As the dot shows

Made it!
Got in here around 9pm last night. Since I was operating on only a few truckstop naps I needed to shower and sleep first. My original plans of taking what google maps offered and doubling the time estimate sounded good, but turns out to be a MINIMUM guess. I don't know where the time went but I have to figre it out later. This morning I unwrap the boat, clean, prep and go deliver it. That should be done by noon.

Paula has some trip notes that she will post shortly, but the internet here is a bit flaky and we will probably have to wait till the next stop.

We are thinking of heading more up through Vermont and maybe go up to Maine from here. Then back to Niagra falls and see how it goes from there. After that who knows... we have the option to cross into Canada and see what's over there. - ay! Or figure out how we go down the coast a bit before we head home.

Any comments?

Know the way?

So here it is. The next event.
I have yet another new line added in my job description. A promotion- sort of.

Short story->
It came about from a need to transport product to a new owner. It's exciting because it may possibly be a market area yet untapped. Being untapped, the problem is that we have no dealers in this area yet. This complicates the standard shipping procedures quite a bit. By chance I was walking by the circle of decision makers that were trying to figure it out and merely mentioned the words "Just hook the darn thing up to my truck and I'll run it out there". The more they thought about it, the more it made sense.

That's how I became the company representative for the New England and Eastern Seaboard. I leave Tuesday. That's going to be one hell of a commute. I think I need to buy a jet. There might be a lesson to be learned here somewhere.

So it's been a flurry of activities based around this.
I currently have boat attached, freshly detailed and it gets shrinkwrapped tomorrow morning.
The truck gets a wash today, and loaded with gear. Looking at the massive bags of stuff Paula has staged to go I'm glad I have a big truck.


Google seems to draw a pretty good path. I am humored by the turn by turn descriptions.

6.	Take the exit onto I-15 N toward BARSTOW		86.2 mi
7.	Slight right at I-40 E (signs for Needles/I-40) Passing through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas Entering Oklahoma		1,215 mi
8.	Slight right at I-35 N/US-62 E (signs for US-62/Tulsa/Wichita/I-35/I-44) Continue to follow I-35 N		10.0 mi

For those that wish to follow along I have a tracker installed and went active this morning. The link below will take you right there so you can check up on us.
Where today?
http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/find.cgi?call=kc6yng

Also try this one:
Progress Map
http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/track.cgi?call=kc6yng&start=9999&geo=usa.geo

Delivery is targeted for Saturday so the trip out will be quick and we will be touring our way back. Depending on time and wifi connections I will post traveling notes here and maybe FB.

Should be fun. Looking at national weather shows that it will not be boring. I keep telling Paula that if I see a bunch of SUV's with weather probes mounted on the top(stormchasers) I'm gonna follow where they are going. If they are going really fast hopefully it won't be in the other direction.

White for Christmas?

I can't believe you other locals haven't blogged onto this yet...
Ok- so maybe it's not a big deal to those of you up North, or to those of you in the hills down South... but for us here in the OC (at least to me) it's still kinda neat.

Last week we got into quite a cold snap. It also rained quite a bit too. Science agreed with nature this time around and placed a nice coat of snow on Mt. Baldy and (even more rare) covered Saddleback quite a bit too. The temps have been cold enough all week so the snow is still quite low today.

Last I looked more rain is expected here tomorrow (Monday) and as an added bonus another system possibly in for Christmas. That should make a neat holiday for those with reservations in a remote mountain cabin (might not be good to be locked up too long with the inlaws tho). This is great news for the mountain communities that are reliant on the tourist industry and I could only imagine how happy the ski resorts are about this.

I just appreciate the view and I hope others can slow down a bit to take it in too.

Merry Christmas everybody!

The Wayback Machine

The holidays make everyone appreciate family and friends. This last August most of us were fortunate to reconnect once again and re-live some of those stories and great moments growing up. I managed to dig out a bunch of photos for a quick visual trip back to those days.


I just got done posting them to a gallery so you can step through them again, and also share them with the ones that did not make the reunion. I figured it was safe now that we cant be prosecuted for most of the things we got into back then.

Gang Archives

Apologies for the quick and sloppy upload. For now they are in no particular order, not cropped neatly, not color adjusted, not particularly clean or void of scratches, and I also noted that apparently we had much more hair back then too.

It was neat going through them again. Those were fun times.
I am bummed that I a missing alot of pics. Hopefully I will find them and put them up with the these.

Enjoy, comment, share, continue the adventures.

T-Giving 08

Thanksgiving at our house is different than most others. It's not even at our house. This year it was out at a dusty little corner of the desert just a bit north of Joshua Tree and south of Johnson Valley. We had WAY too much food (as usual) deep fried a couple of turkeys, tossed some shoes, some watched football on the portable dish, but mostly enjoyed good friends and company.

The riding was a wide range between soft sand, rolling whoops on dirt trails, jagged granite shards that loved to bash skidplates (did not have any tire issues tho) and moon boulders that loved to get lodged under our bikes and lift all wheels off the ground so you have to get off and lift the bike over. It played minor havoc with the 3 wheelers and quads, and made the guys on bikes wish they were on something else.

It was good getting out again. The sweet air right after it rains is something you must breathe for yourself. We saw some neat stuff, played hard, got lost a few times, stayed up late around smoky fires, and nobody got hurt.

Can't complain about that at all.

Someting from nothing

I think most people get great sense of satisfaction when creating things. While it might be a minor event to some, when finished product gets pushed out the door it's a good day.

Monday we wrapped up boat 39, handed it off to our dealer and it is most likely in Texas by now(straight run is ~20 hours). I didn't get a chance to get a pic before it was shrink wrapped. I think it might even be delivered to the buyer for the holiday.

Its neat seeing something in all stages of creation and especially rewarding if you have a hand in much of the the process (tho not quite as grand as Steve's projects). My hands touch the whole boat, but are also directly responsible for components like casting the prop and other parts from big rubber molds, machining raw aluminum castings into final assemblies, installing many of these components(like driveline and steering), but also jump around into other duties when behind schedule- like electrical, plumbing, and hydraulics, and finally detailing the boat before delivery.

One downside to working around fiberglass is that many days I come home itchy with glass dust.

Dockside and tied

Hey, that was fun. As you may have assumed, I am home and safe. The remainder of the trip went almost exactly as we thought it would. NOT that we preferred our outcome, but in review we couldn't have done any better.

We managed to get out of Newport but it wasn't without quite a bit of stress. Right away we were questioning our decision as we were trouncing through some pretty big seas. The boat was not having a problem, but if we weren't assured that it would get better in a couple of hours, we would have turned back and waited it out. That would have meant at least another week sitting in Newport with only a slim chance the weather window was only equally as big. Our weather router said we had 24 hours to move 30 hours of distance. It was going to be messy on both ends.

That night it did get better, but only for a while as the next front was coming in. The wind was picking up quite a bit as we made the turn into Straits of Juan De Fuca the next afternoon and pointed us directly into the short windy chop. Every 5th wave sprayed over the whole boat. We really had to watch for logs when it got dark and when we finally made Pt Angeles it was plenty dark. There we stopped for the night and cooked up a couple of nice steaks on the bbq. This boat does feed us well.

The boat owner, Ken, met up with us the next morning and we started right off. Again we had a very sloppy day ahead of us, and at one point we were in sustained winds of 45 and it gusted up to 58! In between the downbursts we did enjoy the beautiful coastline of the Puget Sound. We reached the locks as it was getting dark and it started raining again. Our dock was just up on the other side a bit further but we were soaked by the time we got the lines and fenders out and finally tied up to the dock.

We had our bad weather days, and our good. There were a couple of days of fog where we could hardly tell the boat was moving. The entire crew was a gag to be around. We all worked well together. The boat performed very well with only a few hiccups that were easily managed. In case you couldn't figure it out...

I had a great time.