Monday, April 19, 2010

The Roadtrip Home

I know I am a bit late on getting this final post to my roadtrip done but here goes.

Monday 5th April 2010

I left Colorado and kept driving east. My most memorable moment of the day was when I was driving painfully slow at about 20 to 25MPH in a really long construction area thru Hickville, Somewhere. I had a really good laugh when I ended up getting passed by a tumbleweed that was going faster then me.

I arrived in Wichita, KS around 3pm which gave me time to check into the hotel, cleanup, and get my camera gear ready before my friend David picked me up for dinner at his place.

It was great to finally meet his family in person. Having a sitdown dinner with all the fixins was a real treat and was thoroughly enjoyed by all.

After that it was off to robotics night. David has been heavily involved with a local group of home schooled kids that compete in robotics competitions.

Every year it is a different so called game play. A detailed manual is given out to those teams that wish to compete. It outlines what task the robot has to complete. All the raw materials are provided for free and you can only use what has been provided. The is absolutey no charge for any of the teams to enter the competition.

The kids did have to raise funds in order to purchase the materials to make a replica of the game play area, presentation supplies, etc.

David's son was on this years team and was involved in the CAD portion of the design phase. There were about 30 kids involved in the design, build, test, presentation, and competition phases of the robot. The youngest was 13 and the oldest was 18. All the kids had to be home schooled at least 51% of the time (this allowed some of the kids to take some early university/college courses).

These kids are the master of building robots as they have been doing it for years. It was pretty amazing to see the results of them being able to split pvc pipe down, flatten it, and then reshape it for their own needs let alone the programming in C language for the brain and remote controllers, etc.

I sat through their formal and booth presentations. It was pretty amazing to see the hard work these kids did. They treated the whole project by forming a company with various departments and everything complete with employee badges.

The team gets together four nights a week and all day saturdays. The furtherest people come from about 70 miles away. Thats the dedication that won themthe right to compete in the upcoming Nationals in Dallas, TX

Their team name is "Wichita Homeschool Warriors" and their website is http://www.whwrbest.com/

Tuesday 6th April 2010

Spent the day driving to Chicago, IL area where I had my last free hotel room at the Four Points hotel from one of my points card. It was even across the road from the Midway Coscto so I go another one off my list. I ended up going for a long walk followed by dinner at a really good Mexican place.

Wednesday 7th April 2010

Spent the day driving back my house. Picked up a couple of bottles at the duty free and sailed through customs like nothing. Had dinner in Barrie with my friend Mark at Jack Astors as I was not cooking anything that night.

Thursday 8th April 2010

The plan was to actually go into the office and work but I kind of didn't make it. I had this really bizzare dream where I dreamnt I was sleeping in my own bed. I woke up to see that I was not in my tent and went back to sleep only to realize that it was not a dream but reality.

I ended up working from home both thursday and friday playing catchup on emails and other stuff.

That concludes the end of my trip. I ended up driving 13013 KM or 8085 miles in 28 days.

I still need to figure out how much it cost me but I am pretty sure I did it for under 2000 bucks!

Monday, April 5, 2010

The Arches, Canyon Lands, and beyond

Tuesday 30th March, 2010

I slept in until 9am. Guess I needed it.

Spent the rest of the morning going through my receipts, online banking, and off-loading photos from my memory cards.

Went to a paddling film festival in SLC. It was kayaker oriented … I guess they have not seen the light yet!

Wednesday 31st March, 2010

I spent most of the day over at Antelope Island. The weather kind of sucked for photos but it is a really amazing place to visit. Hard to believe that on a relatively small island on the variety in the changes of landscape it had. There was quite the collection of Bison and other animals there.

I did manage to visit the Costco in Ogden (another one of my list) before heading back to Jeff’s Places. I did have to log into work for a while and finish off some month end reporting stuff otherwise I would have spent longer trying to fix it if someone else had tried to do it for me.

Thursday 1st April, 2010

Woke up to about three inches of sticky wet snow on my car. Great day for a road trip to the Moab. Luckily I still had my snow tires on as the road was kind of sketchy in spots on the number 6 highway thru the canyon. There was no sign of snow once on the other side. Tip …. There is a huge frigging Jeep Safari every Easter weekend in Moab. The place is a total zoo. I have never seen so many jeeps in once place. A lot of the things cost 40K or more with all the bells and whistles they hand on them. The cops were having a field day handing out tickets to the maniacs on the road.

I spent the next couple of days in The Arches National Park. Pretty amazing place to visit. I highly recommend it to everyone.

Saturday 3rd April, 2010

I spent the early morning in The Arches and the afternoon in Canyon Lands National Park. Amazing view from above. I then drove down to the Newspaper Rock State Park to take some photos of the petroglyphs before finding a place to camp at the BLM just a few miles from outside the Canyon Lands Needles park entrance. You can camp anywhere there for free but I decided to be sociable and pay 6 bucks to camp at a fee site and mingle with some of the others there.

It was the first time I actually set my tent up in daylight hours. Later that night a wind storm came in.

Sunday 4th April, 2010

I woke up to a whole bunch of red sand inside my tent that blew in through the mesh screen. Luckily I keep all my clothes and stuff in a Rubbermaid container inside the tent otherwise it would have been real interesting trying to get the dirt out of it all. I spoke to the BLM campsite host. He said the winds were about 60 MPH. He was surprised my tent was still in one piece and attached to the ground. He told me he has seen lots of tents get totally ripped to shreds in the wind storms. Go Sierra Designs!!!!

I headed over to the Needles section of Canyon Lands and hiked some of the shorter trails.

I then came to a decision that I was getting vacationed out and made a decision to start heading east. I emailed my friend in Wichita and asked if it was ok to come Monday and Tuesday night instead of Thursday and Friday night. He said it was fine but the only problem now was his son had MONO so staying there was not really an option. David had a plan B which was to let me use a two night hotel gift certificate they had won in a fundraiser. I now have a comfy stay in Wichita to look forward to.

I managed to make it all the way to Walsenburg, CO before deciding to stop for the night. I really think that all the deer in Colorado really need not to stand on the road to eat the grass in the dark. Is the amount of damage to a car by a deer different at 55 to 65 mph? It was too much drama for me so I ended up getting a room for the night instead of playing chicken with a deer.