Delayed Departure

Sarah was going to head back to school today.  However, with all the rain we have had in the last week she is waiting a day.  One of her roommates went up to La Crosse yesterday, and she told Sarah that it took her mom something like 8 hours to get home, because there was a portion of the interstate that was flooded so the WI patrol had the road closed.  So with that in mind, she can have another day for the waters to recede slightly.

That will also give me the opportunity to make sure that she has everything she needs packed up.  Kris and I plan on having to drive up over the weekend to bring a few things anyway that she isn’t able to fit in her car (I don’t know where she got so many clothes!) so since we are going up anyway, I suggested not totally overloading to the point where she is unable to see out of her windows; just take what she things she’ll need right away, or what is easiest to fit in her car.

Worried Mom

Here is a picture of a lifetime...  Ali is taking the car to practice by herself for the first time, and Kris has to watch out the window to make sure she gets out of the driveway and turns onto Menomonee OK.

 

Driver’s Test

It is Alison’s birthday today, but I am the one who got the present; that being shelling out another $100ish/month in car insurance, because Ali got her driver’s license. I hope it was due to all the last minute skills practice we did over the last week or so. I will say that her test was nothing like Sarah’s.

Sarah’s test was performed by a young guy who looked like her was only about 10 years older than Sarah. Alison’s instructor was a crotchety old lady. All of our checking in and paperwork filling out was very smooth. Then as we were waiting the instructor came back in with the kid in front of Ali, took her and her father aside to go over the results of the test. She pointed out a few errors she made that I overheard so I made sure to tell Ali what NOT to do. One thing was stopping before the sidewalk as you pulled out of the parking lot, which was one thing we practiced over the weekend. Another was watching her speed.

She called Alison’s name and took her outside, telling me they would be back in 10-15 minutes. When she got back she took me aside to go over her test and pointed out a couple of things she did incorrectly. Alison actually thought she was going to fail. Luckily, the points that the instructor deducted didn’t total up to a failure. As we were waiting to pay and get her photo taken, Alison was telling me about how her test went.

The first thing the instructor did was to crank up the air conditioning. She also apparently moved the passenger seat all the way back. She was a short lady so she was sitting in the passenger seat with her feet dangling above the floor, like a 3 year old sitting in a dining room chair. Very bizarre! Then one of the things she deducted points for was not stopping in front of the sidewalk as she exited the parking lot. Something I specifically told her about before she went out. Alison swears that she did, and the old lad has no idea what she is talking about. I tend to believe Ali, just because I specifically pointed that out. Maybe she was just too short to see it. Another thing was not using her turn signal to change lanes. The point in the road that she got marked down for, was where the road split into two lanes, a right turn lane, and a straight lane, right before a stop light. They were driving in the right lane, so Alison just kept right, i.e. already in the right lane. The instructor said she should have used her turn signal to indicate that she was going right. BUT… She was already in the right lane!!!!! The final thing that got points deducted was because there were a couple of times that Ali wasn’t checking her mirror before changing lanes. Again, she swears she did, though one time she admits it was a little bit late.

At the end of the day, she gets her license. I told her not to worry too much about it because I think that the instructors that do the driver’s tests can deduct points for anything they want. If they happen to not be looking at you at the exact moment you check your mirror, or check a blind spot, they’ll mark it.

Now I’ll have to worry about Alison every time she takes the car, the same way I worry about Sarah driving. I was much better before Sarah got in her accident.

Phantom TP'ers

As I was relaxing last night getting ready for bed after being away for the last week, I decided to get up and put a few things away. As I was coming back from the kitchen, I noticed something go flying into the back yard out of the corner of my eye thru the bathroom window. I went to look and it was a roll of toilet paper. As I was doing this, Alison came running downstairs and said someone was just toiletpapering our house. She just happened to be coming down the stairs and saw them thru the window in the front door, and managed to scare them away. It looks like they got maybe one or two rolls in our shrubs, and the roll in the backyard.

They took off running down the street and left the bag they had all the TP in. I asked her who it was and she didn’t know, but she was going to ask around and find out. I don’t know if I should laugh it off, or be mad. In one sense, I remember doing that at her age and thinking it was funny, but as an adult and a parent, I don’t want to be outside trying to clean toilet paper out of my trees. So we’ll see if we can track down the culprits. I told Ali to put out the warning that was the free one. Next time if I catch someone, I won’t laugh it off.

The Vegas Airport

It always seems that when I travel I see the most outrageous things. This time around, I witnessed a lady being dragged off a plane by airport security. She was screaming something about how her child was going to die because she couldn’t give her the medication she needed. Granted I didn’t see what had happened on the skyway, or on the plane itself for that matter, to get to the point of being dragged off, but she definitely looked a little nuts. At one point they placed her in a wheelchair and she was on her cell phone ranting to someone about the whole mediation issue. The problem was, at least as far as I could see, was that she didn’t have a child with her. If she did have a child that needed medication and they had to forcibly remove the mother from the plane, where was the child? I don’t know how they would have left a minor on the place alone while they hauled the mother off to jail.

After some time what I can only assume to be a supervisor showed up and was having a discussion with the lady. I still don’t know why anyone would feel the need to make that sort of a scene. After 5-10 minutes of talking, they let the lady back on the plane. I don’t know if I would have felt comfortable as one of the other passengers on that flight knowing that lady was back on. Who knows when she might snap again? I would not want to be flying at 35,000 feet when she decides to freak out again because someone might not let her eat her pudding. Oh well… I suppose as long as it isn’t my flight.

Early Flight

Today was my travel day back to Milwaukee. The bad thing is that in order to get a good fare and get back to Milwaukee in the afternoon, I had to go to Las Vegas first with a two hour layover. My flight left at 5:10 AM, which meant getting to the airport by 4:10, and which also meant that I had to get my rental car back and then wait for the shuttle to take me to the airport, so in order to make sure I got there, I wanted to be to the rental care drop off by 3:45, which meant getting up by 2:45 so I could be checked out and on the road by 3:30. And since I didn’t get settled into the hotel until 9:00 because of the traffic and getting something to eat, I ended up with about 4 hours of sleep. So it was definitely a long day.

I was lucky that the airport wasn’t too busy at that time of the morning so getting thru TSA was a breeze. I did however get hassled for some food that I had stashed in one of my carry-ons. There were also LOTS of people sleeping at the gates. It didn’t dawn on me but with the huge dust storm, the airport was closed and thousands of passengers had to make alternate arrangements due to flights being cancelled.

Once we boarded though, things were very smooth and I got to watch the sun come up over Las Vegas, or rather the mountains around Las Vegas. I am not sure I want to do that (take a flight where I don’t get to sleep the night before) ever again.

Vegas was quite a spectacle. I remember a skit on an old SNL with Charlton Heston where he was playing the president of UNLV, and he said, “if you have time to study, you have time to gamble”. The airport obviously takes that expression to heart. If you have time to wait, you have time to gamble. It was like being in a casino with all the slot machines and video poker machines. Gambling isn’t really my thing, so I didn’t do any, but there were plenty of people sitting at the machines at 7:00 in the morning. And they had 24 hour buffets going as well. I walked past one place that had barbecue going. It smelled good, but I just couldn’t see eating it for breakfast.

My First Haboob

On my drive back to Phoenix from the border I ended up driving thru a haboob, or a huge dust storm. I was probably about halfway between Tucson and Phoenix when I had to stop at a gas station. I had pulled off the road across from Picacho Peak State Park, gassed up, used the rest room and got a couple of snacks for the car, a total of about 10 minutes or so. When I had pulled off, the sky to the west was looking a little dark and hazy, and I thought there was a big storm coming. It had rained almost every evening at the resort, or somewhere around the resort. It was almost like Florida in that there were small squalls that would roll thru, and after about 10 minutes the sky was clear again. So I thought this would be no big deal.

When I got back on the road and started driving, I was monitoring the haze as it moved closer and I thought it was strange that it didn’t really look like rain was coming down, but was hazy like it was raining. After about 10 minutes on the road I found out what it was, a large dust storm, or haboob.

At first it wasn’t too bad, just a lot of wind and blowing dust. But then visibility started to deteriorate. At the time it hit, I was about an hour from my hotel in Phoenix. It took me double that time to get there as the speeds on the highway had dropped to roughly 20 mph. It was like driving thru the worst fog banks I have ever driven thru in Wisconsin. And there were several accidents that I passed along the way; cars from the southbound lane in the median, or worse, across the northbound lanes of traffic. It was really sort of amazing. The light was a yellowish-brown, and you might be able to see roughly about a car to two cars in front of you and that was it. Luckily, no one going in my direction wanted to be a douche and go breezing by at freeway speeds.

By the time I got into Phoenix, it was a little better since there wasn’t as much dust to blow around. It was really something to see how the dust just coated everything. By the time I got to my hotel and was able to pull over my rental car was a mess. The nearest thing I can compare it to was when Kris and I went on our honeymoon and I had to park my car in a surface lot at O’Hare for a week. While it was something cool to experience, I really hope I don’t ever have to drive in one again.

Drive Thru The Mountains

Today was my last day in Mexico.  In order to not have to drive in the dark as well as make my flight at 5:30 AM, I left at noon.  The way things work is we stay at a resort about 10-15 miles from the US-Mexico border and drive down to the border town every day to the company’s US warehouse.  A driver from the Mexican division will then come across the border to pick us up because he/they have a pass that allows them thru the border checks, sort of like TSA pre-check.  So when I got back across to the US side of the border, I was planning on driving right up to Phoenix.

The route I took down from Phoenix goes thru Tucson and then on to our resort in the town of Tubac.  However, since I had time to kill, I decided I would try a different route going back.  I would head back sort of southeast, before heading back in a northeasterly direction before turning back north to Tucson.  This route would take me thru the mountains, and I thought it would be some nice scenery as I drove.  I turned out to be right, the scenery was awesome.  I ended up driving thru/past the San Rafael Natural Area, the Sonoita Creek Natural Area, and the Las Cienegas Natural Area (I assume a Natural Area is like a National Park, or Preserve) and then finally the Coronado National Forest.  It was like being in an old western movie.  I could picture the cowboys driving their cattle, or the outlaws like Billy the Kid (yes I know he was in New Mexico, not Arizona) on the run from the law going thru mountain passes, and over the rolling hills.  And the mountain peaks were amazing.  The only thing that sucked is that there wasn’t any place to really pull over to take pictures, and I obviously couldn’t do it as I was driving.  Maybe next time if I go, I’ll take some extra time so I can look for places to stop and take some photos.