ast night I drove over to the plant to drop my empty trailer and park for the night until my load was ready. At 9am the load still wasn't ready and I was told that the plant is as much as two days behind schedule, so I could be a here for a while. At least I'll get some detention pay out of it - money for nothing and the chicks for free.
I decided to drive back into town and get some breakfast. I found a booth in the back with access to an electrical plug and chowed-down on my usual steak and eggs. As luck would have it, Amarillo still allows indoor smoking. What kind of world are we living in when Amarillo actually feels civilized compared to the rest of the country?
While fishing the recycle bin photo out of my camera yesterday I found some photos I took about a month ago in New Mexico. I was on some back roads near the "four corners" area of what used to be U.S. 666 until the recent name change. I was driving through some real Close Encounters Of The Third Kind sort of shit when I saw this great rainbow and decided to stop the truck on the shoulder for some pictures.
here hasn't been much to report other than, if you live in the United States, there's about a 75% probability I've been within 100 miles of your house in the past two and a half weeks. No kidding, we've been up the entire eastern seaboard from Atlanta to Providence. We've been to Chicago, the Minneapolis/St. Paul, St. Louis, Omaha, Denver, Salt Lake, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. Let's not forget Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Knoxville, Nashville, Little Rock, Shreveport, Houston, Dallas/Ft. Worth, and El Paso. In all, 14,500 miles in 16 days.
My student Don is from Michigan as I mentioned previously. I discovered that his mom is/was part of a lesser-known Motown girl group, The Velvelettes. Don likes listening to modern jazz;. lots and lots and lots of modern jazz. Imagine the soundtrack to the community bulletin board channel on your local cable service playing constantly. I wake-up in a cold sweat in the middle night while he's driving, sure that I'm missing some important lecture on planting mums at the county extension office.
With all of this non-stop driving, it's nice to have a break today. We got to Kansas City early this morning and dropped our loaded trailer. We don't get loaded until 1pm tomorrow. Don drove all night, so after he gets some rest I think I'm going to take him over the the drop yard and let him practice backing as much as he wants. This evening, I think I'm going to have to find me some burnt ends for dinner. My usual Kansas City date isn't living here currently, so if any of the rest of ya are interested in getting some dinner - lemme know.
ince leaving Frankfort on Wednesday morning I've been running non-stop with a load to the Seattle area. While the amount of ground I can cover with a student is always mind-boggling to me, some times I still amaze myself with how much ground I can cover on my own.
I had a short day yesterday though. I got to the Seattle area around noon and didn't have to deliver until 08:00 today. It'll be another short day today as well, as I just have to drive back across Washington to deliver in Spokane in the morning. I have a fondness for creating and maintaing lists and I've been using LiveJournal as a place to warehouse them in case anyone else would be interested in seeing it. A couple of weeks ago, I began what is probably my most ambitious list to-date. I humbly present:
For the record, it currently contains 1,138 films and I estimate it's probably 80%-90% complete. The only criteria for inclusion was that it must be feature-length and non-porn. As a side note, this on-line alphabetizer is really fucking cool. Summer's almost over. Some people mark today as the last day of summer proper. I guess I better get to posting these last couple of gams photos I have. Here's troubleagain. For some reason, I find these sneaky office photos particularly enticing. There oughta be a whole website of office snapshots of ladies legs, if there isn't one already.
nother of my favorite entries of all time. I posted the following entry on February 25, 2004
"The San Rafael Swell: Claiming Soopageek Peak"
My trip across Utah this weekend took me over a lot of new road. Of particular interest was the stretch of I-70 between Green River and Salina, Utah known as the San Rafael Swell. Geologic processes pushed the mantle of th Earth up into the crust, breaking the brittle sandstone and creating a huge rock dome in the middle of the desert. Over the millenia, wind and water has whittled the rock away one grain of quartz at a time, leaving behind stark monoliths and deep canyons.
Approaching from the east, the swell is a dramatic site, with huge slabs of rock turned on its end pointing at the sky. This area, known as the San Rafael Reef has been nicknamed "The Silent City" because of its city-scape-like view against the horizon. Trucks coming out of the pass are dwarfed by the massive layers of vertical rock.
technically staked my claim to this little corner of LiveJournal over 6 years ago, in February of 2001. For the first two years, I didn't really "get" LiveJournal; I made no effort to make friends and posted sporadically. For all intents and purposes, I count the second week of July in 2003 as the real birthday of my journal. I began friending complete strangers and keeping a regular chronicle of my life. In that time I've made a lot of wonderful friends, reconnected/maintained friendships with distant people, and even met my lovely welfy because of this place.
As a happy birthday commemoration to my journal, and for a walk down memory lane, I thought it might be fun to pick my 5 favorite journal entries ever and post one per day through the business week. Some of you may not have been around when they were originally posted and since they're my favorites, I think these are worthy of being recycled.
This first one is long, and at the time I posted it, I didn't have the ability to post images in-line with my text, so I've decided to re-edit it the way I would have liked to have posted it originally. Unfortunately, I had a really cheap digital camera at the time, so the quality of the photos isn't all that great. It's about my first visit to Niagara Falls, originally posted August 8th, 2003. If you feel this a bit too tl;dr for your attention span, may I at least encourage you to check out the final three paragraphs. It's for those three paragraphs that this is one of my favorite things I've ever posted here. esterday when I got to Niagara Falls, NY, I found a tour stand off the highway. They let me park there for 8 bucks and called me a cab. My cabbie, J.C., was a middle aged dude who had been driving cabs for over twenty years there in Niagara. He was full of advice on the best things to do, at the most reasonable prices. One interesting tip he gave is, if you're gonna do one of the boat "mist" tours, that rides out into the spray coming off of the falls, do it from the U.S. side, the lines are a lot shorter.
There's a reason for this. Niagara Falls is actually made up of three falls: American Falls, Bridal Veil Falls, and the Horseshoe Falls. The Horseshoe Falls is the one which is the most famous and largest of the three. Virtually all of the pictures you see of "Niagara Falls" are of this one. It's crescent line, a cool term I learned that means the place where the water crests over the rock. wraps in a horseshoe shape nearly 3,000 feet around. Water spills over this at a rate of 675,000 gallons per second. The main part of the river creates the Horseshoe Falls, and is therefore shared equally by Canada and the U.S. with both countries having parks at either end of the crescent line. The American and Bridal Veil Falls both lie on the U.S. side of the Niagara Gorge, and are created by two islands which lie in the stream of the Niagara River, Luna Island and Goat Island. Bridal Veil Falls is no more than maybe 50 feet wide, while American Falls is rather large, over 1,000 feet along it's crescent line. However, since these both lie on the U.S. side, the best view of these two falls is from the Canadian side. Also, due to the nature of the mist that the Horseshoe Falls create, it's best view is also on the Canadian side.
So naturally this is where most people go to view the falls. This, over the years, has created a rather ironic contrast. On one side of the border sits a country known for its culture of consumerism the world over with a view of restaurants set back behind the trees and a few souveneir shops. Standing on the Canadian side, viewing across the gorge, the only thing you really see on the skyline are the tips of a few hotels above the treeline, the marquee of the Hard Rock Cafe, and a hot air balloon ride that is tethered to the ground which rises and falls occasionally. On the Canadian side of the gorge is a massive skyline filled with a Seattle-esque "space needle", skyscraper hotels by Sheraton and Marriot, and casinos. Also the other Hard Rock cafe is visible, and the gawdy, colorful facade of the MGM building. There's also some sort of skyride which goes up and down on its steel frame with blinking lights and one of those "gravity drop" rides operated by the World Wrestling Federation called "The Pile Driver".
his trip is turning into a cross-country journey. I left Lexington last Thursday afternoon. By tomorrow afternoon, I'll be in Bakersfield, CA. It looks something like this:
I've gotten a couple more submissions for the SHOW US YOUR GAMS challenge. Keep 'em coming. You can link me in a comment or email them to me at show.us.your.gams@soopageek.com. Today's legs belong to lacombe.
just got back on the road after being off for nearly a week, hanging out with welfy in Western PA. I had a great time and took hundreds of photos. It occurred to me that I haven't posted a photo mix since March. So without further ado, here's a random assortment for your amusement, in reverse chronological order. As always, feel free to ask about anything which strikes your fancy.
very time I head for Memphis I think of that song. It has such a great surprise ending. Chuck, you da man. Pssst spssppp sspppp ssssp sspppp shhhhhh sppp spsssspppp. I've decided that should I ever incorporate, the name of my trucking company will be We Transport Freight. Naturally, that'll be just so I can have the acronym stenciled on the cab of my truck door and write checks to my creditors from WTF, Inc. Dave is still with me, for another week or two. It's 5am and he just went to bed after driving all night and I'm taking over for the day. We're bringing a load from Mitchell, SD down to Rossville, TN just outside Memphis. It doesn't have to be there until 11am Monday, but we shall arrive sometime early this afternoon. I've already checked with dispatch and they've informed that there's no other loads I can get for a split/swap, so we have to sit on this until Monday. Maybe Dave and I could split the cost of a car rental and go check out Beale Street or Graceland or something. Yes, I'm back. My bank sent me my new debit/check card. Which means I have to think of all the places online where it's used for automatic billing and/or saved for purchasing things and change the card number. Pain in my ass. Marie is only six years old, information please Try to put me through to her in Memphis, Tennessee
esterday morning, while waiting for our next load in Memphis, I got a chance to meet m0nkeygrl and c_rob. Unfortunately, I only had about an hour before my next load would be ready, so we went to eat a nearby dive called CK's for a nice greasy breakfast. It was great meeting them, and I hope that the next time I'm there I have more time to spend with them.
After loading-up in Memphis, we made a beeline for Columbus, Ohio, where we arrived at 11pm... and have been here ever since. The last full week of August is designated as National Truck Driver Appreciation Week every year, so today marked the first day of it. Appreciate me! The Forward Air terminal we were stuck in had a huge steak barbecue for lunch for all the drivers that were around, so at least Steve and I were well fed. We shagged a trailer down the street from there and are currently waiting to be loaded and taking it to Chicago. I might have time to meet-up with welfy who's passing through here this evening on her way home to Kentucky. We'll see how that goes. peaking of Welf, my girl's a bit of a fan of the band Muse. She's given me some of their music to listen to in the past but it's never done anything for me. I listen to the alternative/indie stations a lot on XM, and one of their songs, "Knights of Cydonia" has been getting frequent airplay and I've been secretly digging it. This morning, angiewarhol posted the video to it and this video is made of awesome. It's got shaolin martial arts, cowboys, robots, unicorns, laser guns, absurd rock star posturing, a scantily clad blonde chick, sex, and fist fights. In one video, it's a homage to every genre film ever made. Check it out.
fter spending nearly an entire day doing virtually nothing in St. Louis, Steve and I picked up a load in Salem, Illinois bound for Laredo, Texas where it most likely is later headed for Mexico. Laredo is a bustling border town, that over the past decade or so has grown exponentially to accommodate the boom in shipping between the U.S. and our southern neighbor. Between the massive amount of shipping, the seediness of Nuevo Laredo on the other-side of the river (no doubt with a teeming red light district lined with $20 street hookers), and the pervasive presence of law enforcement of every stripe, it feels like Mos Eisley on Tatooine.
I feel like Han Solo, you're Chewie, she's Ben Kenobi, and we're in that fucked up bar!
Which reminds me, I need to go see Clerks II as well as Pirates in the very near future. don't remember dreams very often which is always a source of envy for me for those of you who do. Yesterday, I slept for a few hours while Steve was driving and awoke from a very vivid dream involving friends in Omaha. Now, with the exception of meeting navygreen and her family a couple of months ago, I don't know anyone in the Omaha area. In the dream though, these were very good friends who I cared a lot for, and I was visiting them for the umpteenth time and there was a feeling of history and back story.
And when I woke up, I felt this huge feeling of loss. I wanted to know these people and for them to be real. Then I began pondering about my subconscious. Maybe I have this rich, alternate-reality life in my subconscious that I only visit when sleeping but I'd have no way of knowing since I don't remember them. Maybe we all do; only remembering the really bizarre parts of the dream because they're so foreign to this reality. This of course led to thinking about the nature of reality and that old chestnut, what is real? That whole Matrix notion of reality being a product of the mind. Is it any less real because it's only a dream? And what about psychotics? Schizophrenics? Maybe they have an ability to relate with the personalities and people of dream reality while awake, a la John Nash in A Beautiful Mind. Maybe they're not crazy, just wired differently. ately, I've fallen out of love with LiveJournal. There's no particular reason that I can associate with this malaise so I'm attributing it to one of two things: either it's just a phase which I'll snap out of or it's just my typical time line for boredom with all things computer/internet, which is about 3-5 years. In the late 80's, it was local electronic BBS. In the early 90's, it was internet-based MUD games. In the late 90's, IRC and the early aughts it's been LiveJournal. I don't plan on going anywhere anytime soon and I hope it's only a phase. My current internet obsession has become Conquer Club. Dork that I am, I even bought a premium membership for the low, low price of $20 annually so that I can play unlimited simultaneous games. I've always loved playing Risk, and lately that love has been intense, playing both at Conquer Club as well as a Risk CD-ROM I've owned and enjoyed for many, many years. I don't know if anyone else on my f-list is a Risk player, but if you are I highly recommend checking the site out. If you do and wanna play, send me a message and we'll play together. 've still got gams to share. These belong to shaden.
Barring any late submissions, I have my two favorite photos left to go. Look out!
hen mxpwr and I got to Everett on Monday afternoon, we were informed by security that it would be at least 12 hours until our load was ready due to a machine failure in the plant. We were basically in his stomping grounds, so I told him that, since we were going to be stuck there until morning, if he wanted to have someone come pick him up and see some friends or whatever, that was cool with me. He began gathering things and after a while, he had all of it out. I looked at it and said, "You look like you're bailing out on me."
Unbeknownst to me, he had been reconsidering his decision to be an OTR truck driver for the past couple of days. There are some people who don't do well in this line of work for various reasons such as poor time management or they just never quite conquer the skills necessary to work efficiently enough to make a living at it. By and large, though, what sends most people packing is the lifestyle. For some, it's disingenuous claims from unethical recruiters. For some it's a denial of themselves; a blind eye turned to their domestic and social nature, by the lure of a decent income coupled with romantic notions about road life and travel. For some, despite going into it as wide-eyed as possible, the realities of the life are so far from the expectation that it's overwhelming. Regardless of the reason, this is why out of everyone who gets a CDL with the intention of being an OTR trucker, only 30% are still doing it one year later.
He conceded that he had come to the decision that maybe he was wrong about this being the life for him. So we said goodbye and he went home. I can't blame him, nor do I harbor any hard feelings. It is a very different way of living from the way most of the straight world lives: your home/social life is fragmented, there is no semblance of routine, and you eat/sleep/bathe when you can, not always when you want to.
The load was magically ready a couple of hours later. Funny how that happens. ithout a student and prospects for one at the terminal in Portland slim, I worked with dispatch to get me out from under that load, since it was going to southern California and I have plans to be home this weekend. I swapped it with another truck operated by a team that could get it to Fullerton by 11pm the following evening on schedule, another incentive for the load planners to get me out from under it. I met them at a Safeway DC in Auburn, WA where they were due to unload at 5:30am. We swapped the trailers around 2am and I got a little rest before getting into and while sitting in the dock door. The planners had me another load lined up at the drop yard in Portland that was going to Ft. Smith, Arkansas by Friday. So I spent what hours I had left on Tuesday traversing Oregon, making it just to the Idaho border where I took the photo of the sun setting behind the motel.
On Wednesday morning I got up and hauled.ass. I'm still not sure how I did this, but I made it to Cheyenne in 10 hours and 45 minutes. Folks, that's 828 miles by my odometer which is an average of 77 mph. Pretty impressive considering the truck is governed at 75mph. Google maps lists it as a more conservative 789 miles, or an average of 73mph. Either way, that's damn good time in a 75mph truck. Sure, I took advantage of gravity going down the mountains up to as much as 85mph, but I also had to pull the opposing side as slow as 40mph sometimes. I also stopped three times, got caught in a small traffic snarl in Ogden, crossed 3 scales, and was slowed down by numerous construction zones. I definitely set a high mark in miles for an 11 hour driving period, and I still could've driven another 15 minutes and could've gotten away with an additional 15 minutes on top of that, without anyone at the Werner logs department saying boo about it. If I can repeat that phenomena tomorrow, I'll be within 100 miles of Ft. Smith when I shutdown for the day on Thursday. Unfortunately, I'm looking at a daytime crossing of Denver, which is never fun. It'd be nice if I could acquire a student at our terminal there in Denver, but I'm not holding my breath; I'm a day late on the last orientation class completing there. or one of my three stops during my 800 mile juggernaut, I had a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches at Mollie's Cafe in Snowville, Utah.
It had a lunch counter with stools in addition to booths and tables. The waitress used an adding machine that sat on the counter beside a huge plastic tub of Red Vines, because the cash register had busted and no one has bothered to fix it. There was a game room in the back filled with 15 year old video machines and the place was crammed with Coca-Cola memorabilia ranging from ancient, unopened bottles to old reach-in coolers and completed jigsaw puzzles turned into wall tapestry. Also on the walls were clocks made from cross-sections of trees with pictures of Elvis and Jesus shellac'ed onto them. In a word, it was swank.
s I mentioned the other day, I finally sorted through the 1,000 some-odd photos from the Soopawelf Road Trip in May. I condensed it to 150 photos for the purpose of an online album which I put the finishing touches on last night. For the purposes of LiveJournal, I'd like to condense it even further into about 25 photos, which you can find below the cut. This is roughly a 50/50 blend of photos from my camera and photos from welfy's. I tried to make it not only a representation of the gallery album, but to make it representative of our month together. My hope is that the album and this journal entry convey that essence. If you enjoy it, please check out the entire album.
o prove a point about how busy I have been, and why I haven't felt much like fooling with LiveJournal this past week, I'll explain something about commercial driving hours. An over-the-road trucker can only work 70 hours in an eight day period. This is not only time spent driving, but time spent fueling, dropping trailers, load/unloading, etc. I began driving last Sunday evening.
Today is Sunday, or Day Eight.
When I began driving this morning I only had 5.5 hours available to me. So I'm sitting in Toledo waiting for midnight when I can work again. At midnight Central Time, I will regain 5.75 hours, the amount of time I worked last Sunday night prior to 12 o'clock. I'm en route to the Washington, DC area where I have to be by Tuesday morning. The plan is to drive to New Castle, PA in the morning and spend the day around welfy's house. She's going to get off the truck there and begin packing for the big move and will meet me in Kentucky next weekend. I'm going to then take a week off from work while getting settled into the new place. he past month has been a whirlwind of travel, sights, and meeting new people. We were afforded the opportunity to meet a lot of LiveJournal friends along the way. In every case, the meeting involved food. This is mostly for me, and includes some photos, so I'll cut it to spare you if you're not interested.
( Meeting LiveJournal friends ) inally, since I've been lax in keeping this up for the past week, here are TWO gams pictures to get you through the long holiday weekend. The first is the green-toed wineroom.
The other is a manly fetish photo of the one and only hockeyfag.
t was becoming apparent that I wasn't going to make it to North Wales, PA by 5am this morning. With the cross-country trek, my driving hours have been exhausted. Commercial drivers can only work 70 hours in an 8-day period. This is the part that was killing me. I had enough hours to make it to welfy's part of the world so I brought it this far and Werner decided to re-power the load with another truck.
Since we were planning on coming here this weekend for her brother's graduation and rather than have a daily fight with my 70-hour for the next two days, I decided to go ahead and take the next few days off, get a 34-hour reset completed, and hopefully get back on the road Sunday morning. For those of you who follow Welf's journal, you know that she's doing a much better job of documenting our road experience, as she has lots of time on her hands right now and I haven't. Hell, I haven't even gotten the photos off my camera from when we were in Los Angeles over a week ago. Maybe sometime today or tomorrow I'll write something of a bit more substance. The legs of the day come courtesy of sexion8. Hubba, hubba.
fter spending most of yesterday fighting the traffic in the Chicago area, I finally made it to Newport, Michigan around 9:30 this morning. With all the driving I've done in the past two weeks, my 70hr is pretty much shot. In fact, I only have 1.25 hours left and I'm only gaining about 4 hours tomorrow. Which is why dispatch is giving me until 5am Thursday morning to get to North Wales, Pennsylvania just outside Philadelphia.
So I had a pretty short day and will again tomorrow. For tonight, welfy and I are holed-up in the truck about halfway between Toledo and Detroit. Earlier this afternoon, we were able to meet-up with bustednut, aka Greg. I became acquainted with Greg a couple of years ago when he was dating an old IRC friend of mine. He's no longer dating her, but we've remained good friends and in the past year, he and Welf have become really close as well. He made a roadtrip to visit with her in New Castle a few weeks ago. He had been toying off and on with the idea of being an over-the-road trucker for a while and just in the past couple of weeks was hired by a small outfit based in Ontario, Canada. This week marked the occasion of his first solo trip and as chance would have it, he was entering the country via Detroit this morning, bound for Minneapolis. We got to hangout with him for a couple of hours at the truckstop here in Monroe.
In honor of this occasion, here is a photo that Greg sent me for the SHOW US YOUR GAMS challenge a couple of weeks ago. So today's legs will be his.
e've been living our lives faster than the speed of LiveJournal. When we last left the Soopageek and Welfy Road Show, we were in Omaha. Oh, that seems so long ago. After a gorgeous cross-country drive through the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and the San Rafael Swell of south central Utah, we found ourselves in Las Vegas with half a day to kill. We wore ourselves out walking the strip and being touristy. Yesterday morning, upon the completion of my delivery in Hemet, California we had another half day to kill, so I rented a car and we drove into Los Angeles for the evening and proceeded to be all touristy once again, and even got to meet one of Welf's livejournal.friends _likelife down in Redondo Beach. Ordinarily, I'd be filling your friends page with lots of photos and stories, but between the living and the working, there's just no time. Maybe some day, maybe not. here's always time for gams, though. This one, is a family affair. First there's the_fishery showing off her tattoo.
Then she decided to get a "couple photo" with her dude.
Then she got a cyoot chubby wubby baby wegs picture. Awwwww.
Please send pictures if you haven't yet. See how much fun we're having? I'm gonna try to read a journal or two... hundred.
spent the entire day shooting abandoned properties in New Orleans today. I am wore right the fuck out. I spent the evening going through my final edit and resizing them for my online gallery and uploaded them all. There's some really strange and beautiful stuff in there. Spending so much time with my camera, I began trying different approaches to shooting and I'm thrilled with the results. I definitely hit a new height technically and creatively. For the first time, I felt like I was doing things intentionally to achieve something I was pleased with rather than just getting lucky, which is the way I've always felt.
In total, I explored eight separate abandoned properties: a marina, a strip mall, a middle school, an indoor mall, a medical plaza, and three apartment complexes. This was in addition to random street shots of burned-out car frames and the shots I took downtown. In all, 551 photographs made the cut for one reason or another from a total of about 1,500. I'll be writing about them in more depth over the weeks to come. Tomorrow, I plan to write about the French Quarter.
I did something else today while I was in New Orleans. I made a virtual driving tour of the area I was exploring. It's nearly 30 minutes long and is not particularly entertaining in any way but it gives a more interactive view of the area than still pictures. At the end of the driving tour, I actually walk into a couple of abandoned apartment units while the video is still rolling. I highly recommend giving it a watch, but it is big. It's a 102 Mb .wmv file. Yeah, I know it's huge. But if you're interested, it's there. keep getting LEGS pictures and I love it so much. If you haven't sent me one yet, DO IT!!!! I'm going to start posting one every other day or so until I run out. Today's legs come to us courtesy of sexywitch.
he news on the truck just keeps getting worse and worse. At the moment, it appears that I will be stuck in here in Hattiesburg until at least Tuesday. Based on this new information, I decided to take advantage of the weekend car rental rates. For just under $100 I was able to get a car today and keep it until early Monday afternoon. Apparently, Enterprise was running low on vehicles to rent-out; I didn't reserve anything special, just a something in the mid-sized sedan range to putter about in while I'm stuck here.
I really wasn't expecting to get a PT Cruiser.
I rented one of these several years ago for my girlfriend at the time, Robin. She loves these cars and as a birthday present I rented one for the day. It's typically considered to be one of Enterprise's upper-tier rentals. To wit, it cost me over $70 for a single day's rental on the weekend when I did it before. What a deal. I'll be style'n all weekend. mong the myriad of reasons I decided to rent a car for the weekend is that I thought it might be interesting to drive down the New Orleans tomorrow. It's a mere 120 miles south of here and with camera in-hand, I thought it might be worthwhile to survey the damage from Hurricane Katrina for myself. I'm also interested to see what a large American city that was essentially wiped off the map looks like; a modern-day ghost-city if you will. With the fortuitous acquisition of the Cruiser, if I get really into traveling around the city and taking photos, I could find a safe place to park, throw down the back seats and spend the night down there and resume on Sunday morning.
It's also occurred to me that lossfound is just a smidge over 300 miles down the road from me. Not an easy drive, but not a hard one either. ne thing I failed to mention is that this past weekend, I retrieved my cat from Robin's house and put her back on the truck with me. I decided to take a lengthy break from training while I got things worked-out with this truck and THE BIG MOVE coming-up with welfy. Welf and I had decided to put-off her job seeking for a couple of weeks and for her to come ride with me for a while before getting tied-down with another job. Then when we get a place, she and Miss Fubu can settle into the homestead and I'll take-on another student at that time. Fubu has been a little squirrelly about the new and changing surroundings over the course of the week but is adapting rather nicely.
'm trying not to be TOO annoying with the multiple LJ entries while I have all this free time on my hands, but it is nice getting caught-up on somethings I wanted to write about. Over the weekend, you can expect the first installment of entries about LEGS. Woohoo!
n Part One of this series we looked at the entrance to the subway and the section that ran just beneath the public library, but we never got really into the subway tunnels proper. We still have a ways to go before we get there, but it's not far off. There's actually still a bit beneath the library that's worth examining.
There were evidence of stairways that went nowhere....
...and all sorts of steam pipes which ran beneath the streets here.
The most interesting thing here, however, was the remains of an old building.
n the early 20th century, the city of Rochester, NY built a transit system. It was comprised of a system of rails which operated at street level and below street level (in open-air, recessed causeways) utilizing single-unit passenger cars similar to trolleys. The transit system ceased offering passenger service in the 1950's with the rise of the American automobile industry and few remnants of this old transit system remain. The street rail were removed and the open causeways were filled.
In the original system was a two mile portion which ran below Broad Street through downtown. It provided service to the City Hall as well as the local newspaper building and was the only portion of the transit system that was a true subway. After the end of passenger service, the subterranean portion of the rail system was used as late as the 1970's for bringing freight into the downtown area, primarily for the newspaper building which at one time printed a morning and evening edition. This two-mile portion of subway still exists beneath the city, providing shelter for the homeless and secluded canvas for graffiti artists. This subway is reasonably well-documented on-line, both historically and photographically. This is mine, if you care to follow me in.
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soopageek's journal
ast night I drove over to the plant to drop my empty trailer and park for the night until my load was ready. At 9am the load still wasn't ready and I was told that the plant is as much as two days behind schedule, so I could be a here for a while. At least I'll get some detention pay out of it - money for nothing and the chicks for free. 
here hasn't been much to report other than, if you live in the United States, there's about a 75% probability I've been within 100 miles of your house in the past two and a half weeks. No kidding, we've been up the entire eastern seaboard from Atlanta to Providence. We've been to Chicago, the Minneapolis/St. Paul, St. Louis, Omaha, Denver, Salt Lake, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. Let's not forget Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Knoxville, Nashville, Little Rock, Shreveport, Houston, Dallas/Ft. Worth, and El Paso. In all, 14,500 miles in 16 days.
ince leaving Frankfort on Wednesday morning I've been running non-stop with a load to the Seattle area. While the amount of ground I can cover with a student is always mind-boggling to me, some times I still amaze myself with how much ground I can cover on my own.
nother of my favorite entries of all time. I posted the following entry on February 25, 2004
technically staked my claim to this little corner of LiveJournal over 6 years ago, in February of 2001. For the first two years, I didn't really "get" LiveJournal; I made no effort to make friends and posted sporadically. For all intents and purposes, I count the second week of July in 2003 as the real birthday of my journal. I began friending complete strangers and keeping a regular chronicle of my life. In that time I've made a lot of wonderful friends, reconnected/maintained friendships with distant people, and even met my lovely 
esterday when I got to Niagara Falls, NY, I found a tour stand off the highway. They let me park there for 8 bucks and called me a cab. My cabbie, J.C., was a middle aged dude who had been driving cabs for over twenty years there in Niagara. He was full of advice on the best things to do, at the most reasonable prices. One interesting tip he gave is, if you're gonna do one of the boat "mist" tours, that rides out into the spray coming off of the falls, do it from the U.S. side, the lines are a lot shorter.
The Horseshoe Falls is the one which is the most famous and largest of the three. Virtually all of the pictures you see of "Niagara Falls" are of this one. It's crescent line, a cool term I learned that means the place where the water crests over the rock. wraps in a horseshoe shape nearly 3,000 feet around. Water spills over this at a rate of 675,000 gallons per second. The main part of the river creates the Horseshoe Falls, and is therefore shared equally by Canada and the U.S. with both countries having parks at either end of the crescent line. The American and Bridal Veil Falls both lie on the U.S. side of the Niagara Gorge, and are created by two islands which lie in the stream of the Niagara River, Luna Island and Goat Island. Bridal Veil Falls is no more than maybe 50 feet wide, while American Falls is rather large, over 1,000 feet along it's crescent line. However, since these both lie on the U.S. side, the best view of these two falls is from the Canadian side. Also, due to the nature of the mist that the Horseshoe Falls create, it's best view is also on the Canadian side.
So naturally this is where most people go to view the falls. This, over the years, has created a rather ironic contrast. On one side of the border sits a country known for its culture of consumerism the world over with a view of restaurants set back behind the trees and a few souveneir shops. Standing on the Canadian side, viewing across the gorge, the only thing you really see on the skyline are the tips of a few hotels above the treeline, the marquee of the Hard Rock Cafe, and a hot air balloon ride that is tethered to the ground which rises and falls occasionally. On the Canadian side of the gorge is a massive skyline filled with a Seattle-esque "space needle", skyscraper hotels by Sheraton and Marriot, and casinos. Also the other Hard Rock cafe is visible, and the gawdy, colorful facade of the MGM building. There's also some sort of skyride which goes up and down on its steel frame with blinking lights and one of those "gravity drop" rides operated by the World Wrestling Federation called "The Pile Driver".
very time I head for Memphis I think of that song. It has such a great surprise ending. Chuck, you da man.
hen 
or one of my three stops during my 800 mile juggernaut, I had a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches at 
ne thing I failed to mention is that this past weekend, I retrieved my cat from Robin's house and put her back on the truck with me. I decided to take a lengthy break from training while I got things worked-out with this truck and THE BIG MOVE coming-up with 
