Heading West
Let the road trip begin AND end!
When planning cross country road trips in the past, I always included fun and interesting stops along the way. This latest adventure, moving from New York to Colorado, was more of a “get on the interstate and get there as fast as possible”. There were no stops for the famous Tony Packo’s hot dogs in Toledo, Ohio, or the Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois, or the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota. All of these are fabulous places to visit if you like hot dogs, President Lincoln, or a building made of corn, but not when you are moving from point A to point B.
The day before we took off went like this:
Pack the U-Haul box. Lock the box up with two new locks from Walmart. Do the cleaning. Hold out things to pack in the car that shouldn’t be put in the U-Haul box. Miscalculation - unlock the xbox. Put more stuff into it because the car really isn’t big enough for all the things that were left out. Put the locks back on the box. Do yet another walkthrough. Unlock the U-Haul box again because there are more things to throw into it. Say goodby to the neighbors a few times. Give my neighbor Rose some treasures like two half full bottles of Italian hand soap. She’s Italian so she loved it. And the hand soap in her bathroom just ran out. Give one more look around, find the fishing poles that were hanging up. Unlock the U-Haul box again, shove the poles into it, then lock it up again. Perfect timing, here comes the guy on the forklift to take the U-Haul box away. Plus the box is so crammed full I doubt anything else would really fit in it. Offer the guy water, he looks like he is drenched in sweat - its a really hot day. Say goodbuy to my stuff as the forklift drives down the street to the big truck the box will be placed on. Drive Sharon, Ruby, Dexter and a cooler full of what was left in the refrigerator to Rockaway. Drink all the Coronitas that were in the cooler. Go to sleep early so we can get out of NY when the traffic is minimal.
We - my friend Sharon and my dog Dexter - left Rockaway early Friday morning. Google Maps took us across two bridges - Verrazano Narrows and Goethals - then onto the Jersey Turnpike, merge onto I-80 in Pennsylvania and then on a toll road through Ohio. That’s when the fun began. The speed drops from 80 mph in Pennsylvania to 70 mph as you cross into Ohio. It’s the holiday weekend and we saw A LOT of highway patrol officers out on Friday, pulling people over for speeding throughout both states. That’s my car pictured below. It’s an orange Subaru nicknamed Baby Tang by my niece and her friend Jakki, on the shoulder of the highway with the highway patrol car behind it. Unfortunately we got to meet one of Ohio’s finest highway patrolmen. A very nice officer issued the speeding ticket that cost around $150 plus an additional processing fee. I think Ohio and surrounding states made a lot of money this holiday weekend.
The rest of the trip was uneventful. As we moved through the “I states” - Indiana, Illinois and Iowa - I finally learned how to set the cruise control on my car. I never had need for it since I’ve only driven my car 2.5 miles daily from home to the train station and back for the past 2 -1/2 years. Once we hit Des Moines we took a break from the road for a day and a half to visit Sharon’s family.
There are two things I spotted on the road as we made our way across the country.
Road construction - Does it ever end? Are there any interstates not under construction at some point? We hit several construction zones on I-80 in several states (this highway goes clear across the country from New York to California, so there were several opportunities for us to get caught in the work zones) and I-76 in Colorado (I-76 is mainly in Colorado, only 3 miles of this highway is in Nebraska). Construction zones can be scary, especially when both east and west bound traffic are merged onto one side (see the picture below. All that’s keeping the oncoming vehicle on their side of the road is a plastic stick-like thing). And even though the speed limits drop, some drivers are still trying to speed through this areas. It’s crazy. I’m just glad we were driving during daylight hours.
Wind farms. We saw several of them. Which got me thinking, why are wind turbines made with only three blades? If three blades are good, why not have four blades, or even five? Isn’t more always better?? The answer to that question is, “Nope. More is NOT always better, especially in the case of wind turbines.” First off, generating electricity using wind turbines has been around for a long time, since 1888. On the first turbine there were 144 wooden blades. It only generated about 12 kilowatts of power, which would light one incandescent light bulb for 2 hours per day for a month. Not really that great, so maybe 144 blades was a bit excessive. Aerodynamics (a branch of physics called fluid dynamics) examines the air flow and wind resistance around a solid object. Engineers using these principals looked at speed and drag when designing turbine blades. If there is too much drag, power yields will be lowered. If there is too much speed, the blades could spin so fast they could break the sound barrier. In reality, one blade would be optimum for a wind turbine to produce the most energy. This would decrease drag - no other blades to stop it from spinning fast - but the turbine would be very unbalanced. Bad idea. Two blades would be good if this setup didn’t cause a phenomenon called gyroscopic precession, which causes the turbine to wobble and places stress and extra wear on the parts of the turbine. Again, not a good idea. What about three blades? Well, more that three blades and there would be greater wind resistance, more drag, and less energy generated. So there you have it. Three is the magic number, producing high energy yields and stability for the turbine. And if you want to read more about wind turbines, click here .
So now I’m in my new home, settling in. I’m unpacking the things that fit in the car, and waiting for my U-Haul box to get here so I can take the locks off for good.