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June 19, 2014

My longest road trip to-date

Filed under: Random Thought — Tags: — Nate @ 11:37 am

I got back from the longest road trip I’ve ever personally driven anyway to-date on Tuesday.

Pictures in case your interested, I managed to cut them down to roughly 600:

 

Long road trip June 2014 - 2,900 miles total

Long road trip June 2014 – 2,900 miles total

California

I decided to take the scenic route and went through Yosemite on the way over, specifically to see Glacier Point, a place I wasn’t aware of and did not visit on my last trip through Yosemite last year. I ended up leaving too late so managed to get to Glacier point and take some good pictures, though by the time I was back on the normal route it was pretty much too dark to take pictures of anything else in Yosemite. I sped over towards Tonopah, NV for my first night’s stay before heading to Vegas the next day. That was a fun route, at least once I got near the Nevada border at that time of night I didn’t see anyone on the road for a good 30-40 or more miles (had to slow down on some areas of the road I was getting too much air! literally!). Though I did encounter some wildlife playing in the road, fortunately managed to avoid casualties.

Las Vegas area

I took a ferry tour on Lake Mead, that was pretty neat (was going to say cool but damn was it hot as hell there my phone claimed 120 degrees from it’s ambient temp sensor, car said it was 100). That ferry is the largest boat on the lake by far, and there wasn’t many people on there for that particular tour on that day, maybe 40 or so out of probably 250-300 that it can hold. I was surprised given the gajillions of gallons of water right there that the surrounding area was still so dry and barren, so the pictures I took weren’t as good as I thought they might of been otherwise.

I went to the Hoover dam for a few minutes at least, couldn’t go inside as I had my laptop bag with me(wasn’t checked into hotel yet) and they wouldn’t let me in with the bag, and I wasn’t going to leave it in my car!

HP Discover

(you can see all of my Discover related posts here)

A decent chunk of it was in Las Vegas at HP Discover where I am grateful for the wonderful folks over there which really made the time quite pleasant.

I probably wouldn’t attend an event like Discover even though I know people at HP if it weren’t for the more personalized experience that we got. I don’t like to wander around show floors and go into fixed sessions, I have never gotten anything out of that sort of thing.

Being able to talk in a somewhat more private setting in a room on the show floor with various groups was helpful. I didn’t learn too much new things, but was able to confirm several ideas I already had in my head.

I did meet David Scott, head of HP storage for the first time, and ran into him again at the big HP party and he came over and chatted with Calvin Zito and myself for a good 30 minutes. He’s quite a guy I was very impressed. I thought it was funny how he poked fun at the storage startups during the 3PAR announcements. It was very interesting to hear his thoughts on some topics. Apparently he reads most/all of my blog posts and my comments on The Register too.

We also went up on the High Roller at night which was nice, though couldn’t take any good pictures, was too dark  and most things just ended up blurry.

All in all it was a good time, met some cool people, had some good discussions.

Arizona

I was in the neighborhood, so I decided to check out Arizona again, maybe for the last time. I was there a couple of times in the past to visit a friend who lived in the Tuscon area but he moved away early this year. I did plan to visit Sedona the last time I was in AZ, but decided to skip it in favor of NFL playoffs.  So I went to AZ again in part to visit Sedona which I had heard was pretty.

Part of the expected route to Sedona was closed off due to the recent fire(s), so I had to take a longer way around.

I also decided to visit the Grand Canyon (north end), and was expecting to visit the south end the same day but that food poisoning hit me pretty good right about the time I got to the north end, so I was only there about 45 minutes and I had to go straight back to the hotel (~200 miles away). I still managed to get some good pictures though. There is a little trail that goes out to the edge there, though for the most part had no hand rails, was pretty scary to me anyway being so close to a very big drop off.

Food poisoning settled down by Monday morning and I was able to get out and about after my company asked me to extend my stay to support a big launch (which turned out to be nothing fortunately) and visit more places before I headed back early Tuesday morning. I went through Vegas again and made a couple pit stops before making the long trek back home.

Was a pretty productive trip though got quite a bit accomplished I suppose. One thing I wanted to do is get a picture of my car next to a “Welcome to Sedona” sign to send to one of my former bosses. There was a “secret” project at that company to move out of a public cloud and it was so controversial that my boss gave it a code name of Sedona so we wouldn’t upset people in earlier days of the project. So I sent him that pic and he liked it 🙂

Car's trip meter - need some color on this blog

Car’s trip meter – need some color on this blog (yes that is almost 60 hours of driving over 10 days)

One concern I had on my trip is my car has a time bomb ticking waiting for the engine to explode. I’ve been planning on getting that fixed the next time I am in Seattle, I think I am still safe for the time being given the mileage. The dealership closest to me is really bad (and I complained loudly about them to Nissan) so I will not go there, and the next closest is pretty far away, the operation to repair the problem is a 4-5 hour one and I don’t want to stick around. Besides I really love the service department at the dealership that I bought my car at, and I’ll be back in that area soon enough anyway (for a visit).

 

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