Thursday, August 02, 2007

A Request and the Usual Placeholder

I received a nice note from a guy named Lane Barnholtz yesterday, and he had a simple request:

I thought your readers might be interested in Charity for Charities: http://www.vajoe.com/charity/. Bag Blog made a post about it.

VAJoe.com will be donating $2,000 to military charities. People come to VAJoe and vote for their favorite military charities. They can nominate charities, also. The charities with the most votes and one randomly selected charity share the $2,000.

I was hoping you would mention this in your blog.

Done, Lane.

I checked out the list of charities one can vote for (voting begins next week) and was pleased to see Valour-IT and Soldiers’ Angels are on the list, as are various department-centric charities, e.g., Air Force Aid Society, Air Force Enlisted Village, Army Emergency Relief, and so on. And, as Lane notes, if your favorite charity isn’t on the list you can nominate it. Easy as that. So: go. Please!

I’m posting late again, as usual these days. Last night I was up into the wee small hours watching the drama unfold in Minneapolis. I don’t know about you, Gentle Reader, but I nearly always have this twinge of dread and apprehension when crossing a particularly long or high bridge…the Golden Gate, the Oakland Bay Bridge, the Mackinac Bridge, yadda, yadda. It’s irrational, I know. Yet the nightmare came true yesterday during rush hour in Minneapolis.

Just as an aside: I’ve been across that bridge in Minneapolis…sideways at 70 mph or so around 0300 in the morning in the waning days of December, 1977. I hit a patch of ice on the bridge’s approach and lost it, quite literally. Even though I just knew I was gonna go for a swim (or bounce off the Mississippi river ice), I managed to straighten the car out, somehow, and proceeded on my way... to the next available off-ramp for coffee and a change of underwear. The change of underwear being metaphorical, of course.

Today’s Pic: Another paved RV park (Jenny!), this time in Houston. Well, it’s not completely paved, as was the Reno park. Close enough, though. I stayed here for two days until I found another park with a lil more elbow room…and better rates. This one was quite expensive, as RV parks go, IIRC. Nice facilities, well-kept, good location, but expensive.

I don't have as many park-pics as I thought I did. In fact I'm missing a lot of the more "colorful" places I stayed at during my first year on the road, and more's the pity. Some of those places made me laugh the following morning when I got up and looked around. This, of course, is in reference to a bad habit of mine, early on. I'd drive way too long before looking for a place to stay...and it's hard to judge a park in the dark. But almost any park is better than a rest area, and I "stayed" (shorthand for taking an extended nap) in a few of those when push came to shove.

March, 2000.

Back in a bit…

7 comments:

  1. There's a bridge over the Missouri River here in Omaha by Bellevue that scares the living crap out of me every time I drive across it. I'm seriously surprised it hasn't dropped into the river yet. It's old, rickety, and the worst part...it's narrow. If you have the bad luck to be coming over when a large truck of some sort is heading in the opposite direction there will literally be inches between the two vehicles, and you better hope you're driving something pretty narrow.

    I actually drove half an hour out of my way to avoid having to cross the bridge late at night. Of course, the bridge I ended up crossing on wasn't much better. They've been talking about building a new bridge somewhere in the area to replace these two, and they definitely need to. Other than the Interstate bridges and one other rickety bridge further north in Omaha, those two are the only crossing points of the Missouri from Omaha down to Nebraska City.

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  2. The bridge collapse is unbelievable. Makes me think just staying home is a good thing sometimes.

    I can think of one good advantage of a paved RV park: You don't have to worry much about leveling the RV out. We are always backing up, sticking another 2x4 under one side, etc, to get it all level.

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  3. I hear ya, Mike. I can't think of any similar examples, but the ex-GF told me a story about a school bus that was wiped out by a semi on a narrow bridge somewhere near here 20 (or so) years back. That sort of tragedy got the NM legislature off its ass and initiated a state-wide narrow-bridge replacement project. Some of those bridges were built back in the 20s, or so she told me.

    Jenny sez: We are always backing up, sticking another 2x4 under one side, etc, to get it all level.

    And I hear that, too! I have a small collection of boards in my basement storage just for that purpose...

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  4. I remember when NM started widening their bridges due to an accident that caused laws to change - it was more like 35 years ago. They need to pass some sort of similar law in OK. There are some bridges here that I call spider bridges because the warning signs look like a spider (sorry difficult to explain). I have hauled a long goose-neck trailer full of cattle across one of those bridges and met a semi truck - sacred the peediddle out of me. When we first moved to OK, I was having dreams about crossing bridges that suddenly fell or disintigrated and I was floating in the water. I think it had something to do with feeling like my life was out of my control. Anyway, there is a road here that is actually a dam across one end of a lake (we call it the dam road). One side is the lake and the other side is about a 100 foot drop off. The first time I crossed that,after my scary dreams, I was seriously worried.

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  5. The bridges I'm talking about were all built in the '20s or '30s. They all have widths around 20 feet. Pretty much all of them are described as "obsolete."

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  6. Lou said: I remember when NM started widening their bridges due to an accident that caused laws to change - it was more like 35 years ago.

    Which all goes to prove that I can't remember the details of a good story when I hear one! ;-)

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  7. The only reason I can remember is I was single when the road crews were working in the canyon between RR and Questa. It was great fun to flirt with the crew while waiting to pass through the canyon.

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