The road goes ever on and on...

At least it sure feels that way.

Day 1 of our little Christmas adventure turned out to be a bit more adventurous than we had hoped. I had the van all packed Tuesday night, and Wednesday morning we were up early and ready to take off. About 7:15 I went out to start the van to get it warmed up, and click-click-click-click-click-click-click. Wouldn’t start. Nada. Finally got it jump-started, and not knowing what might be wrong, took it down to the mechanic who managed to sneak it in. After checking things over, he diagnosed a weak battery, so we had it replaced and were finally on our way about 3 hours behind schedule.

After one false start (forgot the phone chargers at home, go back 4 miles to get them), we were on our way south. Actually more east first, through eastern Iowa and Illinois. I think we managed to take one of the slowest routes to Nashville. It looks straight enough on the map, but take a little hint from me and Messrs. Rand and McNally: the blue roads travel faster than the orange roads. Blue roads don’t have stoplights. Blue roads don’t force you to slow down to 30 mph for small towns. I will not forget this lesson.

We stopped at a Cracker Barrel somewhere in Illinois for lunch, and at an Arby’s in Vincennes, IN for supper. We ended up getting to Nashville about 10:15 pm. We are staying at the Opryland resort, which is just amazing. I’ll post more about it tomorrow, along with lots of pics.

Packing Up and Heading Out

The long-awaited Christmas break is finally here! Tonight we’re loading the van, and tomorrow morning we head out bright and early for our Christmas visit to see Becky’s family in Tennessee and North Carolina.

Wednesday will take us to Nashville. We’ll spend all day Thursday there with her brother Bobby and his family, then Friday morning we’ll take off for North Carolina. We’ll spend the next several days alternating between Becky’s folks’ place in Waxhaw and her sister’s place in Conover. We’ll meet some weird internet friends on Thursday night in Charlotte, then Friday morning we head back home, taking two days to get back to Iowa. At the moment we’re planning on overnighting in Dayton, OH on the way back.

It’ll be good to get away from work for a couple of weeks, spend some major time with Becky and the girls, see some of her family that we haven’t seen in a long time. Hey, I’ll probably post more often over the next two weeks than I usually do - lots of good chances to take pictures and lots of new stories to tell.

“over the river and through the woods…” :-)

Building Up Endurance

So how was your Thanksgiving? We spent the weekend in Wisconsin with my family at my parents’ place. It was the first time we’ve had everybody together in about a year. We ate far too much, shopped a little, played lots of Speed Scrabble, and I did some reading. We made it home last night about 5 PM, in time to get unpacked and get the girls to bed. It was a great time, wonderful to see everybody again.

Becky says we’re building up endurance for road trips over the next month or so. The trip to Wisconsin is only about a three-hour drive. Not too bad. Now this Friday we’re headed for Omaha (to see the Andrew Peterson Christmas concert!), which is just over four hours away. But those drives will all be wimpy in comparison to the road trip we’ll be taking in three weeks, a mere 20 hours to the great state of North Carolina. Fortunately, we’ll split it up over 3 days on the way down there, two 10-hour days plus a day in Nashville in between driving. By the time we get home on New Years’ we’ll be ready to stay home for a while, methinks.

I should note that I am not opposed to road trips - I have taken long ones in the past. But it’ll be a whole different experience with a 2-and-a-half-year-old and a nine-month-old occupying the two back seats in the van. We will get some mileage out of the portable DVD player for sure.

The road goes ever on and on…

This 'n' that

This weekend wasn’t too busy, but I wasn’t on the computer, so no blog updates.

Rebecca and I ran in the Solon Fund Run 5K on Saturday and did OK. I didn’t hit my goal of sub-30-minutes; I finished in 31:12. I’ll blame it on a 10 mph headwind and a long uphill the last half mile. Still, it was a lot of fun, and I’m looking for another race to sign up for yet this fall. I’ll do a full post with pictures when I get the chance.

Watched a bunch of football over the weekend, the Hawkeyes won, setting up a bit showdown with Ohio State in a couple of weeks, but the Huskers couldn’t score the upset over USC. Not that I expected them too, but it would’ve been cool.

Now it’s Monday and back-to-work. I’m going to start working on some new stuff, though, so that should be interesting. Gotta brush up on my C++ coding skills - haven’t used them since school!

Oh, and I’m looking forward to next weekend - I’ll be heading up to Minneapolis along with Pastor Richard to the Desiring God 2006 National Conference. The list of speakers:

  • David Wells
  • Don Carson
  • Voddie Baucham
  • Tim Keller
  • Mark Driscoll

And of course John Piper. I can’t wait.

I'm back home...

Got home from Seattle about midnight last night. Oh so much fun. Our plane was late leaving Seattle, but fortunately we had a good tail wind or we never would’ve made the connection in Minneapolis. As it was, could our gates have been further apart? Not really. We landed at F8 and had to get to A6. I think we were the last two on the plane. But we got home. Oh, and I got to fly first class from Seattle to MSP. That was nice.

I’m hitting work for long enough to catch up a bit and file my expense report, then I’m going home to see Becky and the girls. On a totally unrelated note, if I have time to crash this weekend, I’m thinking of converting my old PC down in the basement to run some *nix flavor instead of Windows… Ubuntu is looking like the early favorite. Should be a fun task.

Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to work we go...

Well, it’s off to Seattle, actually, in about 30 minutes. Headed up there again for work, catching the little yucky turboprop from CID to MSP and then a 757 to SEA… Hopefully there won’t be as much excitement as last time…

I’ve got a new book to read on the way that I’m quite looking forward to: N.T. Wright’s Simply Christian. Hopefully I can digest it and give a little report when I get back.

Traveling Adventures

Tuesday through Thursday of this week took my on my first trip ever to Seattle, WA. Several of us from work were headed out to talk to the big airplane manufacturer from that area. And hey, Seattle was nice. Very nice. The trip there, however… well, it was an adventure.

I departed the Eastern Iowa Airport at 6:55 am and took a little turboprop up to Minneapolis. From there, we had a connection on Northwest Airlines to get to Seattle. At this point in our little drama, I"ll let the pilot handle our narration.

9:25 am

“Hi folks, this is your captain here from the flight deck. We have to wait just a couple of minutes for air traffic control spacing, then we’ll be on our way.”

9:35 am

“Hi folks, your captain here again. The ATC spacing wasn’t going to take this long… but while we were sitting here, the self-test on one of our electronic devices indicated a fault with a battery… so we’re going to have to turn back to the terminal and get maintenance to look at it.”

9:45 am

“Hi folks, your captain again. To do this repair, we’re going to have to ask that you all deplane while the maintenance crew works on the plane. You can leave your personal items here on the plane, but we’ll need to ask you to deplane for a little while. Thanks.”

10:30 am

“For those of you on Northwest Airlines Flight 171 to Seattle, we have some good news, the battery has been replaced and everything seems to check out, so we’re going to get ready to reboard the plane at this time…”

11:30 am

The airplane takes off en route to Seattle.

12:03 pm

“Hello folks, your captain here again… we’ve had a minor hydraulics issue, really nothing to worry about, it’s just a redundant system, but we’re going to have to turn back and land at Minneapolis.”

“I’d apologize, but that would infer that we did something wrong up here… so we’re going to have to fly around an hour or so to burn off some fuel so we can land. So sit tight and I’ll get back to you in a little while.”

1:37 pm

“Hi folks, your captain here again… it took us a little longer to burn off fuel than we thought. But now we’re headed back in to land at Minneapolis. When we land, you’ll probably see some fire and rescue units on the runway there waiting for us. It’s just a precaution. They’re very cautious there at Minneapolis and the trucks aren’t really needed but they’re going to have them out anyway, haha.”

“Now, one of the few things that was affected by this hydraulics issue was the steering on the nose wheel. That means that we won’t be able to taxi off of the runway, so they’ll have to bring a tug out to pull us in. So, it’s not a big deal, but it’ll take a little while. So sit tight, and thank you for your patience.”

At this point the plane comes in and lands, and it’s a very tough landing. Well, the landing is OK, but the thrust reversers don’t kick in on landing, and the pilots have to stand on the brakes to get the plane to stop. Finally the plane pulls to a stop and yep, there are the fire trucks.

1:53 pm

“Hi folks, about this little delay… one of the things that happens when we land like that is that we used our brakes quite a bit and so they got kind of warm. And it’s nothing to worry about, not a big deal, but the folks here at Minneapolis are very cautious, ha ha, and they want to watch them for a few minutes as they cool down. So sit back and relax, and they’ll have us to the terminal in just a few minutes. Thanks.”

2:02 pm

The tug attaches to the plane, and slowly and jerkily pulls it around to a gate on the far end of the Northwest Airlines terminal. Finally it slows to a stop.

“Flight attendants, disarm doors and prepare for arrival.”

2:07 pm

“Flight attendants, re-arm the doors!”

2:11 pm

“Hi folks… Those of you on the left side of the aircraft may be seeing a little bit of smoke out your windows. It’s OK, it’s not a big deal. The plane is fine. But it appears that the tug that pulled us in got a little warm and caught fire, so the emergency guys appear to have that under control, and we should be deplaning shortly.”

“Flight attendants, disarm doors and prepare for arrival.”

2:20 pm

“Hi folks, we’re about ready to get you off the plane here. If you’re a first-class passenger, when you get off, head to gate F7 for your courtesy package. The rest of you, we’ll have a courtesy package with some meal vouchers here at the gate. We are planning on having another plane ready for you to depart again here shortly, our current scheduled departure time is now 3:40 pm.”

At this point, the story becomes less eventful. A new plane is found, and we make it to Seattle at 5:30 pm Seattle time, only about 5 hours later than originally planned.

One of my co-workers on the plane was formerly a Delta airlines pilot and has thousands of hours in 757s. He spoke to our pilot afterward and found out that the main hydraulic system had totally failed shortly after takeoff. That means that in addition to not having nose-wheel steering, we only had electrical power for the flaps (allowing only 20 degrees of flaps instead of the usual 30 degrees), we didn’t have much in the way of thrust reversers, and there was an assortment of other pieces that were disabled. My co-worker said that there are about six pages of checklists that the pilots have to go through before landing in that condition. Yikes.

Here’s to hoping that our next trip to Seattle (scheduled for the first week of August) is slightly less eventful.

Atlanta: Impressions

This is the first time I’ve ever visited Atlanta. I’ve driven through a few times, but that doesn’t count. I’ve driven around the north end of Atlanta for a while the past few days, and there are things that stick out. There are churches everywhere. I didn’t think that Iowa was that godless, but I can’t believe how many more churches it seems like there are here. And BIG churches. Wowza. There’s also a lot of Chick-fil-a restaurants. We have one in Cedar Rapids, but I think there’s one on every corner here in Atlanta. But all the signs still say “Closed Sunday”, though, so that’s cool.

I have a theory that not all of Atlanta is under construction, but I’ve yet to see too much evidence to back that theory up. I’ve seen construction everywhere. There’s construction at the airport. There’s construction at the hotel/convention center where I’m at. I’ve been to two shopping malls, there is construction at both of them. I’ve been through road construction on every trip so far. Sheesh people, get things fixed already!

I am a bit surprised that the accents I’ve heard so far aren’t that thick; certainly not near so much as the ones I heard in Tennessee and Kentucky last week. Maybe I just haven’t talked to the right people. My waitress last night had a German accent; the guy I’m listening to at the conference right now has an Indian accent so think I can’t even understand him. Maybe I’ll get a better reading on accent tonight when I have dinner with Jeff and Adriene.

All in all, Atlanta has been A-OK so far. That being said, there’s no place like home.

Road Trip: Andy O CD Release Show

After hearing the announcement that “much rock will be had”, I decided if I could make it work in my schedule, I’d head on a road trip to Nashville to see Andrew Osenga’s The Morning CD release concert. The schedule worked out, and next thing you know, I was on the road.

It’s not as bad a drive as I’d feared from Cedar Rapids to Nashville. I left at 4:30 am, and with very minimal stoppage I arrived in Nashville by 2:30 pm. I checked into my motel and then left to drive around and aquaint myself with the Nashville area. I drove past one shopping mall that was very dead, and then another one which turned out to be the Green Hills Mall that Andy Gullahorn sings about. After having located Mercy Lounge and how to get there, I went back to my motel to crash.

I apparently gave myself too much time to get down to the Lounge, because I got there about 30 minutes before the published “doors open” time. Deciding to escape the heat and humidity outside, I stuck my head in and managed to hear the end of Andy and the band’s sound check.

There were two openers for Andy; the first was Dave somebody; he sported a Napoleon Dynamite-style afro and a bunch of falsetto vocals with his acoustic guitar. Not bad, but not very memorable. The second act was Matthew Perryman Jones. MPJ is one of the Square Pegs, but I hadn’t heard any of his music until that night. He was very good. He played a few songs solo, then brought Andy O, Cason Cooley, and Eric Weigel up to play with him. Again, very good stuff. I bought his new CD Throwing Punches In The Dark after the show.

Then it was time for Andy. He was playing with a full band: Cason Cooley on keyboards, Eric Chris Weigel on bass, Paul Eckberg on drums, and a guitarist Jason Feller on guitar, and a percussionist whose name escaped me. They played a lot of music from Andy’s new album The Morning, starting out in album order with In Gym Class In High School, After The Garden, and White Dove. He played a few songs from his earlier album Photographs, including Kara and When Will I Run. The highlight of the night was probably his rocking Santa Barbara from the new album. It is a classic roll-the-windows-down rock and roll song, and it was great that night.

I thoroughly enjoyed the show, and also the chance to meet a bunch of folks, some I had already met, some I had not. This is where I name drop (though is it really name dropping if the people are only “names” to a few people?) : Geof Morris (of rmfo.net fame), Ron Davis (aka Ronzilla) of moreron.com, a couple of other dot.netters, and then in addition to the aforementioned band members, there were Jeremy Casella, Chris Mason, Andy Peterson, Ben Shive, Randall Goodgame, and oh yeah, Andy O’s wife Alison. Very cool.

After helping carry Andy’s gear down to his car, I called it a night and crashed hard at the motel. The following day brought me back on the reverse trip from Nashville to Cedar Rapids; again about a 10 hour drive. It was a great time, well worth the drive. As I told Andy, next time I’ll come back, but I’ll bring my wife along. :-)

road tripping

In a bout of insanity, I have decided to take two days off work and drive to Nashville for Andy Osenga’s CD release concert. I don’t know what possessed me. But I’m looking forward to getting to meet Geof and maybe some others, and seeing Andy do a full show with a full band… awesome.

“Much rock will be had.” – Andrew Osenga

:-)