Illinois to Colorado

Post by **BlackBart** » 21 Jul 2022, 19:05

Flew to Illinois to help my son move across country to he and his GF's new town. AA decided to fly away without me and three other waiting passengers in Dallas, and there's only a once a day flight to his town, so they flew me to a town 85 miles away and he came to get me....at midnight.... We did say hello to A Lincoln while there.

Two days packing and cleaning, two days driving in oppressively hot and humid weather, a lot of corn, and finally back to the mountains.
We swapped a 5-speed transmission into his old car about 2 years ago, it's driven fine for 10 or 15k miles, we get to CO, and THEN it decides to stick in gear or not shift, or pop out of gear. Fussed with it, then next day it ran fine. Go figure. At least it didn't happen out in the middle of Nebraska. Now he has no garage or slab or serious tools.

Loading up. '86 BMW we rebuilt (EDIT - are still rebuilding), 205k miles

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I brought along a mascot to scout the way.

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Our truck was quite a good sign - headed to CO, and he's an astrophysics person!

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My traveling partner, Mr Mavic. Very quiet, but very attentive. He's French.

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Truckstops and heat. The cat was suffering in his hot car, so we transferred to the nice cool truck. she decided I was her buddy from that point. She mostly hid on the floor under a seat, but then sat in my lap and walked across the dash.

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Post by **matthew1** » 21 Jul 2022, 20:23

Nice! He lives here now?

Post by **abscate** » 22 Jul 2022, 02:30

Congrats on the move. Did you get my pm to connect and talkshop ?

The young folks are surprisingly hard to get to understand networking, thinking that connectivity has been solved by the internet. Connectivity is 1/3 of networking.

Post by **BlackBart** » 22 Jul 2022, 11:13

Matt - in FC. His girlfriend is starting with a govt / CSU wildlife research agency. He was about to head to NM or AZ to work at mountaintop telescopes, is being unselfish.

abscate - Yes I did, thank you, it's been a frenetic two weeks! I agree with you - when I got out of school, I was stubborn and independent and I was not going to depend of any help or distant unfamiliar contacts and do it on my own. My first job was in a drafting sweatshop under a control freak. Neat.

Post by **BlackBart** » 22 Jul 2022, 11:35

My loyal mascot the goat was eager to get back to the mountains, although with the heat and shaking, he sometime fell over and went to sleep. Totally understandable. The driver of that big luxury coach told us his whole life story at free fake breakfast. This La Quinta welcomes pets, and it was hilarious in the lobby with little creatures going every which way.

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After all that corn and flat, we entered CO to dry sagebrush high plains - such a contrast. There's a dramatic landscape 2-lane from Sterling west to the mountains with ranches, irrigated farms, no trees, and a handful of small mysterious pumping stations (fracking?). Lots of up and down. After the heat, we suddenly had a wall of clouds and black thunderstorms and the temp dropped.

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Then, on the horizon, the first row of mountains starts to appear. It really is a straight wall in CO. Imagine those people in wagons saying UH oh..... "Henry, didn't I tell you to take I-80 and go AROUND the mountains?! But NOOOO, you never listen to me, women don't know anything about wagon trains, noo!"

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Ahh, arrival. Trees! Pleasant temp, we sat outside at a taco truck with his uncle. So tasty. The bikes double the height of this car. His mileage goes down 4mpg on such a light car.

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A day of moving cars out of the garage and unpacking the truck, cleaning it and dropping off, then more tacos. Two days later he started work at 5AM. Then Dad flew home on the Friendly Skies. Until we climbed out of it, our pilot S-curved and banked between towering thunderheads. So fun.

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