In my hasty attempt to update the site before I left for the Road Trip, I mangled everything for a few hours. Good times. I seem to have sorted it all out for now, but please tell me of any problems you might be having. You can post them in the Forum.
The basic quirks are that user information (your avatar, posts, the last time you visited) are all being pulled through to other pages. Not a big deal... yet. For now, when you enter the main page, if you are logged in from last time (click the "Log Me in Automatically" check box in the forum login) it will tell you how many posts have been made since your last visit, and it will let you see them all in one click. To come: Posts from other people's blogs, checked against your last login time. Don't worry, it will be cool.
My biggest problem is that the blog area (for various reasons) could not be updated like the rest of the site. So suck it up. It's not a bad thing for now, as the pictures on the left may be better when I start adding a bunch from the trip.
I so should be asleep right now, because the draft starts at noon and it promises to be a wild one for the Giants. So I think I shall.
Despite some doubts to the contrary, we arrived in Flagstaff at about 11:30 PM last night. That puts us about an hour away from the Grand Canyon - where we will spend the day - and end up in Las Vegas. There are pictures for you to see so far. No descriptions yet, but they will come in the next few days.
A quick recap:
MI - boring, but we knew that (I-94)
IN - short (I-94, I-80)
IL - boring and kinda long. Speed limit was 45 MPH at one point with no construction on an Interstate. (I-80, I-55)
MO - St. Louis and the arch was cool, as was the Mississippi. Parking is free if you park in the river, like we did. Rest of state was decent, most of it was dark. We stayed overnight in Joplin, MO. (I-55, I-44)
OK - Boring but fast. Speed limit was 75, we went 80 with no problem. Hills were made of cool red dirt. (I-44, I-40)
TX - Vast open plains. Lots of cars stopped by cops and being searched. Landscape got cool as we approached NM. (I-40 here on in.)
NM - Landscape was as cool as I imagined. Lots of red, weathered rocks all over. It started to get late, so we couldn't get many pictures. Albuquerque had NO MEXICAN FOOD!! Are you kidding me? Mountains were great though.
AZ - It was dark, we didn't see anything. Yet.
Cell phone coverage was non-existant after OK, except for a few cities. NM was almost completely under construction which cost a few hours. More to come later.
So far, we've been doing it really cheap. Gas was $1.63 in OK. The weather is spectactular (unlike the flurries I hear of in MI).
Off to the Grand Canyon.
Who would have thought that Las Vegas would have been a town that was hard to find Wifi in? Well, maybe if we looked harder, but Amber only has so much patience to drive up and down the Strip with me in the passenger seat, yelling "Here! Turn Here! ... Wait.... nope, it's gone."
Then, when I drive up to the roof of a parking garage, I get a signal, only to have the laptop's battery die. Good times. So now, I am in the hallway/open walkway in front of my motel room at the Motel 6, about 1,000 feet from a T-Mobile hotspot in a Starbucks. Thankfully, they have some try it free for a day deal, so this is gratis. It is about 85 degrees outside, and I am sweating, but this is apparently only a taste of things to come. Tomorrow morning, Amber, Liz, Ron, Jackie, Jeff and I - along with 60,000 or so other people are converging on Indio, CA for Coachella, a two-day music festival. It should be cool. Well, make that ridiculously hot. Like over 100 degrees hot. Both days. Please kill me.
The added bonus is that we bought our tickets and had them mailed so we wouldn't have to wait in line at will call. However, we got a call from Amber's uncle during the week, and he won a pair of tickets from the Coachella website. Cool for us, because now we get some VIP pass thing, a free Playstation 2 game and some other stuff. Except we now have to get in the Will Call line to pick them up. With a gazillion people showing up tomorrow, that should be a walk in the park.
The good news is that the event is sold out for both days, so we should be able to command a premium for our tickets and maybe actually make money for attending the fest. Throw in the $50 Amber made in Vegas, and the $10 I made, and this trip just got a whole lot cheaper. Bad news - longer wait outside until we can get in and begin over-paying for bad food and water. Yes, water is $2 a bottle at the show, and you can't bring your own water in. Hopefully, the absurd heat will cause so many cases of heatstroke that they'll just start giving it away. I plan on drinking a few gallons before I get there, so I'll probably be in the bathroom for all the bands.
Time for sleep. I have to get up soon to get ready for this madness. There are more Vegas pix on the way, along with Coachella pix, maybe by Monday/Tuesday.
P.S. Downtown Las Vegas is so much cooler than the Strip. It's got such a cool retro feel and it's so much easier to walk between casinos. The Strip is so overblown. My other Vegas complaint is that I was jonesing for a Dairy Queen "Blizzard", but was unale to find a single Dairy Queen in the city. Why isn't there one on the Strip? There was a Dairy Queen every ten minutes along I-40 in the middle of nowhere in Texas and Arizona, but nothing in Vegas, where thousands of hot, drunk people with cash walk by every night! Dumb.
