OpenSpaceman
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- Sep 22, 2015
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Left Xmas evening from Southeast WI. Weathers unpredictable so I left early. Hunch was right, if I had left in the AM…would have been a rough start.
*The plan was get to Des Moines and then straight South to Fort Worth, then West to El Paso.
Nice dry roads, only a couple of semis “cuz of Xmas”, drove 6 hours, took a four hour nap. Something told me to get goin’. Man I’m glad I did. It got a little dicey in Wichita…huge wind and rain.
**Where I screwed up! I made it through Oklahoma before the tornados and decided to call it a night right before Dallas. I only slept a few hours and I woke up hearing Bob saying get South as fast as you can.
Hit the road again. Everything was cool for a while. Then all hell broke loose. “F*ck gas mileage,
I’m glad my van weighs ten thousand pounds because I was blasting through 12 inches of standing water under the overpasses in Dallas/Fort Worth. Man they go a lot of casinos.
The roads were pretty empty except for emergency vehicles flying up and down the frontage roads…and I must have seen a dozen small economy cars in ditches, some upside down and lots of semis jacked knifed.
If I wouldn’t have stopped that break before Fort Worth I would have made it before the weather in West Texas. Ice, snow and worse of all wrestling the high winds for hours. But I’m grateful I beat the real rough weather.
I stopped just passed Odessa. My plan was to grab a shower at the Planet Fitness there but it was closed because of the roads. So I kept going. Bad decision? I don’t know. Yes it was a bad decision.
I’ve been brushing my teeth three times a day. I guess to over compensate for the last 48 showerless hours. Sorry lost my train of thought.
The roads got real bad “like driving on frozen ping pong balls bad”, like I was only one of three cars on the whole hywy…but I was the only one beating the sh*t out of my house. The house I so carefully and lovingly built over the last two years. The house that contains 98% of my worldly possessions ( I have a few musical instruments stored at my Mom’s ) So I pulled off.
I think It was called Monhana. I didn’t want to park in the sea of over tired, nervous wreck semi drivers but my extended van is to big for most spaces. So I parked on the side of the building strategically blocked by the wind and anyone hopefully not sliding into me. Before I slept I went out to check on the van. Ice had formed a sheet over the entire body. I had to take a hammer and break the ice away from the wheels and carefully chip away the ice on the headlights and more importantly the taillights and blinkers.
I ate a footlong meatball Subway and went to bed at 8pm. Ignoring the brand new hotel across the street and the hot showers and the sports bar full of cold beer and big screen TV’s full of football and ESPN.
I sprung up from bed at 4:30am from a dream of someone knocking on my rear door yelling you can’t park here. I know it was just a dream but it felt and sounded real.
I usually make tea before I do anything else in the morning but for some reason in that frozen parking lot I remembered what Bob said. Go south young man!
So I jumped in the drivers seat, fired it up and went South. I took 118 straight fifty miles to
I 10. Nobody was on it. I mean not one person. Am I a genius or an idiot?
The first thirty miles were ice…then it became dry. Go South he said! Dry roads…and 7 crystal clear radio stations all New Country. I don’t hate country. I just hate Kenny Chesney type corporate country. I’m more of a Townes Van Zant and John Prine type.
I got to I10, started heading West and once the roads started getting icy again I pulled off.
It’s Monday morning the 28th…Gonna wait til noon for the sun to hopefully clean things up a bit.
Two hundred miles ‘til El Paso. I read online someone has a snowplow in El Paso.
We’ll see.
*The plan was get to Des Moines and then straight South to Fort Worth, then West to El Paso.
Nice dry roads, only a couple of semis “cuz of Xmas”, drove 6 hours, took a four hour nap. Something told me to get goin’. Man I’m glad I did. It got a little dicey in Wichita…huge wind and rain.
**Where I screwed up! I made it through Oklahoma before the tornados and decided to call it a night right before Dallas. I only slept a few hours and I woke up hearing Bob saying get South as fast as you can.
Hit the road again. Everything was cool for a while. Then all hell broke loose. “F*ck gas mileage,
I’m glad my van weighs ten thousand pounds because I was blasting through 12 inches of standing water under the overpasses in Dallas/Fort Worth. Man they go a lot of casinos.
The roads were pretty empty except for emergency vehicles flying up and down the frontage roads…and I must have seen a dozen small economy cars in ditches, some upside down and lots of semis jacked knifed.
If I wouldn’t have stopped that break before Fort Worth I would have made it before the weather in West Texas. Ice, snow and worse of all wrestling the high winds for hours. But I’m grateful I beat the real rough weather.
I stopped just passed Odessa. My plan was to grab a shower at the Planet Fitness there but it was closed because of the roads. So I kept going. Bad decision? I don’t know. Yes it was a bad decision.
I’ve been brushing my teeth three times a day. I guess to over compensate for the last 48 showerless hours. Sorry lost my train of thought.
The roads got real bad “like driving on frozen ping pong balls bad”, like I was only one of three cars on the whole hywy…but I was the only one beating the sh*t out of my house. The house I so carefully and lovingly built over the last two years. The house that contains 98% of my worldly possessions ( I have a few musical instruments stored at my Mom’s ) So I pulled off.
I think It was called Monhana. I didn’t want to park in the sea of over tired, nervous wreck semi drivers but my extended van is to big for most spaces. So I parked on the side of the building strategically blocked by the wind and anyone hopefully not sliding into me. Before I slept I went out to check on the van. Ice had formed a sheet over the entire body. I had to take a hammer and break the ice away from the wheels and carefully chip away the ice on the headlights and more importantly the taillights and blinkers.
I ate a footlong meatball Subway and went to bed at 8pm. Ignoring the brand new hotel across the street and the hot showers and the sports bar full of cold beer and big screen TV’s full of football and ESPN.
I sprung up from bed at 4:30am from a dream of someone knocking on my rear door yelling you can’t park here. I know it was just a dream but it felt and sounded real.
I usually make tea before I do anything else in the morning but for some reason in that frozen parking lot I remembered what Bob said. Go south young man!
So I jumped in the drivers seat, fired it up and went South. I took 118 straight fifty miles to
I 10. Nobody was on it. I mean not one person. Am I a genius or an idiot?
The first thirty miles were ice…then it became dry. Go South he said! Dry roads…and 7 crystal clear radio stations all New Country. I don’t hate country. I just hate Kenny Chesney type corporate country. I’m more of a Townes Van Zant and John Prine type.
I got to I10, started heading West and once the roads started getting icy again I pulled off.
It’s Monday morning the 28th…Gonna wait til noon for the sun to hopefully clean things up a bit.
Two hundred miles ‘til El Paso. I read online someone has a snowplow in El Paso.
We’ll see.
We finally came up out of the low area just before where I-10 and I-20 merge. There were a LOT of 18 wheeler's turned over and in the ditch on the stretch behind us as well as 4 wheeler's too. We made it into Anthony, NM Welcome Center to spend the rest of the night. I wanted to get past El Paso before stopping. We started out again the next morning and by about 10 AM, it started snowing :huh: Thought we had already got past the bad stuff. We had to stop in Phoenix and get new windshield wipers. The ice buildup on the windshield from the night before shredded them 
