Making the miles
13/06/14 04:04
In 2007, we loaded a kayak onto the roof of our pickup camper and drove 1805 miles from Rapid City, South Dakota to Hartford Connecticut in 2 1/2 days. We simply put in long days of driving with minimal breaks. The goal was to get our pickup and camper to the east coast for the meeting of the General Synod of the United Church of Christ. Susan was a delegate and I was representing the Association of United Church Educators at the meeting. Our thought was that the occasion offered us the opportunity to get our camper to the East Coast for a vacation. After the meeting, we visited Mystic Seaport in Connecticut for the Wooden Boat Show, then we drove to Maine, where we visited friends and made the pilgrimage to the Old Town Canoe outlet store. Now with two kayaks on the roof of the truck, we drove up to the border of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and paddled in the Bay of Fundy along the way. We came home at a more leisurely pace, driving across Quebec and Ontario on our way home.
The hard driving, however, is not our usual vacation pace. It makes sense from time to time when we really have to make the miles, but we much prefer shorter days and we like to travel at 65 mph or less with our camper. Most of the time we avoid the Interstate highways and explore the back roads.
The next few days will be intense with a bit of hard driving for me. I’m going to Hastings, NE tomorrow to teach a seminar tomorrow evening and Saturday, then I drive home on Saturday after the seminar to be in Church on Sunday morning. That’s just under 900 miles. Then Sunday we hope to get to my sister’s place on our way toward our son and daughter in law’s home in Olympia, WA after church. That makes a total of about 1300 miles in three days. By the time we get to Olympia, I’ll have put in over 2,000 miles in 4 1/2 days. To be fair, 900 miles of it will be in a little car with a light load. And the balance will all be done in daylight hours. We have our camper so we will be able to adjust stopping points if we get too tired or encounter harsh weather or find ourselves in need of an unanticipated repair.
No one makes us do this. We are doing it because we want to. I love to teach and the lure of our grandchildren is very strong. And I don’t mind a good road trip from time to time. It gives me time to clear my head and to allow my thoughts to wander.
Our mobility would have amazed our grandparents. Our grandparents were born in the days before automobiles were common. They lived to see the airline age when people routinely traveled thousands of miles in the same day. But they never took traveling for granted. Big distances amazed them.
When my mother was in high school, there was a terrible car accident on the gravel road between Great Fall and Fort Benton, Montana. The rumor in town was that the car had been traveling over 60 miles per hour at the time of the accident. That is a mile a minute! The speed was amazing to the folks at that time. I don’t know what they’d think about us driving 75 miles down the Interstate and considering the practice routine.
It leads me to believe that our grandchildren will find our modes of travel to be nearly as incomprehensible. They will probably question the need to drive cars. With driverless cars already operating in experimental projects and the California legislature considering legislation to make them legal, we can see the day when some form of automobile autopilot will drive our cars more safely than we can. The role of the driver will be to program th computer and monitor the systems. People may even get used to taking a nap as they roll down the highway.
I suspect that future generations will be surprised that we pull a camper around the country. You mean they took a whole house with them? What did they need that for?
NASA recently unveiled its futuristic warp drive starship. Like the science fiction television of our childhood, the UEV-47 is theoretically capable of traveling faster than the speed of light, making interplanetary travel a reality. Of courts it is all pretty theoretical and the space ship is little more than a lot of imagination and some really great drawings. Still, the future may hold much different modes of transportation that we imagine.
When settlers first came to the plains, travel at the rate of 25 miles per day was considered to be a pretty quick pace. Once the railroad got in place, travel was greatly sped up. The trains that crossed the plains averaged nearly 45 miles per hour. Still, even those folks would have found it pretty amazing that I could cram 900 miles of travel and 10 hours of lectures into two days. And I am not traveling by airplane, which would shorten the travel time considerably.
Just as our modes of travel are beyond the imaginations of previous generations, so the modes of travel of the future are beyond our imaginations. And when we do imagine, we often get things a bit wrong. When I was a kid, I believed that we would all have flying cars within my lifetime. That doesn’t seem likely now. The Terrafugia flying car is now available for investors and for people to reserve a manufacturing position. The expected cost is coming in around $300,000 per copy. The jet powered version is expected to require at least 12 years more development and research and who knows what the price of that plane will be. The bottom line is that I don’t expect to find one of those within my budget anytime soon.
Still, I’ve nothing to complain about. I have a comfortable way to put the miles behind me and get on with my life. Nebraska today, Montana Sunday, and the West Coast by Tuesday. Not bad. Not bad at all.
The hard driving, however, is not our usual vacation pace. It makes sense from time to time when we really have to make the miles, but we much prefer shorter days and we like to travel at 65 mph or less with our camper. Most of the time we avoid the Interstate highways and explore the back roads.
The next few days will be intense with a bit of hard driving for me. I’m going to Hastings, NE tomorrow to teach a seminar tomorrow evening and Saturday, then I drive home on Saturday after the seminar to be in Church on Sunday morning. That’s just under 900 miles. Then Sunday we hope to get to my sister’s place on our way toward our son and daughter in law’s home in Olympia, WA after church. That makes a total of about 1300 miles in three days. By the time we get to Olympia, I’ll have put in over 2,000 miles in 4 1/2 days. To be fair, 900 miles of it will be in a little car with a light load. And the balance will all be done in daylight hours. We have our camper so we will be able to adjust stopping points if we get too tired or encounter harsh weather or find ourselves in need of an unanticipated repair.
No one makes us do this. We are doing it because we want to. I love to teach and the lure of our grandchildren is very strong. And I don’t mind a good road trip from time to time. It gives me time to clear my head and to allow my thoughts to wander.
Our mobility would have amazed our grandparents. Our grandparents were born in the days before automobiles were common. They lived to see the airline age when people routinely traveled thousands of miles in the same day. But they never took traveling for granted. Big distances amazed them.
When my mother was in high school, there was a terrible car accident on the gravel road between Great Fall and Fort Benton, Montana. The rumor in town was that the car had been traveling over 60 miles per hour at the time of the accident. That is a mile a minute! The speed was amazing to the folks at that time. I don’t know what they’d think about us driving 75 miles down the Interstate and considering the practice routine.
It leads me to believe that our grandchildren will find our modes of travel to be nearly as incomprehensible. They will probably question the need to drive cars. With driverless cars already operating in experimental projects and the California legislature considering legislation to make them legal, we can see the day when some form of automobile autopilot will drive our cars more safely than we can. The role of the driver will be to program th computer and monitor the systems. People may even get used to taking a nap as they roll down the highway.
I suspect that future generations will be surprised that we pull a camper around the country. You mean they took a whole house with them? What did they need that for?
NASA recently unveiled its futuristic warp drive starship. Like the science fiction television of our childhood, the UEV-47 is theoretically capable of traveling faster than the speed of light, making interplanetary travel a reality. Of courts it is all pretty theoretical and the space ship is little more than a lot of imagination and some really great drawings. Still, the future may hold much different modes of transportation that we imagine.
When settlers first came to the plains, travel at the rate of 25 miles per day was considered to be a pretty quick pace. Once the railroad got in place, travel was greatly sped up. The trains that crossed the plains averaged nearly 45 miles per hour. Still, even those folks would have found it pretty amazing that I could cram 900 miles of travel and 10 hours of lectures into two days. And I am not traveling by airplane, which would shorten the travel time considerably.
Just as our modes of travel are beyond the imaginations of previous generations, so the modes of travel of the future are beyond our imaginations. And when we do imagine, we often get things a bit wrong. When I was a kid, I believed that we would all have flying cars within my lifetime. That doesn’t seem likely now. The Terrafugia flying car is now available for investors and for people to reserve a manufacturing position. The expected cost is coming in around $300,000 per copy. The jet powered version is expected to require at least 12 years more development and research and who knows what the price of that plane will be. The bottom line is that I don’t expect to find one of those within my budget anytime soon.
Still, I’ve nothing to complain about. I have a comfortable way to put the miles behind me and get on with my life. Nebraska today, Montana Sunday, and the West Coast by Tuesday. Not bad. Not bad at all.