I have no idea.

What was I thinking when I decided that A would be Automata and C would be Cars when it could have been A for Automobiles and C for Computers?

I do not recall. 

I had expected to do this NEXT weekend...

 I don't recall if it was while decorating eggs for Easter or at the Whitaker family's combined birthday/easter dinner (so I suppose I'll post pictures from both) that I got the news that my niece had decided on where she was going to go to college. It was a surprise to me, at least: this fall, she will be headed to the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Turns out that the Western University Exchange makes her tuition there $7,000 cheaper per term than going to an in-state school here!

Then Chris asked if I wanted to tag along for New Student Day. It was that coming Friday. 

Well. I had decided I was going to get out of town at least one weekend every month, and I didn't really have a plan for April aside from load up the Jeep, point it at whatever OnX Offroad thought was open and doable, and go for it. So I said, "Sure, but I'm going to drive separately so I can continue on elsewhere and explore that weekend."

I did have one other goal for the April trip: I wanted to see if I could figure out how to do it without needing the tent. To do that, I needed to downsize so that everything could fit in the Jeep while the bed was folded out flat that I could sleep on it. I had made some outside progress toward that since my last big road trip in a ZJ. I had downsized my cooler-- for the entire Alaska trip, I didn't need anywhere near as much cooler space as I had brought. I had moved the shovel and traction boards to the roof, joining the tire that was already up there. Additionally, I figured I'd have a lot more space if I could avoid bringing the cassette toilet. 

That gave me a filter to decide where to go after Laramie: I would go somewhere that had at least a vault toilet in the campground. Of course, I try to also be prepared if the plan doesn't go to plan. I wasn't just going to bring toilet paper in case the vault toilet was out. I picked up a small supply of 'wag bags' just in case the toilet was locked or something. 

Anyhow, armed with exactly one criterion as to where to go after I left Laramie, I hit the web to search national park, national forest, and BLM campgrounds. It turns out there are a lot of campgrounds in southern Wyoming that would have done just nicely... except that they're still closed for the season in early April. The closest I found without it being back toward home was Wind Cave National Park, a four and a half hour drive away in South Dakota. 

Well, then. Don't threaten me with a good time! That became the plan. Then I planned even harder-- I reserved campground space. And a ranger-led tour of the caves! I stopped planning there before I turned into my mother. 

I had an ulterior motive for visiting Laramie: Shannon works there! She's a lead for collections in the university library. 

Conveniently, the New Student Day schedule worked well for my plan: I could tag along in the morning for the generic new student orientation, then when they broke for lunch, I'd meet up with Shannon for lunch. She offered me a tour of the library, which I could do while the rest of the family got into the nuts and bolts part of New Student Day where Jessica would register for classes and her folks would learn about how to pay for it, all stuff I didn't need to care about as merely an uncle. 

So I loaded up the Jeep, and on Friday at some ridiculous hour of the morning (I had to set my alarm clock a half hour earlier than a usual weekday!), I pointed the nose of the ZJ north and headed toward... Buc-ees.  I'm pretty sure it is no longer possible to do a western road trip without visiting the Beaver at least once. (My memory is short. I did exactly that as recently as February.)

The gas was reasonably priced (for the time), and the bathrooms were large and spotless, but the star of the visit was the Brisket Breakfast Taco. It's burrito-sized, but they also serve a burrito and it's even larger. I considered that, but I've been trying to lose a few pounds so I hadn't had fried potatoes in weeks. I "settled" for the taco so I'd also have some calorie budget for some tater tots, er, I mean, beaver nuggets. 

I shouldn't have bothered with the nuggets. I know better. Fried potato becomes quite disappointing when it's been sitting under a heat lamp, no matter how long it's been. The brisket taco, though, was excellent, and I'd do that again. 

The rest of the family arrived while I was there, so I passed along my findings about the food and the route to Laramie-- the machine (my phone, in this case, the Waze app) thought that US-287 was going to be quicker than taking interstate highways through Cheyenne, so that was my plan. The rest of the gang did the same, though they were much more efficient about leaving the place than I wound up being, so they were well ahead of me. They were in the grand touring coupé, where I was in a short-geared stick-axled SUV, so I figured they'd get further ahead and I'd see them when I got there. 

They had us all park out by the sports complex, so I got a good look at the stadium, and finally caught up with the rest of the gang in the basketball arena where Jessica picked up her name tag and bag of information.  We learned a few things about campus and about the college she'll be in. We got to take a dorm tour-- so much nicer than they were back in our day! 

I think it will be a good set-up for her. I post this here so that when she transfers out of there in two years to go to some big party school or something I am on record for being an idiot. :) 

More seriously, though, I do honestly think it'll be a good school for her. Her end goal is marine biology, and Wyoming's kinda landlocked, off the cuff, you'd think it wouldn't work at all. Thing is, you can't do much in marine biology without a graduate degree, and once you have one of those, who cares where you got your undergrad? 

The things that work well: It's a small school in a small town, and she'll still be close to home-- it's less than three hours back to Englewood. It's a full-on research university, but it focuses on class sizes and instruction. It's got a huge endowment set aside for students to study abroad-- one source said the largest in the US-- and it's spread out among a very small campus full of kids-- so chances are very good that Jessica will be able to supplement the wildlife management and biology program there at Wyoming with some classes at schools that do marine biology well. And it's afforable... 

Anyhow, enough about what I think of where she's headed. I'm sure Stephen and I will head up there for a tailgate at least once or twice before it's all done, and I'll probably ramble more about it then, assuming I haven't forgotten this blog exists again.

After lunch in town with Shannon, (which I spoilered above), we met back up with the family and she gave them a tour of some of the more useful bits of the library. After the rest of the family had to split for Important Stuff, Shannon and I continued the tour, where I got to check out some of the work they're doing in 3D modeling--not just books, but in some cases, a model of the book can be just as important as what's in the book. As an example, a collection of tiny books (postage-stamp sized) was donated to the library, and they're 3D scanning them to digitize their physical format as well as what's in them. I also got to check out their special collections section, where I got to see some of those small-format books and talk with the special collections librarian on what they're looking to do going forward. 

I'd have enjoyed more, but I needed to get on the road and Shannon needed to get back to work, so I pointed my Jeep northeast into the Laramie mountains and got on my way. I hope to do some more exploring in that area, the mountains were beautiful, even if the place I stopped off for a picture was not being exceptionally photogenic. 

I pulled into my campsite just after sundown. I still had enough light that I could pitch my tent and attach it to the back of the Jeep, but part of the point of this exercise was to verify I didn't have to. And it was nice to not have to do that in the dark. I could get straight to making dinner, which was backpacker pizza stew. Turns out I didn't need to bring the table, they had one for me. It didn't take much space, though.

There were deer all over the place. My eyes had been all over the place driving in because it was approaching sunset and the deer were coming out. That was just the opening act; Wind Cave National Park is full of fauna. While I was in the area, I saw countless deer, prairie dogs, and bison. There were a number of pronghorn, a few voles, and some raptor birds I don't know enough to identify. And a cat.

That night's dinner was the best meal I had all weekend. It was not a food trip like Vegas was. As an example, as I was driving toward Hot Springs, SD the next morning for breakfast, I saw a sign for a joint that claimed to be "coffee, food, and boutique." I wrote off that place immediately. Guess which was the only place open for breakfast in Hot Springs? 

The coffee was OK, at least. Good enough that I didn't even try the spring water.

It's otherwise a nice looking little town sitting there on a small river (Fall River, IIRC), with a little waterfall and turn-of-the-previous-century buildings. Looks cute and historic, but a lousy place to look for breakfast.

After doing some exploring, it was finally time for my cave visit, which was really cool-- and really cool, because it's a cave, so it's always fifty-something degrees. This one is fifty-three. Wind Cave is one of the largest cave complexes in the world, large enough that its air pressure is independent of the prairie around it, which is how it "breathes" and gets its name. If the air pressure outside is low, wind comes out of the cave. The local Native Americans would hang small ribbons in front of openings of the cave to determine if it's breathing in or out when the air was slow. 

That was not a problem when I was there. Ranger Liz had a tough time getting the door open between the elevator shaft and the rest of the cave. There's a door because the air pressure difference can get so high that the elevators wouldn't work or would be unsafe if they were between the cave and the outside world.

Wind Cave also has formations that are almost unique to it-- box formations hanging from the ceiling where calcite got into planar cracks and then the limestone eroded out from around it. 

I did spend a lot of the hour-long tour hunched over. The ranger, who was "five foot zero", said there were two places in the cave even she had to duck. I didn't bother counting how many times I did. 

After the cave, the ranger asked where we were headed next. Someone said, "To the mammoth site," and the ranger said that's one of her favorite places in the area. This was sufficient recommendation for me, so I headed back out to Hot Springs again. 

The Mammoth Site is a spot where the same geology that created Wind Cave eroded out a sinkhole, and then the nearby hot springs filled the sinkhole. In the ice age, when mammoths roamed the earth, this meant that a cold plain had a nice, warm pond. A nice warm pond with steep sides that were tough to gain traction on. If a mammoth went in, often, the mammoth would not get back out, and it would drown there. Bones from at least 60 mammoths were found here, and they're still excavating, slowly.

After I learned a bit about mammoth fossils, I headed back out. It was mid-afternoon, and I figured a) I hadn't been off-pavement yet, and b) I didn't want to do dinner in Hot Springs, it had disappointed me enough for breakfast. OnX said there were some trails that'd be the equivalent of "bunny slopes" in the ski world up near Custer, SD and I'm not an experienced off-roader, so that sounded about right to me. Getting there would also take me off the main route of US-385, which was also nice.

Traffic was heavy...

 

...the signs didn't tell the whole story (look close near the bottom of the smaller post)...

...and yet, it was a great drive. When I got to the unpaved bits, it got even better. Soon, I was on a forest service track that went up Custer Mountain rather than staying down near the river valley. 

There were a few spots where the road had been rutted out to where I had to be careful of where I put the wheels so I wouldn't bottom out. There were a few spots where rocks on the trail tried to rattle the rig around, but it was nothing the shocks couldn't (mostly) deal with. A few spots looked like they could have been treacherous had there been significant rain recently, but the forecast didn't show that 'til tomorrow.  All in all, a nice little spot to explore that was just difficult to make me think I might be finally learning something.

I eventually got to Custer, and thought, well, it's about time for dinner, I should find something here instead of head back to camp and rehydrate a backpacker meal. I drove down the main drag, trying to figure out which was the place the locals go. Custer's very near Mount Rushmore, so it's something of as tourist town and it wasn't yet tourist season yet, but I figured the locals knew what was what... but everything seemed to be deserted. Not much in the way of cars in front of any restaurant-- but then I found everyone. They were at the Dairy Queen. Dairy Queen? I mean, sure, it's the midwest, but why's everyone here? What do they know that I do not?  As it turns out... nothing. And the fries were mediocre, too. I didn't need much after weeks without and then those terrible beaver nuggets, and DQ didn't even deliver on that. As Amy pointed out to me via text: The midwest is not known for its cuisine.

Before the cave tour, I had considered doing a short hike called "Prairie Vista", which was roughly a mile round-trip, but everything ached and I figured it'd be unwise to do that before I had a scheduled walking tour, so instead I took 200mg of ibuprofen and cooled my heels in the visitor center before the tour. After finally sitting down for a while in the Jeep and the ibuprofen caught up, I was feeling pretty good, so on my way back to the campsite, I stopped off by the visitor center and walked the Prairie Vista loop. It needed to be done. These signs weren't going to read themselves, and there's a fence in the way so the bison can't do it, either. I had to. 

When I got back to camp, it was still pretty warm. The radar map suggested we were going to get hit by some thunderstorms. This made for some good breeze, and I had screens over all the windows of the Jeep, so this was nice, but I wasn't sure how long I could get away with it as the skies grew more and more leaden. The fan did a pretty good job of circulating the air so when I did finally button everything up before the rain, it was pretty comfortable. I might want to get some vent visors like Amy has on her RAV4 to allow more circulation without getting rain in, but it was still pretty good as is. 

I didn't have any plans the next morning  other than not stopping at either of the two nearby towns for breakfast. A truck stop about an hour down US-385 solved that problem nicely. 

I had no plans on the way back. I was willing to stop for whatever I saw on the way home-- I'd rolled out of bed around 0600 and was only about 6.5 hours from home, so I had time-- but I didn't know what to expect. Near Scottsbluff, I found a spot where the railroad had a chicane because when they were laying the track, they came across the grave of a woman who died on the Mormon Trail.

Not far after that, though, I found Carhenge. It's an art installation recreating Stonehenge (sort of), and some artists have been invited in to paint the cars. Some other cars are stuck in the ground and have time capsules installed in them. 

I found it interesting that many of the cars still had engines in them as they stuck out of the ground. I would have figured it'd be easier to move the durn things if they didn't have a thousand pounds of engine and transmission in the nose, but perhaps when you've got earth moving equipment, maybe you don't have engine hoists.

Many of the cars made excellent bird's nests, aside from the fact humans keep walking by so they have to fly off. Except when they don't, like these two pigeons. 

Eventually, I made it home. Wind Cave is no longer a national park that I've never been to. 

Vegas Without the Poker

 I dropped Amy off at the airport on the 20th, she was headed cross-country for a big long six-month Appalachian Trail thru-hike, so I was going to be emulating a bachelor for a while. 

What do bachelors do? A guys' weekend in Vegas!

Austin turns fifty this year, and his brother-in-law was going to be at a conference in Las Vegas anyhow, so a gang of us went out to join 'em. 

The novelty of this trip started closer to home for me-- I'd wound up with a fairly inexpensive fare on JSX, bolstered further by a rebate from my credit card, so I would be getting in a day late and miss the hike out to Red Rocks and some supercar track laps, but I'd get to try semi-chartered jet service. 

There were many things I liked about this. One, the cabin layout means I can arrange to have nobody sitting next to my wide shoulders. On the way out, the layout was one person on either side of the aisle, with a table next to the person on the starboard side of the aisle. 

Another was where the terminals are. On the Denver side, JSX flies out of APA/Centennial Airport, which is a lot closer to home than DEN/Denver International Airport. A Lyft rideshare each way was a lot cheaper than parking out at DEN, too. On the Las Vegas end, they fly into McCarran just like everyone else, but their terminal is on the other side of the airport from where the commercial service terminal is-- so instead of an expensive taxi ride to the Strip, you're already there, down by Mandalay Bay. 

The terminals also worked (mostly) a lot better than mainline commercial service. Since the TSA wasn't being paid at the time, many agents were quite under the weather and calling in sick. Must have been poor nutrition from not being able to eat well or something. Security lines at DEN were well over an hour long. Since the JSX terminals handle their own security and do it a single plane at the time, they said don't bother showing up more than 30 minutes early. Since I can't help being early, I was there 45 minutes early and they weren't yet ready to check my bag. They weren't kidding. 

Some other side benefits-- the way they're set up, they work well for traveling with pets, so I shared the terminal with a whole lot of dogs. Flying out of the small airport on the home end also meant I got to see interesting airplanes as we taxied out to the runway.

I said mostly, and there were two drawbacks. One is that even with the nice cabin layout, the Embraer 145 is still a Really Small Airplane. The layout meant that I was able to sit in the seat without turning sideways half the flight, but my brother simply wouldn't have fit because the ceiling would have been too low for him. The other was that even though Vegas is their hub, their terminal is still quite small. If things get backed up or delayed, the terminal gets crowded in a hurry. 

After a short flight, I landed in Las Vegas around noon. I was willing to catch a rideshare out to Speed Vegas, where Mark and Austin had been driving a Porsche GT3 and a McLaren 570 around their track and all of us were going to race go-karts, but the gang was ready for lunch so they picked me up on the way to a barbecue joint that had been recommended to Austin at a poker table.

The barbecue was pretty good, but nothing to write home about, so I won't. 

We swung by the Pinball Museum for a bit before our go-kart track time. They added some new historical exhibits to what had mostly just been an arcade full of ancient machines, most of which you can play. I appreciated them, though most folks preferred the living history.

I didn't get any decent pictures at the go-kart track because I was go-karting rather than taking pictures, but they did email us results. The results were surprising. At 300 lbs, I outweighed the next heaviest of us by around a hundred pounds. Karts don't have to be powerful because they don't weigh anything-- but I sure do. Rental go-karts are usually on the order of 300 lbs, I'm another 300, so the total weight is around 600 lbs. Everyone else is closer to 500. High school physics class tells us that F=ma. 

Racing is all about 'a', or acceleration-- and not just getting up to speed. From a physics perspective, cornering is also acceleration, as we're changing the direction of our travel vector. If we assume F is constant because the go-karts are identical (this isn't completely true, because my extra weight does get me a little more traction-- but not enough to offset how much my weight wants me to keep going straight while I'm cornering, so it's still a reasonable approximation), then to maximize 'a', you want to minimize 'm'.  My extra 20% of mass means everyone else has 20% more acceleration than I do. 

Here's the results of each heat:

SpeedVegas ranked by fastest lap, and every time Mark had us all covered both for fastest lap and average lap-- though only just barely in the second heat. He was less than a thousandth of a second faster than I was in heat 2-- those lap times are identical to the precision shown here. (It's also possible that that's as precise as the measurements are and the tiebreaker was average lap time?)

Somehow I was second in every heat-- it seems I remember a little something about car control from a lot of years as a mediocre autocrosser. 

Curtis had waved off the third heat because thrashing karts after barbecue wasn't necessarily our best idea ever (and the other kinda heat probably didn't help), and after heat 3 I wasn't champing at the bit to buy more track time, either-- my stomach was starting to get queasy as well. We packed up and headed on back to the ranch-- and what a ranch it was. Turns out that when you're splitting it five ways during the off-season, you can get a penthouse suite for about what the local Hampton Inn would have cost.

The suite had a hot tub at the edge of the balcony. It had a multi-arcade machine, a pool table, and just in case you didn't get enough downstairs, a blackjack table without a complete deck of cards. (None of us are playing with a full deck anyhow, so...) It also had an Elvis pinball machine, but one of the flippers was broken. As it turns out, one of the showers couldn't maintain a temperature-- turns out one of the factors getting the price down was some deferred maintenance. Still, not a bad setup.

Angelo took us to dinner at Raku, which is a Japanese small-plates joint that focuses on chicken. I didn't know that chicken was the focus at the time, so I went off-script by ordering "Raku's Tofu" as one of mine, figuring if they name the dish after the joint there must be a reason. It was excellent. I also had the Saboro Don, which was just billed as "Seasoned ground chicken" in the Rice Dishes section, which strangely put me in mind of laab gai when I read it, so I had to try it. As expected, nothing at all like laab gai, but really excellent. 

We wrapped up the night by heading to a Cirque du Soleil show, this one the Michael Jackson themed one. It felt less Cirque du Soleil than the other few that I've seen-- in part because I could sort of make heads or tails of some of the plot. My favorite bit was tumblers who were choreographed well with "Smooth Criminal", and was a bit disappointed that they hadn't managed to shoehorn "Thriller" in there, even if zombies would have been out of place. 

I was up earlier than everyone else and tried to make coffee, but was not sufficiently awake to realize that the coffee that housekeeping had left us was for a single-serve machine but I was trying to use it in a 12-cup rig. That went... poorly. After some of the rest of the gang got up, a few of us headed to the Starbucks next door, which worked a lot better.  Mark then made migas for breakfast in the suite's kitchen, which were excellent. 

With the rest of the gang, I finally made it to the Atomic Testing Museum on this trip (I've been meaning to for ages, but I keep being a degenerate playing 4-8 out at The Orleans.) They were running a special exhibit on Fallout, and had shoehorned some Fallout artifacts among their usual exhibits-- a Vault-Tec bobblehead up on a rocky area, a Grognak comic in with other books and pamphlets pertaining to the 1950s and 1960s' views of the Atomic Age. I enjoyed both parts of the museum, both the reality and the shoehorned-in fantasy. 

Lunch was at one of my favorite joints, a tiki-themed dive bar called Red Dwarf. Our timing was good, as they had live music-- good live music-- delivered by a surf band called Thee Swank Bastards. The reason I like the place is they've got the best Detroit-style pizza you'll find outside of the Motor City. There weren't very many people in the place when we got there, so the lead guitarist, freed from his amp by modern wireless technology, came over and played there at our table for a bit. That was fun to watch-- I really like electric guitars from a science and engineering perspective, even though I have zero musical talent.  It seemed to be particularly fun for Curtis, who actually is a guitarist. 

We took Mark over to where he was staying for the conference, and the rest of us went shopping because there was a particular required chocolate that can be found in few places, Vegas being one of them. I didn't get a picture, so I can't remember the details (aside from we were in the malls attached to the Venetian). It was good chocolate, but as you've probably noticed from the rest of this paragraph, I am not a chocolate guy. :)

Austin split off to get in some blackjack, and the rest of us headed back to the ranch to chill. The sun had gotten to the other side of the building again, so the hot tub was pleasant and not blinding. Angelo and I also found that we're both not particularly good at pool, but I might be worse. Dinner was at the korean joint next door, and it was right up my alley. As much as I enjoyed Raku, I was glad we'd hit this place. It'll need to go into the rotation for future Vegas trips. 

The next morning was mostly chill, as Curtis, Angelo, and I had to head to the airport at various times-- Austin was hanging around to play a WSOP Seniors poker tournament, where you had to be 50 to sign up and it started on his birthday, so he was the youngest person in the field, but the rest of us were headed back to reality. 

My plane was delayed by a few hours, and I think I may have wound up on different hardware, because this plane was two seats on one side, one on the other. Flying solo, I still wound up on the one-person side, which is good, because regional jet seats aren't any bigger than long-haul planes. When I eventually got back to APA, I requested a Lyft, which got directed to the wrong place. I'm not entirely certain how I managed to sort that out since the driver spoke no English and my Spanish is horrendous, but we narrowly avoided me getting declared a no-show. 

2026 trip-a-month: February

A couple of pieces of administrivia before I get into the aforementioned travelogue: 

• One of my original conceits was that each of the five categories my thoughts tended to go into would get a lead-in icon. Half of those images are on a web server that's down, and the system administrator who runs it (me) is a lazy sack. I may or may not pick that back up. I may or may not restart the swerver. This is the first time in three years I've missed it. 
• I probably won't write much about the January trip. It was a trip to visit family. I still felt reasonably familiar with Atlanta. I wound up renting a BMW 5-series for cheap. We got more snow there than Colorado did. Everything went pretty much to plan. That's pretty much it. So, skipping January, then. 

February!

As February began, I figured I'd push the February trip outside of February and double up some other month-- a lot of stuff was going on. Austin came into town, so one weekend we did the local science museum (the bears to the left were part of a special exhibit they had going on) and Casa Bonita. Another weekend I went to Genghis Con, the local game convention. The last weekend, I figured I couldn't avoid going out for my birthday. That left only one free weekend, and the laundry must be done. 

 Shows what I know. Somewhere in the middle of the month I grumbled about the birthday coming up, and Amy said she figured I was headed out of town, so there were no family plans. Hot dog! The weather looked fine for a road trip west. I started making my checklists. I started finding my tent and mattress and all the other things I use to pretend my Grand Cherokee is an RV. 

Then I realized: like I noted in the previous post, we currently have no pets. That was sort of intentional-- the plan, yes, the timing, well, we'd hoped it'd be a few more years. No animals makes travel easier for both of us, and it's not like Amy's gotta take time off of work or anything. And sure enough, it did turn out that she was interested in seeing Dinosaur National Monument and whatever else we found around there. 

So I stopped hunting for the tent, and figured we'd find hotels in the area. Should be fun! 

Then Amy screwed up her knee and told me to head out alone. I'd stopped preparing for Plan A, because Plan B. So, on to Plan C: Like Plan A, but with hotels rather than sleeping in the Jeep. I wasn't sure what I'd wind up inadvertently leaving behind if I tried to sort and load camping gear at the last minute. 

I still got a fairly late start, and between that and traffic, it was lunchtime when I got to Indian Springs. which was convenient: That's where Beau Jo's is. I demolished a whole small pie (which means only one pound of toppings). 

I got off the highway not long after that and took US-40 through ski country. It was beautiful and snowy-- though there was no snow actively falling, so the roads and skies were clear. This was a nice change, because down on the Front Range we kept forgetting to have winter this year. 

I enjoyed small-roads Colorado, and it was just as nice to get into Utah. By the time I got to the hotel in Vernal, though, I still wasn't done digesting a pound of meat pie. I picked up an apple and a large snack pack of pepperoni, cheese and crackers when I filled up at the local Maverik, picked at it a bit, but didn't really bother to have a real dinner. 

One problem with working an early schedule is that it means I have a hard time sleeping in, and the first night in a hotel bed means I probably wasn't sleeping anyhow. I gave up and got up around 0600 (which is kinda sleeping in by my standards!) and went down for hotel breakfast, figuring I'd take my time because there was no way the National Monument would open before 0900, which was right about when I pulled up to the front gate.

I was right about not opening before 0900. They didn't open 'til 1000. 

You could drive on in, though, if you got a day pass from recreation.gov. I had just enough signal there that the app mostly worked... until I tried to order a day pass. 

Eventually, I gave up. There was another facility about an hour back down the highway just over on the Colorado side of the border. I'd go check that out first, then come back here when they're open. The Canyon Visitor Center. Pictured to the right. 

Yeah. 

And that sign didn't even have hours. Just "CLOSED". 

So, back to the main visitor center! I stopped off at the scenic overlook on the way through this time. It's not a bad drive. Wasn't exactly my plan, though.

The National Monument is worth checking out if you're in the area. There's a spot where they've partially excavated a lot of fossils. They didn't all die there, a flooded river carried the bones down to a spot where they clogged up so there were a huge bunch of bones all in the same place from all over the watershed. The bad news is that means that there's not any decent way to be sure which bones went to which animal, and it's unlikely that there's a complete set of any given dinosaur, anyhow. Still, very cool. 

After the visitor center and the Wall O' Dinosaur, I continued into the park. History fast-forwarded a few million years after that. Sure, the geology was old as time, but the stuff on it was signficantly more recent-- but still prehistoric. A major theme of the next few days was going to be petroglyphs. Since no river picked them all up and deposited them in one place like it did with the dinosaur bones, they were scattered, but probably just as many of them in this area, if not more. 

Amy had sent a birthday present along with me (a widget to make carbonated water and a Flyin' Miata keychain) so I opened that while I sat along a river to eat lunch (which was the rest of that pack of pepperoni, cheese and crackers). 

The road turned to dirt, though nothing I really needed the Jeep for, and ended at an ancient cabin where a woman lived alone from 1913 to 1964. Progress marched on, but it was apparently not for her. 

After visiting the cabin, I got back on the road and followed more of the Dinosaur Diamond. The stretch out of Vernal, UT wasn't particularly scenic, not what one expects out of a Scenic Byway, but once US 191 splits off toward Price, it starts to get excellent. I had driven part of this stretch a few years ago in the old BMW, and had to turn back not far past Price as we climbed up into snowy mountains, the BMW was on summer tires and it got sketchy. That wasn't a problem this trip, as the weather was dry and it takes a lot more to be sketchy in the Jeep.

I ended the day at a stop that was another echo of road trips past. In 2015, after I'd picked up the blue Miata from Flyin' Miata for its elective surgery (turbocharger), I continued on west, eventually getting to California before turning east. That night I stopped at a campground in Green River, UT, and the next morning, I found joined called La Pasadita, which was a food trailer that was parked at a disused service station. It had a few old cafeteria booths set up under the awning, and sold a spectacular breakfast burrito. 

Eleven years later on this trip, I also overnighted in Green River (this time at the Holiday Inn Express rather than the KOA) and I saw they were still open so I stopped off for dinner. I am pleased to report that their chile relleno burrito is just as good. They've also cleaned up the interior of the gas station and have set up some more seating inside. 

The hazard to this sort of road trip is you wind up finding stuff that looks interesting to explore, but it's inconvenient to do it then, but there's not necessarily anywhere to stop for the night nearby, either. The next morning, I backtracked about an hour to get to a turnoff to go explore a forty-mile-long canyon named Nine Mile Canyon. (It was nine miles from something in a survey.) 

I did find some remnants of some more recent civilization, similar to the cabin in the National Monument, but the best bits were once again prehistoric-- more petroglyphs! Sometimes they were a little difficult to find-- I walked 3/4 mile or so back into a box canyon and didn't find the "owl panel" I was looking for, but on the way back out I found a bit of signpost sticking up that I couldn't see from the other direction, which pointed me a few dozen yards off to the right. One of my favorites is one that more modern folks have called "Coyote Placing the Stars". I'd have never found those, either, without viewing tubes to point out where to look. Of course, if Coyote is placing stars, he's going to be way up at the top of the hill. I should have guessed. 

The road turned to dirt a good ways before the end, but still, nothing I needed a 4x4 for. Eventually I got to the other end of the canyon, which was up near where I'd been the previous day, not far from Vernal. 

Dinosaur Diamond makes something of a diamond shape. The northern apex is in Vernal, and I'd driven the northwest and southwest edges of the diamond to get down to Green River-- so this worked reasonably well. I wasn't far from taking the northeast and southeast edges down though Colorado back to I-70.  I haven't done the whole thing-- there's a loop that heads south from I-70 down to Moab, which I have not done yet. I expect to visit Arches and Moab in the not too distant future, so that won't be any trouble.

As I crossed into Colorado, I entered Rio Blanco county. Soon, I crossed the White River. I thought, "I suppose some things didn't get translated."

I was wrong. Later I found a plaque about the Escalante expedition, who discovered the White River, but they called it the San Clemente. So who knows how the county got named...

The Colorado sections of the Dinosaur Diamond are just as good as the stretch of of US 191 in Utah. Lots of good scenery, a few good spots to pull off for (once again!) petroglyphs and other ancient native sites. This time I intentionally got off the road on a BLM trail through what claimed to be Cow Canyon. Now, I get I'm a city boy, but I'm pretty sure them ain't cows. 

When the track started getting a bit muddy, I figured I'd turn around and head back. I don't need to tear up a muddy trail and have to dig myself out. I had a shovel and traction boards with me, but I'd just as soon not use them. 

From there, it was mostly just getting home. I took I-70 home, which one might think wouldn't be as good as US-40 on the way out, but I-70's an exception. I-70 through Glenwood Canyon is excellent. Heck, from Cove Fort all the way to Morrison, it's good stuff. Five stars, would drive again. 

Twelve years, huh?

I started ignoring  this thing after migrating over to 'social media'. The media quit being social, and after a while, the inertia there became less "keep using it" and more "keep forgetting it exists, too." I wanted a place to keep track of what had been going on in my life, though. 

Right. I have a blog. Had a blog? Nope. Turns out I can still log in. I have a blog. How early-2000s. 

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So... what am I trying to keep track of? Travel. (Oh, right. The conceit of this blog calls those 'expeditions'. What was I thinking?)  There is one thing that has not changed in twelve years: I am long-winded. So, some setup of how I got here. 

Back in the summer of '24, my job switched to supporting a different customer. This shop has a 4x10 schedule, and I figured that's a lot of three-day weekends. I was gonna get out and do things more. 

To be fair, I did get out occasionally. It just wasn't much more than I had before. That was also the year that Amy retired, so she was out doing things a lot more often-- big hike on the Arizona trail, a month on the Appalachian trail. I wound up holding down the fort, keeping up with the animals. 

October of last year (2025) sucked. We lost both Dulce and Dozer, leaving us with no animals at the house. Somewhere in my funk, I decided I was damned well going to find a silver lining: I don't need to tag off with Amy any more for travel.  I set myself a goal: I was going to do some kind of travel once a month in 2026. 

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So far so good.  In January, Amy and I went out to visit her family in Marietta, GA:

In February, I took the ZJ out to explore the 'Dinosaur Diamond' scenic highway (this is not said highway):

And last week, I met up with Austin, Mark, Curtis, and Angelo in Vegas for Austin's birthday festivities: 

The intent here is I'll write up some more about each of these, and maybe keep this place up to date so I can remind myself what I've been up to. 

Assuming I don't forget this thing exists again... 

Just a few miles down the road...

The plan was to go home today, but the weather put the kibosh on that. So, since finding silver linings has been something I've had a lot of practice with lately, I thought, "Hey, that'll give me a chance to try that barbecue shack I drove past the other day!”

Smokin’ Joe’s serves out of a trailer, and has a covered patio with some picnic tables as their dining room. They’re on the same lot as (and affiliated with?) Rick’s Custom Meats, so I figured they might know something about meat. 

Even as frigid as it was by Florida standards (I did not have any fear that they’d be turning the fryer off early to keep temperatures down in the trailer, even if my neighbors back home would probably kill for 60 degrees and windy), there was a line five people deep when I got there. Most places near my Mom’s house, that’s not too surprising— Bloomingdale has gotten huge and is almost twice as densely settled as when I moved out in 1990. However, I was down in Pinecrest, FL, across the street from an orange grove. This isn’t the brass-and-wood restaurants and electronics stores section of the county. This is strawberry patches and feed stores. I took a line like that on a day like today in this area as a good omen.

The three people directly in front of me ordered the “Starr Special”, which was chopped pork served over french fries, and you could opt for cheese and peppers as well. When I got in line, I was thinking pork sandwich, but I’ve learned over the years that one should never try to shoehorn a barbecue shack into his own vision: If the locals like the Starr Special, chances are, that’s what this place does well. So that’s what I ordered. Besides, I was probably going to order fries with my pork anyhow.

Now, the purist might note that I said “chopped” instead of “pulled” pork. If that purist had looked into their smokehouse (which, being Florida, was more of a smoke-screen-porch), he’d have seen that they were using a propane-fired smoker, which may have sent him running away in horror. He might have shuddered at his smoked meat being served over a pile of fries. I’m not a purist. If it’s tasty barbecue, I don’t mind chopped instead of pulled. If I can only taste the hickory they smoked it with, I don’t care if they used propane to keep the smoker box at the right temperature.

This was good barbecue. I’d picked their traditional and their sweet sauce and put some in the corners of the to-go container, but I never once wound up dredging my tasty, moist pork through it, that sauce wound up being solely for the fries. When Stephen and I get back into town in a week or so, we'll come back down here. It's definitely worth going back.

The story doesn’t end there, though. As I was polishing off my fries, I heard, “I saw your hat and your ring. What year did you get out?” I looked up and there’s a guy in a black Georgia Tech jacket. We chatted a bit, and then he said, “If you haven’t been in the store yet, you should take a look. They sell all sorts of old-time sodas there.”

Which they did— but that wasn’t the real score. The meat market had a deli counter, and that deli counter’s soup of the day was venison chili. Honestly, even though I hadn’t had breakfast, I really didn’t need anything else after the huge pile of fries and pork and cheese and peppers, but I couldn’t resist; I took a small chili back to the truck.

It was every bit as good as the stuff from the trailer next door. I have a vague recollection of a chocolate-cherry soda I had with it, but the chili was so good that anything that went with it is very hazy in my mind.

I'll be back next time I'm down here. And I'll poke my head into the butcher shop to see what the soup of the day is at the deli counter before I order my pork outside...