August 02, 2006
Road Trip : Part Four
(Logan, UT to Lincoln, NE) : 921.82 Miles
(Butte, MT to Logan, UT) : 495.99 Miles
And I Would Walk 1,000 Miles...
There's nothing quite like looking down at your mapquest directions for a particular portion of your drive across the country, and seeing the line item: "Merge onto I-80 East - 1,007 miles".
My apologies if today's post seems more like "my photos and musings" (as opposed to the promised "my thoughts and musings"), but driving by yourself through an untold number of miles of corn fields has a way of draining one's creativity. =)
(What Wyoming Actually Looked Like)
(What Nebraska Actually Looked Like)
(What I Remember Them Looking Like)
Pro's and Con's
And while passing between Lincoln and Omaha, I actually *saw* rain yesterday... In that I could see it off in the distance, watch it come closer to me, and finally find myself stuck in the middle of it. Something that hasn't happened to me... well... since freshman year of college at Cornell. This got me to thinking about what are the three major pro's and con's of driving yourself across the country.
Pro's:
- Having time to think
- Being able to see rain from across the horizon
- Getting to decide when (and where) you want to stop
Con's:
- Having time to think
- Getting rained upon in strange and random places
- Being forced to stop every 350 miles, since you decided to move "up" from a Toyota Corolla to an Audi A4
- Oh, that and having random people call you at random times because no one (including yourself) really knows what time zone you're in... =)
It's the End of the World as We Know it...
Outside of Omaha, there is an interesting museum known as the "Stategic Air Command" museum. For those of you who didn't watch the 1980's film "Wargames" - the Strategic Air Command (SAC) - was the branch of the military responsible for keeping airplanes with nuclear weapons on a 5 minute notice to launch, and potentially deploy weapons that would lead to the end of the earth... especially if Geese were flying over Greenland (once mistaken for Russian missles), or if Nancy Regan's astrologist said the USA was going to have a bad month (long back story on this comment).
Anyways, it is an interesting place to visit, even if only out of the morbid curiosity of seeing just exactly what were some of the very last objects that we humans would have used - shortly before we ended our own surivial as a species (granted... as well as the survivial of many other species as well). It has, on display, virtually every plane ever flown by the strategic command in the fifty or so years that the SAC was in exsistence...
"Cozy... But still enough room to destroy the world"
I couldn't resist but to crawl into the bomb bay of a B-52, the plane most synonymous with the SAC
"Caution... Hot Liquid..."
(Now, one would logically think that if McDonald's has to put a warning on their coffee cups that the contents of the cup might be dangerous, the military should have to put similiar warnings on their hydrogen bombs... like "Caution : Contents May End Civilization" ... I guess tort law hasn't gotten all the way through to the military just yet).
Ah. The vagaries of human existence... =)
Posted by Brice at August 2, 2006 10:04 AM