3SX Nationwide Tour
July 2-10, 2002 -- NC - WA - CA - NC
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I had to make a little trip for 3SX. This qualified as one of those "above and beyond" duties... 6,549 miles beyond normal duties! We bought a couple cars from other 3Si club members out on the west coast, one outside Seattle, WA, and one in San Jose, CA, outside San Francisco. As a side, we also ended up carrying a car out to Seattle for guy. To make the trip, I drove our big rollback car hauler, dragging our trailer the whole way. This is not your ordinary rollback, no hopped up pickup, but a BIG Kodiak truck with a 6.6 liter inline-6 turbo diesel Caterpillar motor. Yeesh!! Top speed of 70, ok, twice, but 60-65 was the normal cruising speed, and that was with my foot NAILED to the floor. Went to Seattle to deliver the car and pick up ours there, then down to San Jose to get that one, then all the way back across the country on I-40 to Charlotte. Here are a few stats I compiled from the trip: * Days: 9 The trip went great for the most part, uneventful as far as problems with the truck until the last 2 days. NEVER drive on Oklahoma highways!! WORST highways in the Nation!! I've been to most of the states now, worse than Pennsylvania (worst east of the Mississippi), and North Dakota was on par with PA. OK took the cake though. They highways in OK are sooo bad... How bad are they? They BLEW UP my air conditioner! Literally. I was bouncing/banging along (no "air ride" in this monster truck) and after one particularly large rattlebangbump, I noticed the air wasn't really blowing cold anymore, but HOT. Now it was 105 degrees that day, and my AC was gone. Spent the last 2 days with the windows down guzzling water (literally drank about 1.5 to 2 gallons of water and went to the bathroom ONCE! UGH! Glad I took the cooler! Then, about 1.5 hours from Charlotte, home almost in sight, the alternator goes out! Raining, dreary, getting toward night, I notice my voltage is reading next to nothing, and my dash lights seem to be dimmer than normal, and as it gets darker, I seem to have no headlights. I pull off and realize that my lights are almost out. I call Steve but keep pegging on, eventually it's dark, and I'm using a Mag light for a headlight going down 321! hahaha, cop (local) pulls me over (duh!) half laughing. Steve shows up, we pull the battery out of the car on the truck, stick it in the batter cage and drive the truck home. Whew! But it and I made it home finally. I've got a few more details of the trip below this first batch of pictures. Other than that, all in all it wasn't too bad a trip, had a cooler, tunes (CD/MP3 boombox and AC adapter), phone that had coverage maybe about 40% of the trip, and my digital camera. I actually took almost 1100 pictures!! What else when I'm bored - take pictures of stuff... Whittled them down to 600 for this gallery - some really neat shots, scenery shots, sunsets, traffic, lack of traffic, lack of ANYTHING in some places. But it was great to see a big chunk of the country. A trip I want to repeat someday in my own CAR at a more leisurely pace. I squashed the pics from their full size down to 640x480 and everything is set up in a nice gallery, some of the individual pics are annotated. |
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| Index 1 of 12 |
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| Index 1 of 12 |
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Special Panorama Page!!
I love shooting panoramas, those really wide pictures that show more than a single shot could ever hope to portray. Shooting them definitely takes a little extra effort - shooting a series of shots making sure to set them up and get them just right so they can be assembled later. Then I use special software to stitch the series of pictures together to make one really big image. Each panorama takes anywhere from 1 hour to 3 or more to get just right. I finally got them all assembled from the trip, and here's a special section of those images. 
Click here to check out the panoramas from the trip! |
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Additional notes about each day of driving. Driving by Days: July 2-9, 2002 Day 1: 16:55 hours of actual driving (not counting stops, gas, breaks, etc., actual driving), 890 miles Stopped in Waukesha, WI. Met with couple Chicagoland owners Sanjay and Brian for dinner, and Scott Cowan in WI for breakfast on Day 2. Day 2 : 16:05 hours, 920 miles. Pushed all the way through to the Montana border, crashed that nite in truck at MT border rest area. I think I-94 across ND has a total of about 5 turns - look at a map! I'm serious! FLAT FLAT FLAT. Day 3: 15:20 hours, 899 miles. Made it across MT! 'Bout blew up the truck in Idaho, something about leaving it in 4th and coasting down 6 mile hill without foot on gas, letting engine control speed - when I put it it 5th at the bottom, apparently a backup of fuel in the cylinders ignited and scared the piss outta me!! TONS of smoke everywhere, checked everything out, all seemed OK, idled fine, so I kept going - no phone signal anyway, 1400 people in next town - night of July 4th. Thank God it kept going - not like I would have been able to get any help anyway! Pushed through to Moses Lake, WA. Day 4: 8:55 hours, 473 miles. Made it to south side of Seattle to deliver car and pick up our car (dropoff/pickup same place) from Eric Gross. Went back north to just east of Seattle to meet with Bob Koch (eK2Mfg). Great guy, wife made big steaks, yummy! Only real meal I had whole trip I think... Wanted to make some tracks south so headed out. Met Armand, his cousin, and Nathan in Portland. Armand tossed me his keys to go get light bulbs - it was great to drive a vehicle that moved when you hit the gas and didn't need 3 gears to get through an intersection! :-) After meeting them and fixing trailer lights again, headed further south to just south of Salem OR. Day 5: 13:55 hours, 719 miles. Ventured on into Cali, down to San Jose, picked up other car from Stan Yee (NICE VR4 man!), and headed on south. Got totally freaked OUT too. Driving along, finally got back to I-5. NOTHING on the highway, black night. I'm tired. I notice these lights doing some seriously funky maneuvers out over nothing just to the left of the highway ahead of me. There were 2 lights, REALLY bright, both pointing the same direction, and separated by what looked like nothing - it was pitch black! These things were swooping and flipping all over the place. All I could think of was the little ships in Close Encounters zipping around. I was OK with wondering about them until.... As I'm getting closer to them, I'm kinda up elevated above where it's swooping around left of the highway. Well, it kinda makes a long curved upward swoop over the highway in front of me, maybe a quarter mile, then slowly curved toward me, and then is coming DIRECTLY AT ME!! I mean the inside of the truck lit up like it was daylight! I was freaking out - what the hell!?!? It's coming right at me, getting lower as it approached, pointing straight at the truck head on! I hit the brakes and nearly bring the truck to a stop before it goes right over the top, I swear no more than 50 feet above the truck! Never heard a sound, or saw anything between the lights that were about 25 feet apart. What the?? As I slowly sped back up, heart finally getting going again, I was watching it back kinda behind me now swooping around again, it'd get really low and go along the ground for maybe a couple hundred yards then swoop all over the place, and make another pass along the ground, but not parallel to it's last path. Very strange.... About 15 minutes later I saw another one doing the same thing a little further from the highway. Finally dawned on me that it must be a small plane doing night crop-dusting. Weird thing was I never saw a runway, or any other lights other than those two super bright search lights. I stopped about 30 minutes after that for the night - enough excitement for my tires arse! Day 6: 11:30 hours, 627 miles. Drove across the Mojave Desert. Talk about flat and nothing. Some interesting scenery nonetheless, see the pics. Got through to Flagstaff, AZ. Was going to go to the Grand Canyon and watch the sunrise, but found out that commercial vehicles weren't allowed in the park (damn this big truck). So planned on hitting Meteor Crater and Petrified Forest the next morning. Day 7: 11:15 hours (not counting 3 hours driving through Petrified Forest National Park), 642 miles. To hell with it, dammit, I'm not driving 6500 miles and not stopping to see SOMETHING. Stopped to see the Meteor Crater (remember end of the movie Starman?), it was right off the highway, so easy to visit. Also spend some time in the Petrified Forest National Park, really cool, like mini grand canyon. After that, plowed through to Amarillo, TX, where I was to meet 3Si member Melissa (Melis) for breakfast the morning. Day 8: 12:40 hours, 770 miles. Met Melissa for breakfast, what a sweetheart! Wish I could have hung around longer... :-/ But alas, miles to go... All's well until I hit Oklahoma and the highways to go hell. Just past OK City was where the AC blew up, busted the clutch on the compressor! 105 degrees and no mercy in a big black truck at 60mph! Then 20 miles before getting out of Arkansas, got detoured 1.5 hours to go 20 minutes worth of distance! Dinky little 2-lane roads. Yeesh! Got to east side of Memphis and bed down. Day 9: 12:25 hours, 609 miles. Goal - get home. Still no AC. Had to stop in Nashville to pick up some other parts for a friend of 3SX. East TN, run into bad weather. As starting to get darker, my power inverter running the boombox starts making funny noises and shuts down - I thought it was overheating (still no air). Then as got darker, noticed voltage on truck really low and lights dim. That's when the driving by Maglight adventure began. Finally got home about 11:30... Total trip was 120 hours of driving over 9 days and 6550 miles. IN A BIG ASS TRUCK!! :-)
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