Day 9: Ithaca, NY to Canton, MA

Outline: Ithaca, NY -> Lee, MA -> Canton, MA

Today was the last serious driving leg of the trip. Technically, I haven't reached my summer place yet, but being within 30 miles is nothing now. New York was rainy (sometimes VERY rainy); the rain tapered off as I went east, until it became dry and cloudy around 75 mi outside Boston. The drive itself was mostly unremarkable - about 350 miles/6hr, which counts as a very short day.

Started the day around 11, when Shaddin gave me a walking tour of Ithaca. We began with breakfast at Collegetown Bagels:



The Tex-Mex bagel (plain bagel, eggs, cheese, and salsa) - approved. Hazelnut coffee also approved.

We then proceeded to walk around the Cornell campus. It's a nice place - lots of Gothic and Classical architecture, and quite a bit of natural beauty too. There are waterfalls located all over the place:



Unfortunately, most of the interesting buildings were closed (it is a weekend in summer, after all), and it was raining, so we cut the tour short and headed back. While preparing CDs for the last leg of the trip, I was able to observe a theory student in its natural habitat:


After an easy drive across New York and Massachusetts, I ended the day in Canton, a suburb of Boston, to stay with my cousin's family. It's a real shame, though - they live exactly 1 mile too far from Woodside. Just as I pulled into their driveway, the odometer ticked over to 25,001.


Restaurant Review #1: D'Angelo's Subs

Shaddin hasn't been able to shut up for months now about the lobster sub at D'Angelos, so I knew I had to get one now that I'm finally in the right corner of the country. I pulled off at Lee Plaza, the first service plaza on the Mass Pike, to get gas and a sub. $14.99 (!) + tax later, I had this in my hands (it looks more appetizing in person - the phone camera sucks):




It looked like a mix of crab and lobster, and it was indeed pretty good. Very good, even. The problem is, I'm not sure it was $16 good (especially since it looked like crab+lobster, not just lobster; maybe I'm wrong, though). At $10, this would be a definite recommendation, but at $15+tax, it's iffy. 3 stars - it's definitely good, but it's too expensive.

Restaurant Review #2: Ali's Roti Restaurant

I'm staying with my cousin and her husband (and their adorable kids) tonight, and we grabbed some takeout from this West Indian (as in Trinidad, not Pakistani-border) restaurant. For about $40, we got a selection of curry plates (goat, chicken, and shrimp) which came with sides of rice, vegetable, and potatoes; some roti (bread), fried plantains, and 2 pineapple sodas. The food was uniformly excellent - I especially liked the curry shrimp with a drop of their special hot sauce on it. I'd say that the three of us and the two young kids probably ate only just over 1/2 of all the food, so it's an excellent value as well. Great food, great price - five stars.

Tomorrow: Canton, MA -> Somerville, MA (time to move in!)

Day 8: Kentwood, MI to Ithaca, NY

Outline: Kentwood, MI -> Port Huron, MI -> Wales, NY -> Ithaca, NY

Today's post will be less photographic than usual because there wasn't any sightseeing along the way - just a straight 550mi dash from Michigan to New York, going through Canada in the process. Those stops mentioned there were pretty much just for gas, so I didn't have to pay currency conversion charges to get gas in Canada.

We started the day with an 830am breakfast. At 9, the family and I parted ways - they had planes to catch from Grand Rapids, leaving me to do the rest of the drive solo. Got everything packed and hit the road around 930. The drive from Kentwood to the US-Canada border at Port Huron didn't have any particularly interesting scenery to report - not even any particularly annoying construction. The only thing that caught my attention was an exit services sign advertising a Tim Horton's - inside the USA. The Canadian invasion has begun.

As expected, there was a bit of delay at the border crossing, but after about 15 minutes I was on my way. The drive through Ontario, too, was pretty boring. The first part of the drive (before you get to London) goes through a very rural bit of land, so it's frustrating that even in the middle of nowhere, the speed limit is only 100 km/h (62 mph). Indeed, the limits never got higher than that (although once the highway hit urban regions, traffic was generally moving around 120 (75mph), posted limits be damned). Two annoying things manifested themselves here - one with the car, and one with myself. The former: the RX-8's cruise control lets you adjust your set speed in increments of 1mph, which is very convenient; however, this doesn't change when you switch to a km/h display, where the increments are still 1mph, or 1.6 km/h. Nitpicky, I know. The latter problem is that if traffic suddenly speeds up or slows down, I'm used to a quick glance at the speedometer telling me the best gear to select, but I'm not calibrated in metric.

On the way out of Canada, the border crossing was similarly smooth. Traffic on the other side of the border, though, was not. I entered the US around 430pm, on a Friday, which meant people were likely just getting out of work. But traffic wasn't at a standstill; rather, I-190 was the scene of some of the most insane driving I've seen in this country. Welcome to the USA (and New York) indeed.

This leads me to my final complaint of the day: the RX-8's nav system. It's functional, but it's just not very good. The UI is rather shoddy: it's not always clear where a motion of the joystick will take the cursor, it locks you (or a passenger!) out when the car is moving > 3mph, it's fairly low-resolution. But a much more irritating problem is that its routing is really, really weird. Yesterday, from Portage to Manitowoc, it offered a "Quick" route that was longer in both distance and estimated time than the "Shortest Distance" route. We took the latter, and it routed us along a ton of random county roads; fine, I did say "shortest distance", which doesn't usually mean interstates. Today, though, I did ask for "Quick", and rather than giving me a path along I-90 (which probably would have been faster), it routed me along more two-lane highways running through towns, with speed limits no higher than 55 and more usually 45. Not that I was annoyed at that or anything, at the end of a ten hour day of driving.

550 miles solo wasn't so bad - just took a while. After a long day's drive, I finally reached Ithaca, where I met up with the redoubtable Shaddin:



After quickly unloading my stuff at his place, we drove down to the Ithaca Commons to get dinner with some fellow Cornell grad students:






(I apologize for the terrible quality - I forgot my camera, so I used my phone instead.)

Tonight's Dinner Review

On a recommendation, I got the yellow fried rice at Taste of Thai restaurant - a fried rice dish made with yellow curry. It was quite good, and was served with a really good sweet-and-hot sauce. I ended up paying about 11 or 12 dollars, which is somewhat high for just fried rice, but not completely insane for a sit-down dinner. 4 stars.

Tomorrow: Ithaca, NY -> Canton, MA

Day 7: Portage, WI to Kentwood, MI

Outline: Portage, WI -> Manitowoc, WI -> Ludington, MI -> Kentwood, MI

We reversed the trend today! While we started about 25 minutes later than planned, it was at 840am. The early start was because today, we had the first fixed-time checkpoint to make - our ferry across Lake Michigan requested that we be present to board at 1215p, and Google claimed a nearly 3hr drive time to Manitowoc. We left an extra hour or so for margin.

...and it's a good thing we did, because the route mapped out in the link above isn't even close to the actual route we took. I tried figuring it out post hoc, but I can't; US-151 was closed, and the detour took us through a mess of county roads through rural Wisconsin over to I-43. However, we actually made very good time on these roads (as you can imagine, there wasn't any traffic), and it was a nice view. Rural Wisconsin is very different from rural South Dakota - for one thing, there are actual trees. (For another, the roads are all very uncreatively named: "County Road C", "County Road R", "County Road TT"; come on, really?) This was probably compounded by the GPS taking weird routing decisions, but either way we got into the port with over an hour and a half to spare.

"Big ship, more fun!"

Good timing too, because about 20 minutes later, we saw our ferry, the SS Badger, pulling into port:



The Badger was launched in 1953 primarily to ferry rail cars over the lake - it has railroad tracks built into the car deck so that freight trains could move directly onto the ship without having to unload. Later it started taking leisure passengers and their cars too. When the railroads found it more economical to just run trains around the lakes, the service stopped, but in 1992 it was restarted as a car ferry service across the lake, both for vacationers and for freight trucks.

You'll notice the clouds of black smoke - that's because the Badger is coal-fired (the last operational coal-fired steamship in the US, they say). They're quite happy to remind you that coal is an abundant domestic fuel and doesn't require sending money abroad; there are huge piles of coal by the dock in Manitowoc, and it's loaded on by truck before each voyage:



After availing ourselves of free hot chocolate and coffee (and making sure our cars got on board!), we boarded the ship about an hour before departure:





This was definitely one of the most pleasant parts of our journey - for the first time, we were covering miles where we didn't have to watch out for traffic, #$@! road construction, or potholes - and got some fresh air to boot. The ship had a galley (where we got a pretty solid lunch), arcade, movie room, and plenty of deck space. I took a nice nap before departure (the ship's horn woke me up), and spent most of the ride wandering around the ship and admiring the view outside. There were plenty of interesting exhibits detailing the history of the Badger itself as well as ferry service over the lake.

One thing they don't tell you: even if it's pretty warm on either coast, the lake itself is cold. We hit a wall of fog in the middle of the lake, and even when that lifted, it was frigid outside. Once the sun returned, everyone seemed to enjoy taking a bit of time out on the decks:




Finally, we reached Ludington right on time (615 Eastern), they unloaded the cars, and we were on our way:






After another couple hours' drive, we arrived in Kentwood, MI for the night's stay. Dinner was at the Shang Hai Ichiban restaurant, which operated in two halves - the Shang Hai side was Chinese, the Ichiban a Japanese teppanyaki-style place. We went for the latter and were not disappointed. Great food, great service (even though we arrived just in time for the last seating - taking notes, Prime Rib Restaurant of Gillette?).


Couple hours driving, 5 hours napping and relaxing on a boat, and another couple hours? Most civilized traveling day we've had so far - I'll take it.

Milestones: Car hit 24,000 miles today.


PS - Today's post would be incomplete without a link to the following video.

Tomorrow: Kentwood, MI -> Ithaca, NY

Day 6: Oacoma, SD to Portage, WI

Outline: Oacoma, SD -> Mitchell, SD -> Albert Lea, MN -> La Crosse, WI -> Portage, WI

Today was mostly a driving day, with minimal sightseeing, so this will be sort of a short post - and good thing, because we have to get back on the road in 9 hours.

We started the day at our hotel on the banks of the Missouri River. As always, we started late, with breakfast at 11, followed by pictures on the river:



It occurs to me, though, that if you correct for time zone, we've been starting out at just about the same time (Pacific) each day.

The hotel staff recommended that we check out the first rest stop on I-90 just across the river, which we did. I'm used to thinking of rest stops as sort of sketchy places with a parking lot and a couple bathrooms. In contrast, this one was really nice, with a pleasant picnic area overlooking the river, and a museum exhibit inside about the Lewis and Clark expedition (which had encamped near the site of the rest stop):




From there, we went about 70 miles east to Mitchell to visit the "world's only Corn Palace". The Mitchell Corn Palace is indeed unique - it's a large, city-owned building right next to City Hall that is decorated on the outside with huge murals made from four colors of corn. Every summer, the murals are torn down and replaced with new designs; one wall had been taken down when we arrived, but most of the designs were still up. This was one of the few things we visited that was actually free - it's used as an event hall during the year, and that revenue pays for free visitor access the rest of the year. Pretty cool if you're passing through the area:





From here, it was a 240 mile leg straight out to Albert Lea, MN to get gas. Nothing particularly remarkable about this drive, except that it was the first time all trip that the thermometer actually broke past 80 degrees - I think it got as hot as 89F (and humid!). The speed limit drops 5mph crossing from South Dakota into Minnesota, and I've come to the conclusion that Interstate 90 is really just one long road construction project connected with occasional segments of four-lane divided highway. Not a fan.

From Albert Lea, we drove on another hour and a half to La Crosse to get dinner. The only amusing part of this drive was that for about 5 miles, I got faked out by a white Saturn with a moonroof and a large antenna. The roof was open, looking like a lightbar; that, combined with the huge antenna from the trunk made the car look like a police cruiser from a distance. Dinner was at the La Crosse Family Restaurant just off I-90, which was surprisingly good, and really cheap. No time for a capsule review now; maybe tomorrow. After dinner we went another hour and a half out to Portage for the night to save some drive time in the morning, since for the first time, we actually have to be somewhere at a particular time.

Milestone: As of today, more than 10% of all the miles on my car have been accumulated during this trip.

Tomorrow: Portage, WI -> Manitowoc, WI -> Ludington, MI (via ferry) -> Grand Rapids, MI

Day 5: Rapid City, SD to Oacoma, SD

Outline: Rapid City -> Hot Springs -> Wall -> Badlands National Park -> Oacoma

The progressive delay in starting times continues apace, as today I didn't even wake up until past 10 - guess the asthma took a lot out of me. Luckily, by morning I was breathing quite nicely once more. Since we had already taken care of Rushmore yesterday, we were well ahead of schedule anyway, so no problem. We decided that since we had a lot of additional time, we might as well aim for Mitchell, SD rather than Pierre - about 150 mi further out, and directly on I-90, rather than 30mi off on a spur.

Big Ol' Pile of Them Bones

After an excellent breakfast, we headed out around 1pm to another local location I hadn't heard of - The Mammoth Site, in Hot Springs, about 50 mi south of Rapid City. About 35 years ago, mammoth bones were unearthed here during the construction of a housing development. The land was promptly sold to a local nonprofit agency which has established the site as a major paleontological discovery. The site is a 26,000 year old sinkhole which has encased bones of many large mammals, including Columbian and woolly mammoths, camel-like animals, and giant bears.

During the tour, you'll wander around the inner perimeter of a building, looking in at rock and bones. At first, I thought we were looking at plaster recreations of the sinkhole site; it wasn't until I saw someone actually chiseling away with tools that I realized that the building had been put up all around the sinkhole - what we were looking at was the actual skeletons partially uncovered from the rock:





A bit out of the way, but definitely a cool side trip to have made. We finished up around 2:45 and took off for Badlands National Park.

Where the heck is Wall Drug?

As you drive east on I-90, starting at the SD state border and becoming more and more frequent are strange billboards: "Kids love it! Wall Drug", "Free ice water! Wall Drug", "5c coffee, Wall Drug", "Check out the Wall Drug Backyard", and so on. Naturally, when we finally got to the town of Wall, near the Badlands, we had to exit and visit Wall Drug. Started in 1931, the Wall Drug Store has grown into a massive conglomeration of shops and cafes full of random trinkets, decorated with photos and memorabilia from the Old West period of South Dakota's history. It's a sight (and a site) much better seen than described in words; definitely worth checking out. It's a tourist trap for sure, but it's a pretty fun tourist trap!





Flowers on the moon

Heading south from Wall on SD-240, we entered Badlands National Park. I had been warned in advance that the weather here was likely to be brutally hot, but it turned out to be partially cloudy, about 70 degrees, and absolutely beautiful. Badlands is a mix of prairie grasses and eroded rock formations producing a moonscape seemingly more appropriate to Arizona than the Midwest, and has some truly stunning vistas. SD-240 forms a loop that cuts through the northern part of the park. While there are a few other roads running through the park, they're unpaved. That, combined with our limited time, kept us on the loop road. Even so, the scenery was awesome (and the weather certainly didn't hurt):







Closing out the day

From the end of Badlands, we had about 200 miles to go to Mitchell. As the sun set and we crossed the Mountain-Central time zone boundary, we realized that it was getting pretty late, so we cut the trip 70 miles short and stopped for the night in Oacoma, SD, on the banks of the Missouri River. I expect some nice pictures in the morning, but for now it's too dark.

Tomorrow: Oacoma, SD to La Crosse, WI

Day 4: Gillette, WY to Rapid City, SD

Outline: Gillette, WY -> Devils Tower National Monument -> Rapid City, SD and environs

Since the day's driving was to be relatively short, we took a late morning and didn't get out of the hotel until well past 10 or 11am. As we left Gillette, a thunderstorm was rolling in from the west, so we took off at speed in an attempt to outrun the rain.

Out of nowhere...

As you head northeast from I-90 at Moorcroft, out of a flat plain suddenly appears a large, flat-topped tower. Devils Tower National Monument is set around the tower itself, described by my brother as "wow, that looks like Isengard". As we drove in, a light, intermittent rain started to fall, so we grabbed umbrellas for the short loop trail circling the tower. We promptly took a few pictures by the tower:




Good thing we did, because within ten minutes the rain started pouring down. With it came lots of lightning, very close by, which couldn't have been comforting for the few people actually climbing the Tower. The second half of the trail was more about getting out of the rain than seeing the sights, so there aren't any more interesting pictures.

After getting back to the cars and changing out of soaked shoes and jeans, we made our way towards Rapid City. Soon after leaving Devils Tower, the rain went away, only to come back - fiercely - near the South Dakota border. (Also right at the border I saw perhaps the only state trooper in all of Wyoming). This time, the rain wasn't accompanied by lightning. Instead, we got huge hail that sounded like it could break windows. We managed to escape without any damage and get into Rapid City, where we were staying at the house of a family friend.

Of bronchi, bears, and blocks of rock

Upon arriving, we were served a delicious lunch and lounged around a bit in the sun outside - it was the first time all trip that the weather finally hit 80 degrees! The family with which we were staying have an adorable three-legged cat (named Champion) - unfortunately, I'm allergic to cats. This cat was mostly OK, but I did get a bit sneezy.

After a couple hours, we headed out to a few local attractions. Our first destination was Bear Country USA, a drive-through wildlife park. We saw a variety of animals, naturally including the park's namesake bears:



After Bear Country, we drove to one of the area's minor attractions - Mount Rushmore. I probably don't need to say very much about this one, except that it really is as neat as it seems like it would be. Mt Rushmore promises giant heads carved out of a mountain, Mt Rushmore delivers.



Our final stop for the day was one that I'd never heard of which may be even more impressive than Rushmore. The Crazy Horse Memorial is a project in a similar vein to Mt Rushmore - it will be a carving of Lakota hero Crazy Horse into a mountain fairly close to Rushmore - but completely different in scale. Rushmore looks (and is) big, but the Crazy Horse carving is huge; all four faces of the Rushmore carving would fit in Crazy Horse's head. The CH carving is incomplete; the only fully-defined portion is Crazy Horse's head, and the final product is supposed to have him riding a horse, pointing off into the distance. At night, they have a neat light and laser show on the side of the memorial. I hadn't heard of this one before, but it was well worth the trip:




The reason this post wasn't written last night is because we got back, and my lungs, reacting to the cat, promptly decided that staying open wasn't really too important. It wasn't that bad of an asthma attack, but breathing seemed a better use of energy than blogging.

Tomorrow (planned): Rapid City, SD to Pierre, SD

Day 4: Postponed

No post tonight - no energy. Stay tuned.

Day 3: Vernal, UT to Gillette, WY

Outline: Vernal, UT -> Dinosaur National Monument -> Rawlins, WY -> Gillette, WY


Today was a long day of driving - about 560mi in total. As seems to be developing into a theme, we didn't stick to the previous plan for where to go, and we started out late again - almost an hour, today. We started out from Vernal and headed towards Dinosaur National Monument, about a 20-30 minute drive away.

'Cuz dinosaurs are cool, that's why

Dinosaur National Monument is the site of active digs for dinosaur fossils, which are scattered all over the place. Although the main quarry was closed to access (for renovation of the unstable visitor center), they had set up a temporary visitor center. From here, a ranger led us on a short hike up to a ledge which had been blasted by paleontologists just over a month ago. The ledge had a great view of the site, and featured a ton of partially-excavated dinosaur bones:


Small highways are awesome. Also, they suck.

After leaving Dinosaur, we backtracked into Vernal and headed north towards Wyoming. We took US-191 north through the Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area. I know that just yesterday I called US-189 one of the most scenic stretches of highway I've been on, but it's already been dethroned. This was a spectacular drive, and it certainly didn't hurt that a fair bit of it was on a winding mountain road with plenty of switchbacks and some wide corners. Today was probably the hardest workout that rotary engine has gotten since I've had the car. After 191, we hit I-80 for a brief stretch into Rawlins, WY, where both we and the cars refueled, before heading up US-287 towards Casper, our goal at the time. 287 was a similarly beautiful highway. The contrast between the side highways and I-80 is just night-and-day. Now I understand why people were advocating that I not drive across the country and calling it boring: it's because it really is, if you just stick to the interstates. Surprisingly enough, we actually made very good time on the side highways (better even than on the segment of 80 into Rawlins - which because of road construction was reduced to one lane in each direction, no passing, for 15 miles).

So that's the awesome part. What's the price you pay for the scenic journey, if not time? Simply put, it's mental energy. These roads are almost always one lane in each direction (a dedicated passing lane, when you get one, is like gold). In many places, although the lane stripings indicate that you can pass, the undulations of the road (both up and down and side to side) mean you'd have to be brave or suicidal to do so. Even when there is a (relatively) clear road, I still find passing using the oncoming lane to be a somewhat nerve-wracking experience. Thankfully, the RX-8 has a fair bit of power, but the altitude eats up almost 25% of what you would get at sea level, so there's a lot of 6->3->4 shifting going on to execute passes. That's not a big deal (you get used to the engine screaming at much higher revs than normal pretty fast), but the pressure to execute passes quickly starts to wear after a while. Combine that with the fact that even when you're not passing, gigantic trucks are whizzing by one lane over at a relative velocity over 130mph, and the interstate feels like a godsend after a couple hours. (Of course, after the first 20 minutes, the interstate then becomes boring...).

Adventures with the Casper Police

There weren't any, really. The extent of the adventure was that I actually saw a squad car belonging to the Casper City Police; it's the first cop car I've seen in days. (The one exception is a set of narcotics cops we saw by the side of I-80 in Utah. They were searching a sedan that had a LARGE box of Huggies in the back. Uh huh, I'm sure the family vacation was just a pretext for running coke.)

We got into Casper so early (around 5:30 - and with so much gas to spare) that we decided to continue north on I-25 up to Buffalo...and then out on I-90 east to Gillette. Which brings us to:

Tonight's Dinner Review: The Prime Rib Restaurant, Gillette, WY

Because the family will be off in various places next Sunday (myself in Boston, my brother at football camp in Oregon, etc), we decided to have a Father's Day dinner tonight instead. Looking for a good steak, we promptly made the last possible reservation -- 9pm -- for tonight at The Prime Rib Restaurant. When we got there, we stood around for a few minutes because there was no one at all manning the front. We were eventually (grudgingly?) led to a table, and drink orders were taken. Our waitress had a very harried attitude about her (though the restaurant seemed mostly empty). To avoid harping on the service too much, I'll just say this - we were definitely given the impression of being hurried through the meal and out the door. In fairness, we did arrive not too long before closing, but the restaurant made the reservation knowing that, and knowing our party size.

Enough of service; onto the food. Given the choice of soup or salad, the entire family picked salads. They were good; fairly generic with the exception of using Chex as croutons. Unorthodox, but actually not bad. (What was bad was that we were served salads and no silverware. It took a few minutes before we could get someone's attention to get that...but I promised to stop harping on the service).



At the table we had three steaks, one fish, and one prime rib. The fish, as one might expect at a steakhouse, was simply OK; the steaks were pretty solid (the sirloin pepper steak especially so). I decided to order a medium-size prime rib (they offer three sizes), figuring that the restaurant's namesake couldn't be bad. I was right - our waitress brought out a hulking slab of meat that was some of the best prime rib I've had. No one had room for dessert, which was a good thing, as they seemed to be in a rush to get us out. (Sorry.)



One last note: the decor of the place is pretty dark. The restaurant is also a martini bar; my impression of the place walking in is that it really ought to have been smokier, with people playing cards at the tables.


Verdict: 3 stars. The beef was really great, but the service, while quick, was not particularly friendly. I'm giving consideration for the fact that it was late, on a Sunday - under other circumstances I would knock it down even more.

Tomorrow: Gillette, WY to Devil's Tower to Rapid City, SD

Day 2: Route Map

Google Maps

Day 2: Elko, NV to Vernal, UT

Outline: Elko, NV -> Bonneville, UT -> Lake Point, UT -> Heber City, UT -> Vernal, UT
Started 30 minutes later than planned again. Went by McDonalds in Elko to get breakfast, and they screwed up the order, so I ended up having 1/4 of a hash brown and a cup of orange juice for breakfast. A light rain in Elko followed us out on I-80, changing in intensity slowly until we approached the mountains at the Nevada-Utah border - where it became torrential. The change in weather upon crossing the mountains was amazing - a black sky turned white (but still cloudy) and the rain vanished.

Bonneville: Leave only tire marks, take only trap speeds

The sky isn't the only thing to turn white when you cross the border - the ground does too. Brown dirt and scrub give way quite rapidly to white salt flats, and pretty soon you'll see signs for Bonneville. The Bonneville Salt Flats State Park is home to the Bonneville Salt Flats International Speedway, perhaps the most famous site for super-high-speed and speed-record racing in the USA (if not the world). Sadly, it had been raining on this side of the mountains too, and conditions were no good to head out onto the salt. We had to settle for walking around a bit on the salt, and taking pictures:


Salt Lake City: The City That Wasn't

The plan for the day was to head east from Elko along I-80, and meet with the rest of the family in Salt Lake City (where they had flown in). Except for the diversion to Bonneville, that was going swimmingly...until the intersection of I-80 and UT-36 near Tooele. At this point, the entire highway was shut down and directed off onto a side road. Earlier in the morning, there was a fatality accident on 80 in which a pickup truck hit a FedEx truck towing three trailers...carrying live ammunition. As put by KSL.com:

The collision caused both vehicles to catch fire. The Fed-Ex truck was transporting ammunition, which added an extra hazard to the scene.

UHP Sgt. Jeff Nigbur said, "Ammunition has been going off periodically due to a fire that started in the cab and moved back to the first trailer.

Instead of getting lunch in SLC as per the plan, we grabbed some food in Lake Point, and then took the long way around: UT-36 to UT-73 to I-15 -- around 75 miles for what should have been a 20 mile drive.

It turned out to be great. These two highways go through some very scenic terrain around Eagle Mountain. Near the intersection with 15, we had plenty of time to appreciate the scenery, as we ran into a traffic jam running about 5 miles. No accident this time - just a pair of stoplights and a bunch of road construction. Because of the long delay in getting to Salt Lake, we decided to meet up in Heber City, on the way to Vernal, instead.

US-189 and US-40: Heber City to Vernal

This pair of roads is one of the prettiest stretches of highway I've so far had the luck to drive (93 through Banff and Jasper is still #1 - but this is pretty scenic). They wind up and down through Wasatch Mountain State Park and the Uinta National Forest. In particular, the road runs over Starvation Reservoir, and the contrast between the brilliant blue water and the orange rock is amazing (sadly, the brightness of the water doesn't come out as well in the picture):



After another hour and a half or so, we arrived in Vernal, which turned out to be a much larger town than expected.

Tonight's dinner review: Don Pedro's Mexican Restaurant

This restaurant is located a bit outside the main strip of Vernal, and you'll probably think you're lost trying to get to it - there's a whole lot of nothing before you get to it. Once we got there, though, dinner was pretty good, and very well priced. For the second night in a row, there was more food than we could finish. It's not the best Mexican food I've had, but it'll certainly do, especially for a small town. The chips and salsa (and bean dip) were excellent, and I heard rave reviews of the fajitas. My enchiladas suizas were tasty and filling.

Verdict: 4 stars - food was tasty, service was prompt, and portions were generous and affordable. Do make sure you get directions before heading out, though.

Tomorrow: Vernal to Dinosaur to Cheyenne

Day 1: Woodside, CA to Elko, NV

Outline: Woodside -> Berkeley -> Reno -> Elko

Started the morning about 30 minutes later than planned - had to get all the excess junk out of the car, get gas, and set the timelapse camera up after getting gas. Headed to Berkeley for breakfast at Au Coquelet - tasty pancakes. Discovered, after breakfast, two interesting things about the timelapse so far:

• If you turn the car (and thus inverter) off without properly shutting down the camera, the camera corrupts some metadata files and reports all images on the card to be corrupt. This is a lie - they're still on the card. Solution: let the camera flush its buffer and shut it down before turning off the car. Gas stops just became a much larger hassle.
• In its initial orientation, we had a lovely time-lapse series of images...of the cloudy sky on the way to Berkeley. Solution: change where the camera's aimed, duh.

A fair amount of traffic leaving Berkeley cleared up past the 580 interchange, and everything was generally smooth heading out.

The RX-8 gets about 18-19mpg in my general driving, so the plan was to get gas around Auburn...but then Auburn came around, and we still had half a tank. New plan: Truckee. Truckee came, and there was still over a quarter tank. In the end, we made it all the way to the planned lunch stop at Reno without having to refill, for over 21mpg. Highway miles really are different.

Drive to Elko was uneventful. Traffic was moving fast - over 90mph was the norm for anyone that wasn't a big rig. Set a new record for longest travel on one tank in the 8: 288.8 mi.

Two gripes

1. It's June 12. Summer starts, technically, in under two weeks. Why, then, has there been a bank of clouds following us from the Bay Area, through the valley, over the mountains, through the desert, and into Elko? And why is it raining?
2. Road construction isn't fun to run into. It's less fun when it shuts down half the lanes in a given direction. It's even worse when it does so for 10 miles at a time...every 10 miles.

Review: Elko, NV

We haven't taken the time to really look around Elko that much, but we did go out and get dinner. Apparently, Elko has a disproportionately large Basque restaurant - such that two of the top rated restaurants on Yelp here are Basque. We had dinner at Biltoki Basque Restaurant. We both ordered the dinner special (chef's selection of three daily specials). The food was quite tasty (the soup and salad were surprisingly good)....and it just kept coming. We ended up with:

• 8 pieces of bread
• 3 bowls of soup
• 4 bowls of salad
• 4 (!) steaks
• 8 meatballs
• 1 large plate of fries
• 1 large plate of chicken
• 1 large plate of beef tongue
• 1 large plate of rice
• 1 medium plate of boiled (?) veggies
  

$18 a head is pretty typical for a nice sit-down dinner. What's not typical is when $18 a head buys you more food than a 16- and 24-year old pair of guys can eat in one sitting. We probably didn't even eat half - one of those meals easily would have sufficed for the two of us. Also, I learned that I'm not partial to the texture of braised (I think) beef tongue.

Verdict: 3.5 - 4 stars - food was tasty (except for bland vegetables), service was good. You definitely want to scale down your ordering, though.

Tomorrow: Elko to Salt Lake City to Vernal

Materials and Methods

What sort of automobile would one take on such a drive? Courtesy of Wikipedia:

A grand tourer (Italian: gran turismo) (GT) is a high-performance luxury automobile designed for long-distance driving. The most common format is a two-door coupé with either a two-seat or a 2+2 arrangement.

Thus, for this grand tour of the USA, I present...a Mazda RX-8 Grand Touring:



Technically four seats. In reality, the rear seats are more useful to store suitcases and electronics (of which more later), because the trunk is packed. I ditched a box of clothes at home because I was out of space. I don't actually know what was in it - it's entirely possible that I've left myself with nothing to wear in Boston save an Ali G costume.

Now about those electronics

Documentation for this trip comes at you courtesy of three digital cameras, one GPS receiver, one laptop, a window mount, a big external hard drive, and one poor Woot inverter that was probably never meant to drive so many devices. One of these is particularly notable:



The camera itself isn't very interesting. It's a 4-megapixel Canon Powershot S45, it cost me $40 on Ebay, and given its external appearance, it's something of a miracle that it actually takes pictures (but it does, beautifully!). The contraption attached to the top is far better:


Each of these is a popsicle stick with the cap of a 2mL Eppendorf tube epoxied onto it. Rubber-banding one of these onto the top of the camera lets me keep the shutter held down for hours at a time - and by setting the camera to continuous-drive mode, it'll keep taking pictures (every 3s or so) for hours. Combine this with the window mount, and you get a setup for a time-lapse movie of the drive across the country.

Descriptions of the rest of the stuff (and results!) to come later.

An introduction

This is a travel blog about my drive around the country in summer 2009. It's not related (sadly) to the One Lap of America race series...but it is actually one lap of the country:

Tentative route, Google Maps view

The first leg, Palo Alto to Boston, will take 8 days (June 12-June 20). The reverse will be in the fall. Suggestions for places to visit are welcome!