Ursus Pacificus

Greetings from Beaumont, TX!

1. Day Before Yesterday: Tucson, AZ to Van Horn, TX
2. Yesterday: Van Horn, TX to San Antonio, TX
3. Today: San Antonio, TX to Beaumont, TX by way of Houston, TX.

I visited Johnson Space Center today… well… to be technical, I visited “Space Center Houston”, which includes a tram tour of 3 desperately static places within Johnson Space Center. …in Houston.

Yes, it took me three days to get here from Tucson, AZ. Having traversed Texas I have a few observations I’d like to share:

• Most of Texas (as far as I can tell) is vacant.
• The radio landscape in Texas is (for me) mostly unbearable, consisting primarily of:
  1. Spanish language oom-pah music
  2. Christian broadcasting
  3. Country music
  4. Limbaugh-esque far-right ranting
• Most of non-vacant Texas seems to be populated with towns like Van Horn (barely a wide spot in the road), that make Winslow, AZ look like LA.
• There seems to be a general assumption that everyone is a Christian.
• “Don’t mess with Texas” is, apparently, not just a cute tourist-baIting slogan, like “I love New York”… it’s more of a … not-so-subtle “f*ck you” to the rest of the country.
• Most people I’ve encountered here think Rhode Island is part of New York. It’s not.
• What’s with the flies? About a hundred miles on either side of Van Horn, on I-10, there’s swarms of aggressively stupid flies. As I was bringing my stuff into the hotel room, I ended up letting 5 of these stupid things into my room. Once they were in, they wouldn’t leave, and wouldn’t leave me alone.

Considering it’s taken me 3 days to traverse Texas, I have to admit I’m pretty disappointed. I mean JSC was OK… but…the post-9/11 paranoia is getting old. Bag checks, metal detectors and so on… I mean… come on. The tram tour take you to 3 places: The retired Apollo-era Mission Control Center (which was pretty cool, but, since it’s retired, you’d think they could let us go down and actually check out the consoles and junk), the Space Vehicle Mock-up Facility (where nothing of note was happening, and there was lots of cool stuff in view that was unmentioned by the pre-recorded descriptions), and the Rocket Park (where we were only allowed 10 minutes to check out all the stuff… which was a gyp.)

Don’t get me wrong… I’m glad I went to JSC… but… traversing 800 miles of mostly-barren Texas countryside, listening to ranting preachers and raving fascists to get to it made it a little anti-climactic.

There’s good exhibits, and some good information that, it seems, is unavailable elsewhere (astronaut interviews, artifacts, trivial tidbis…)

I dunno… I suppose if I was already in Houston for some other reason, and I had a day to kill, and I’d never been there before, I’d take a day to check it out. If I had driven 800 miles to get to it, and had seen it before… looking for more insight… it might not be all I’d hoped.

Welp… it’s off to New Orleans… let’s see what’s happening there.

Well, I’m in Tucson, AZ, taking a little breather from driving and seeing, while I get the car serviced.

I’ve been a long way. My first stop was in Grove City, OH. That was uneventful. On the way, I got to drive along the Pennsylvania Turnpike. That’s a fun road. Just before I merged onto the PA TPK, I was passed by a car that had a bumper sticker that said “Paddle faster. I hear banjo music.” That was priceless.

In Indiana, I saw billboards for an RV dealership owned (or founded) by a guy named Tom Raper. Um… “raper”… Am I the only one who… uh… I mean… You’ve head of Dick Trickle. There’s an unfortunate fella. If you’ve got a last name like Raper or Trickle or… Dong… or Scheissekopf… Please, before you have kids, change it to something less… horrifying.

Indiana also has lots of Christian radio stations. Yay. …and farm reports. Whee. So do Oklahoma and Texas.

In Illinios, there’s a town called Effingham. You think I’m joking? I’m not. Look at my face. This is my serious face. Effingham, it turns out, has a giant cross of its own. I don’t know when that one went up… but I don’t remember seeing it when I blew through in 2002. Still… it’s horrifying.

Let’s see… After Effingham, there was St. Louis, MO… which… went by quickly. Then it was off to Tulsa, OK… Which … well… There’s not a whole lot I can say about Tulsa, other than … it’s… in Tulsa. On the way to Tulsa, I had an opportunity to stop at the “world’s largest McDonald’s” . How exciting is THAT?!

The plan was to proceed to Socorro, NM fro Tulsa, but I just ran out of steam in Albuquerque. I spent the night there, then continued on to Socorro in the morning. I suppose if I hadn’t dawdled to long at the giant ross in Groom, TX, I coulda made it to Socorro in one go… but… The cross was so scary, I couldn’t pull myself away. I don’t mean that in a good away. From Amarillo, TX to Albuquerque, there’s just about nothing. Also nice are the long stretches of I-40 in New Mexico, where they’re doing construction… so there’s no lines in the road, no lights, no reflectors… That’s just spiffy in the middle of the night. Oh, and the speedlimit drops from 75 to 55 for miles at a time… not that anyone’s actually doing any work there at ten PM… they’re not… Still the speed limit is 55. Thanks. and what is a “safety corridor”, anyway?!

Anyhow, the road to Socorro (I-25) was pretty straight and uneventful… except for the rest stop about 15 miles outside socorro, where I observed a big explosion to the south, in the mountains. Huh.

Socorro, NM is little more than a wide patch in the road. There are plenty of friendly people, but unless you’re there to drink, or using it as a waypoint to visit the VLA or Trinity, there ain’t much going on.

Saw the VLA last Friday. That was pretty cool. Saw Trinity the next day. That was neat. After that, Socorro was burned out for me. I moved on to Farmington, NM. Farmington is a more buzzing metropolis, compared to Socorro… but still not huge. I stayed in Farmington Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Monday was Chaco day. Chaco is amazing… see my blog post on visiting Chaco for some caveats.

Wednesday, I was off to lovely Winslow, AZ and Meteor Crater. Meteor crater is a hell of a thing. Winslow is almost a ghost town. Socorro, with its Taco Bell has more culture and sophistication going on than Winslow. Still, I managed to stand on a corner, which was one of my goals for the trip. No girl (my lord) in a flatbed Ford slowed down to take a look at me… which is probably for the best.

Thursday (yesterday), I left Winslow for Tucson, AZ. Spent the night and had the car serviced. I’ll be doing laundry… How’s that for a vacation?!

That’s right, I did go to the giant cross just outside of Groom, TX….

A simple evaluation of the cross itself…

At first I thought it was just because I’m a heretical heathen… but…

Awkward…..

All god’s children are welcome… unless..

Meteor Crater is a hell of a thing!

Well, yes, it is an enormous hole in the ground. If that’s all you take away from it, then I suppose you may not be impressed.

If, on the other hand, you look a little deeper, and realize that people tried to figure out what that giant hole in the ground was for the first hundred or so years since it was discovered by caucasoid humans.

Now, the understanding seems to be pretty well clinched: 50,000 years ago (or so), an iron-nickle meteorite about 150 feet across crashed into the rocky plain of what is now Arizona moving at 20-something-thousand mile per hour and bored a 500-foot-deep hole, 4,000 feet wide. That’s a hell of a thing.

It’s hard to appreciate the scale of this giant hole in the ground, but this Astronaut may help:

Here’s me reading from the pamphlet:

Oh, and here’s me arriving in Winslow, AZ

Hi! Chaco is amazing.

I have many, many pictures and a fair amount of video, but there’s no way I’m getting it all posted here, now. I’ll try to get some of it up now.

For now, let me tell you a couple things about Chaco:

1. The road to Chaco is really crappy. From US550, you get on to CR7900, which is paved, and not too bad… but then you get on CR7950, which accounts for 13 of the 21 miles from US550 to Chaco. CR7950 is a washboarded dirt road. Count on it taking an hour or more to cover those 13 miles.
2. Dress for Chaco, not Farmington. What does that mean? Chaco is at 6200 feet. It’s windy. You should probably have a windbreaker. A hat might not be a bad choice.
3. If you’re not camping, plan to see everything in one day. That means get there early. It also means plan on leaving the park 2 hours before sunset so you can get off the dirt road before it’s dark.
4. Bring some sort of food and beverages. There is nothing there, except, maybe some bottled water in the visitor center and a couple potable water spigots. If you want anything more than that, you’ll have to bring it yourself.
5. You will be walking a lot in high-altitude conditions. If that sort of thing’s not your bag, baby, skip it.

With all that in mind, Chaco is a really nifty place. It’s out of the way, and not all that easy to get to, but if you can get past that it’s amazing.

I’ll have more pics and video up soon. For now:

The awful road into Chaco

Crossing the wash (part 1)

Crossing the wash (part 2)

Pueblo Del Arroyo walking tour

Pan around the Great Kiva

Thoughts about the Great Kiva (MOV021 - coming shortly)

Hi.

Well, I got to see the first two sites… The VLA, outside of Socorro, NM (Friday) and the Trinity Site (Saturday). I have some video, but I’m having such trouble getting reliable Internet connectivity, that the uploads will be sparse for now.

Here’s me welcoming me to New Mexico

What I’ve seen so far:

Socorro
Well, Socorro is a quaint little town. About an hour South of Albuquerque, Socorro is not, in itself, much of a tourist attraction. Socorro’s most appealing draw is that it’s within 75 miles of the VLA and White Sands (home of the Trinity Site). Actually, the Stallion Gate of White Sands is only about 30 miles from Socorro. Trinity is another 16-or-so miles from the gate. Socorro is cute, and the people are friendly, from what I saw, but after a couple days, there’s really nothing more to see.

Oh, but there was a McCain Palin rally…

Very Large Array
Very Large doesn’t really do it justice. “Frickin’ Huge” might be more appropriate. The dishes are enormous, and there are 27 of them, split into 3 legs, each of those, miles long. These dishes are all capable of being steered individually, in groups, or all together, to track distant objects and take detailed time-exposures in radio light. The dishes themselves are huge, but they’re dwarfed by the miles of track used to position them. …and, as big as the dishes are, the actual antennas which collect the radio light are no bigger than a pack of cigarettes. It’s really a stupefying thing to see. It’s even more stupefying to consider the weakness of the signals they receive and the minuteness of the constant and complex steering adjustments needed to keep all those dishes, separated by miles, pointed at the same object, hundreds, or thousands, or millions, or even billions of lightyears away. The VLA is a hell of a thing.

Me talking about aiming the dishes… and being a little stupid.

Trinity
The Trinity Site is quite a place. Some 64 years ago, an army of scientists, technicians, and, well, army men worked feverishly to build a workable atomic weapon. Some thought the blast would burn the whole atmosphere off the Earth. They were so unsure of what they were doing that their idea of how much fissile material they would need were only accurate to a factor of 100. They were doing their calculations with slide rules, adding machines, and IBM sorting machines.

On July 16, 1945, they performed the one test they could of the implosion-trigger plutonium bomb design later dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.

Now, there is almost nothing to show for it. There is a fenced-off circular area, at the center, a lava-rock obelisk, with two plaques. For visitor days (two days a year), there are captioned photos attached to the back fence, and an unused bomb casing for the type of device tested at Trinity. There is also a shed preserving the floor of the blast area as it was before it was bulldozed. You can’t see in the shed.

There is no interpretation provided for the visitor. It is up to you to decide whether developing and deploying nuclear weapons was good or bad; necessary or unnecessary.

The desolation of the site and its surroundings lives up to the name Jornada del Muerto.

What’s Next?
I’m in Farmington, NM tonight, and will be visiting Chaco Canyon tomorrow. I’m trying to get some videos uploaded, but it’s very sketchy. When the hotels talk about “high speed Internet access” they’re not really talking about upload speeds. I’ll post again when I can.

Ok, this is A-Roll… needs some editing… which I can’t really do right now.. So I thought you might like to see this.

I saw the giant cross yesterday, too… Shot a big pile of video there.

More later.

Well, here it is, the end of Day 2, and I’ve made it to Tulsa, OK in one piece. The car is in one piece, too…. which is good.

Last night I made it to Columbus, OH (well, Grove City if you want to be nitpicky about it) and stayed at the “new” (read “most likely rehabbed”) Travelodge there. I was up and out by 6:30 AM and on the road. What thrills!

On the way to Tulsa… oh, the things I’ve seen… “Jesus” billboards all through Ohio, Indiana and Illinois… and I stopped in Effingham, Il (My dad and I stopped there in Nov of 2002, and had an absolute blast… see, Effingham… F—ingham… get it? We got gas and ate at the Denny’s… Oh, the fun we had… So I had to revisit it… and, then, as I was getting back on the highway… A GIANT FSCKING CROSS… just like the one in Groom, TX. I got a little bit of video of that… out of sheer incredulity. TWO giant crosses! What luck!

I couldn’t post from Columbus because, as much of a geek as I am, I forgot to pack an Ethernet cable. D’Oh! The Travelodge was supposed to have wireless… and it did, but only in the lobby. Crud!

…and it turns out that big-box office supply chains are harder to find in the Midwest than Jimmy Hoffa… so I still have no Ethernet cable.

Fortunately, the Days Inn at Tulsa West has in-room wireless… hence, this blog post.

I have a few short videos (mostly state line crossings, and the occasional roadside oddity) that I plan to post soon, but maybe not tonight, as I am wiped out, and need a shower. I’ll try to at least yank them out of the camera tonight.

Tomorrow, I’m off to Socorro, NM!… More later!

With a brand new tattoo, and a car full of crap, I’m just about on my way. Eeek.

Yes, that’s right. A new tattoo. I’ll put a picture up a little later… It’s not much to look at now

Thanks to everyone who’s supported and encouraged me on this crazy trip.

Next stop: Lovely Columbus, OH. … well.. Grove City. Close enough.

More later….

The base page for my month-long road trip has lots of new info on where I’m planning to go, what I’m planning to see and like that.

Maps! Dates! Standing on a corner in Winslow, AZ!

Also, I snagged a new JVC hard-disk camcorder for the trip. Pretty sweet! Video tape sucks!