getting stuck closed. This part of Texas is also suffering from the same drought. Very dry.

In Memphis I visited an ice cream and bike shop which was manufacturing and selling this hybrid electric bicycle.

A thunderstorm at sunrise in Oklahoma.

And I took a long lunch break just southwest of St.Louis and took a cave tour.

E.N.G.L.A.N.D. stands for . . .

Soon after I started driving for CR England in January, someone told me what a number of the trucking company names are actually acronyms for. WERNER----We Employ Rookies No Experience Required, CFI --Cant Find Interstate, SWIFT---Sure Wish I Finished Training or Sexy Women in Freightliner Trucks, CRST ---Cedar Rapids Stunt Team, and ENGLAND ---Every New Guy Leaves After Ninety Days. Interestingly, on my 86th day of solo driving for England, and six weeks without a day off, I started to feel bad vibes coming from both my driver manager and England corporate. Despite my weekly reports putting me in the top 20% of drivers in every category - miles run, on-time deliveries, highest fuel mileage, etc. - I was getting clear indications that England no longer wanted me. A quick survey of other trucking companies revealed JB HUNT (Just Beginning to Hold Up Nation's Traffic) which seemed to have all the requirements I was seeking and would also give me a 57% pay raise to $0.41/mile (the highest pay I could find for a driver with only six months of experience). On my 100th day of solo driving, I returned my truck to England, took a week off in Salt Lake and made a quick trip down to Great Basin National Park where I got up to 11,400.

Orientation for JB Hunt was in Memphis Tennessee so I found a cheap flight to St.Louis (got all my stuff down to two fifty pound containers, one of them the case for the bike that converts into a bike trailer (as seen in the photo),biked 20 miles along the Mississippi, tasted some great beer, attended a blues festival, and at three in the morning caught a Greyhound to Memphis. Orientation took four days and now I'm back on the road, currently doing a 34 hour reset in Augusta Georgia after a quick visit to Tulsa (a very nice town (with incredible bike trails) which I hope I can explore more in the future ). My truck is pretty much the same as the one I drove for England except I realized just yesterday (after four days of driving) that this transmission is a ten speed instead of a nine. I'd been shifting from 4th to 6th and wondering why it was such a big rpm jump. Duh.

Photos from July

I had an interesting month of driving mostly in the mid-west with a few
trips back west. I spent a little more than a week as a contract driver for Walmart making local deliveries to Walmart stores centered around north central Illinois - Sterling to be exact. Just across the street from the Walmart center was a horse stable which included this very friendly and confident spotted horse, among others.

I went as far north as Lake Geneva, WI.

Surely you've seen these before.
But have you ever looked closely at the instructions?

Down to Bloomington, IL a couple of times where this grainary has been converted into an indoor climbing gym. What a great idea.

Up and west to Davenport, IA.

And had almost 20 hours of time off-duty in the actual town of Sterling and ended up walking about a half mile through the thigh-deep rock river to see what a couple fisherman were catching.

In the last couple weeks I finally got back west and had a full 34 hours off, my first in six weeks, in Cheyenne which had some crazy weather.

I met this kid at the Cheyenne Frontier Days celebration. He said the bike will do 60mph but you have drag your feet to stop.

After making it back to Kansas City for a very hot night (I really like that city), I headed back west through CO and UT.

Spent a night in Las Vegas and had so much fun riding my little bike up and down the strip, maneuvering between all the stopped traffic to the head of the line and then sprinting off at the green light to the next red. So hot out that my eyes were burning - at ten oclock at night.

Finally the long-awaited photo of my bike (taken by a couple of German students spending a month over here perfecting their English).

I finished July in Fresno CA to a fabulous sunset and a relatively cool night in a truckstop parking lot that doesn't smell like urine!

Public and Private lands in Wyoming

Hmmm. I found this post sitting in my drafts folder. I would have sworn I'd published this. Oh well.

After spending the last couple weeks back east, I'm heading back to Utah's Cache Valley with twenty one tons of Wisconsin cheese. Strangely, the Cache Valley is known for only one thing - cheese. Why would Wisconsin cheese be shipping to the Cache Valley?

I'm reading the book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver and she's filled it with lots of very interesting facts about the American food production system. Like this: The US exports 1.1 million tons of potatoes each year, while at the same time importing 1.4 million tons of potatoes. Sounds like someone is getting rich on the distribution end of the deal.

Anyways... I'm spending the night in Rawlins, Wyoming. The last couple of times I've driven into this town from the west, I've admired a mountain just north of town called Cherokee Peak. Tonight was my opportunity to bag it. The Flying-J truckstop I'm parked at is just down the ridge from the peak so I headed uphill and reached the summit in a couple of hours.

Interesting land markings I saw from near the summit. Do you see the straight line in the middle of the photo? I'm sure it's made by an ancient alien race. Human's couldn't possibly make a line that straight. And is that light green circular section closest to us actually two overlapping circles? Is it a symbol for something?

Hiking down, after a fun close approach with a pronghorn antelope, near the bottom I climbed through a barbed wire fence and looked over the edge of a bluff into a verdant little valley with a farm house, some horses, another pronghorn antelope drinking water from a stream, and not thirty feet from the antelope a man yelling up at me "What are you doing up there?". I really need a new eye glass prescription because I couldn't tell if he was facing me or not. So I just yelled down, "HIKING", and continued down, crossed the fence again, and went down a dirt road toward the truckstop. Not five minutes later one of those little two-seat four-wheelers with a roof comes barreling up the dirt road. I thought I was going to get shot.

It turns out it's the guy who was at the bottom of the bluff at least two miles away via dirt roads. The guy then proceeds to explain to me the rules of private property in Wyoming, which are essentially - the burden to know which property is private and which is public rests on me, not on the property owners to post their land. He further explains that most of Wyoming was originally broken up by the US government as one square mile blocks - 640 acres - which were then sold off to private landowners in a mostly checkerboard arrangement. The land he and I were standing on (well, he was sitting in his little vehicle), was public Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land. But the land I passed through to get to that land was his, and another man's, and the land I had to pass through to get back to the truckstop was owned by someone else. In fact, Cherokee Peak is privately owned and I'd been trespassing. Apparently selling off the government land in this checkerboard pattern of private land and BLM land was somebody's way to get rich about a century ago. I'm not surprised.

We end up talking for an hour and I don't get shot, and he gave me the name and phone number of a guy who may be a good contact for the wind energy stuff I'm working on. Finally he gives me a ride back down to the truckstop through a pasture filled with bulls (which he said wouldn't have bothered me if I'd walked through, but I've never dealt with bulls before so I'm not so sure).

Funny how things work out.

Photos from June

Over the last few weeks since my last post I've been to many places and settled into a rhythm of driving, parking, biking, exploring, biking, sleeping, waking, driving. No great revelations. No thoughtful insights. Settling into a driving life of sorts. As usual, click on any of the photos to get a larger view of it.

Diamond Bar California, a suburb of Los Angeles and a central distribution hub with plenty of warehouses.

The Mojave desert in southern California.

Driving into Salt Lake after a rainstorm.

Twin Falls Idaho, the Snake River Canyon. Evel Knievel jumped this canyon just a half mile up-river. Incredible canyon, 600 feet down with shear basalt cliffs and then a little green paradise at the bottom. Apparently this bridge is the only place in America at which BASE jumpers can jump any day of the year without a permit. I saw a few poised on the edge as I drove over.

The Wasatch range near Ogden.

Western Wyoming, greener than I've ever seen it. Lots of rain this year. Global Climate Change. You gotta love it baby. Some places are winners (western Wyoming). Some places are losers (west Texas).

Graffiti in a men's room in Lincoln Nebraska. The little text at the end says "sadly not once in my lifetime". Yes. Sadly.

Same Men's room. No explanation needed.

The Missouri river flooding thousands of acres of farmland south of Lincoln Nebraska. Businesses in the area, but still above the water, had piled up dirt around their buildings about ten feet high in anticipation of the water rising higher.

Your's truly in a corn field in Nebraska. Or was it Iowa?

A guy I met in Cheyenne, Wyoming who I thought looked like he was from the same clan as me. Sure enough, he was of eastern European descent.

The view straight up from the inside of a large human-torso-shaped sculpture in downtown Des Moines, Iowa in the middle of the night. This was a ten mile bike ride into town, and ten miles back out. Yes, I was beat by the time I got back to the truck.

The Holy Family Shrine in Gretna, Nebraska. I've seen this building from I-80 since February and finally had the time to stop and visit. Incredible building. So much thought built into it.

Though a tenth the size, it 'felt' as spiritual walking in as any of the great cathedrals of Europe.

A young recent Russian immigrant to Virginia Beach in her usual bicycling attire. What a nice beach town Virginia Beach is.

The Tarragon, Oregano and Basil I'm growing on my truck. Unfortunately, the Oregano has since bit the dust. Nothing like having some fresh herbs on a sandwich.

A portion of the Doctor Seuss memorial in Springfield, Massachusetts.