Just the Beginning

I thought I would post all the excitement (real and imagined) from my recent trips across the country.  Not incredibly exciting, but much better than talking about the joys of coding.

This is the first installment of our first trip across the country.  This trip took place in a 26' Penske truck.

Packing sure is a lot of work.  Who would have thought that throwing a bunch of things in a bunch of boxes would take so much work?  The problem comes in when you decide you don’t want it thrown in, but carefully packed.  At that it might even be nice to know what is in the box (or at the very least what room it came from).

So, we were to leave for Florida on Friday morning.  When Friday morning came, we still weren’t packed.  We called in reinforcements.  They called in more reinforcements.  Eventually at 8 p.m. we were all packed up and ready to go, almost.  After getting some drinks and snacks, we were ready to go.

So we pulled out at around 9 p.m. and made it to Price that first night (originally desitnation: Albuquerque, NM).  Part of this lateness was also due to the fact that we were woken at 5 a.m. with a car horn going off.  Make that a truck horn… Our truck’s horn.  It eventually quit about 5:30.  They sent someone out to look at it, but he didn’t know what was wrong.  We didn’t want to drive a truck without a horn (what fun is a road trip if you can’t honk at all the crazy drivers that are trying to kill you).  So, the company sent out a new truck and movers to move the items from one truck to another.  This turned out to be a blessing, since they were able to fit all the things into a much smaller space.  As a result, we got to take much more stuff with us to our new apartment  in Florida.

Driving a big truck was a new experience for Bubba and I.  Bubba had driven farm tractors.  So had I, if you count going 5 mph in a straight line.  They told us that the truck could go up to 75 mph, but we shouldn’t go over that.  Maybe unloaded the truck could go that fast, but the fastest it would go for us was 70 mph.  This only occurred on fairly level ground when the pedal was floored.

The section of the drive from Price to Monticello is definitely not level.  At a few points, I think the truck was down to 35 mph on some of the hills.  Slow, but still faster than a horse-drawn carriage.  Thanks to Dad for pointing out that I-70 might be a bit steep for a big truck.