Month: October 2019
-
Coachmen & Ford Transit – Hits & Misses
Hits and misses – continued. Transit Chassis hits & misses The one-ton dually combined with the 3.7L motor worked OK. It’s not a speed demon – it’s a 270hp motor pushing a 9000lb steel box at 65 mph – and it lets you know that you are in a cargo van. But it was usable.…
-
Travel & Technology – Hits & Misses
I thought it would be useful to enumerate some of the things that worked well and didn’t work well during this last trip. Here’s the first ‘hit and miss’ list. Technology hits: Data plans: We have two ATT phones on a cheap 4GB shared data plan with about 3GB rollover and a Verizon 8800L MiFi…
-
Red Flag Days & Home
Because we wanted a few days to clean up and winterize the campervan before it got too cold in Minnesota, we decided to head for home. Our route took us northeast across Kansas & north through Missouri and Iowa. Unfortunately we picked some awfully windy days. We hit a three days of crosswinds (15-30 mph…
-
Shortgrass Prairie, No Man’s Land
Northeast New Mexico is a vast area of shortgrass prairie. Towns are small and far apart. It’s sparsely populated, with cattle ranching the only obvious activity. The roads seem endless, grassland to the horizon. Moving east, we drove through the mixed rangeland and cropland of the western edge of ‘No Man’s Land’, the western Oklahoma…
-
I’m glad I’m not this fish.
I caught the osprey flying off with his catch. A minute later a bald eagle started to chase the osprey, presumably to force it to drop the fish. An easy meal for the eagle, if it works. Later that day I caught the bald eagle chasing after an osprey again, with what appears to be…
-
Lava Flows and Dinosaur Tracks
One of the ways I prep for trips is to use My Places in Google maps to keep lists of things we might want to see someday. Somewhere along the line I marked El Malpais National Monument. I don’t remember why – I only know that sometime in the last few years I thought it…
Michael Janke 