Travel Day
I love Santa Barbara Airport. After a wonderfully short ride with Toby and Max, I got to the airport about 50 minutes before my flight to Orlando with a plane change in Salt Lake City. Everything went smoothly, and I believe that we left a couple of minutes early. I know that we arrived in SLC 15 minutes early. The flight to Orlando was not very full, and the couple that was sharing my row decided they didnt like my company and left for more spacious digs. I have the whole row to myself. I started and finished Painting the Map Red, by Hugh Hewitt during my plane flights. The pilot stated that we had good tailwinds, so we arrived in Orlando about 30 minutes early. Woo hoo!
Even though I left the airport with my bags at 11:30p, by the time I got the rental car, and checked into the hotel, it was nearly 1 am. The car had the Magellan NeverLost
GPS system which was cool.

I have been daily commuting from Carpinteria to the south end of Camarillo for nearly 3.5 years.

During
that time I have gone to work as early as 6 am and as late as 11 am for various reasons.
The stretch between Carpinteria and Ventura is mostly empty, so I use cruise control
every day. Today, as usual, I set cruise control to 72 mph as soon as I got on the
freeway and began my daily ritual of shaving my face and head while listening to an
audiobook (currently I am 15+ hours into a 26+ hour book, How
Few Remain by Harry
Turtledove — I love that I can download books from the local library, but I digress ). I usually get to Ventura or Oxnard and then turn off the cruise control for the rest of the trip.

Although I noticed that traffic was not heavy this morning, I didn’t notice that traffic was significantly lighter than usual. At the Carmen exit, which is in the middle of Camarillo, I noticed I still had the cruise control on. Amazing! I was able to go all the way to my exit at Santa Rosa Road on cruise control.

359 miles is the number of miles that I can drive on a single tank of gas in my Honda. My tripometer reading this morning was 359.4 miles. Can you guess where I was sitting? If you guessed on the shoulder of the Telephone on-ramp of 101 South in Ventura, you would get a prize.
What communications device was missing from my pocket where normally lives? If you guessed my cell phone, you get a prize. I had left it at work the night before. I almost never take it out of my pocket, but it was bugging me on Monday.

I knew I was pushing the edge of the range of my car this morning, but I thought the little dashboard light would come on. It didn’t.

As I was walking down the on-ramp headed to get a gas can from the not-so-near nearest gas station, a CalTrans driver stopped and asked what was wrong. I told him that I was getting a gascan. He said he had some gas and would put some in my car so I could get to the next gas station. He was very professional and courteous and refrained from laughing at me (at least to my face).

I got his name thinking that I could call and commend him, but after 4 different transfers to get to the Ventura office of CalTrans, the operator told me that they didn’t have anyone by that name.

I submitted a webform, but that was pretty generic and goes to Sacramento.

My co-workers had a hearty chuckle when I told them the story. Now I know that I need to get gas when the tripometer rolls to 355. (I want to allow a little cushion.)

If you are not reading Michael
Yon’s Online Magazine Blog, you need to be. Michael Yon is a free-lance writer embedded with an Army unit in Iraq. He is completely self financed (with the help of donations) and so is not beholden to deadlines or editorial oversight.

What is included in his reports is strictly a grounds eye view of a combat unit in Iraq. The material is thrilling and confusing. Why aren’t we hearing similar reports from the MSM?

I have included his blog link in my blogroll to the right.

Tim and Susie Theule are having a baby boy!

Read
about it on Tim’s blog