Ok, we are gearing up for a Pacific Road Trip in a 30′ RV beginning September 5th! What started out as a simple trip over and under and through the woods to my son’s Grandmothers house has somehow morphed into another family road trip across country.

The highlights of this trip include a stop at Great Salt Lake in Utah, several of the beautiful national parks and forests as we travel south to Las Vegas, through the deserts of south eastern California and into SanDiego (Hi Mom!). After visiting Mom for a few days, it’s back through the desert and into Las Vegas for a few nights at the presidential suite at Club 36 through my timeshare and then on the road again…. Hoover Dam, Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, and Albuquerque, NM before turning north through Denver, Mt Rushmore, and back home in Wisconsin!

During this trip I plan on staying in touch with my online crowd using my laptop and AirCard. We will be bringing our digital camera and we should be able to get a few videos online as well as all our pics! Hopefully the RV will have enough power to spare and I’ll be able to spend more time online than during my past few excursions.

This will be my son’s first time west of the continental divide, so there’s a ton of stuff I’d love to show him. Subscribe to my RSS feed by clicking the orange icon in your address bar above and you can play along on our trip from the comfort of your own home!

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1) Do not attempt ‘Marathon Sprints’
2) Use a low-powered laptop while ‘on the road’ (but not while driving, of course).

Heading down there, I drove the 1,000 miles from Chicago to Dallas in one shot and had to be at an event two hours after I arrived in Dallas… a very rough trip down that didn’t accomplish much besides covering a vast distance in a short time. I think it would be better if I left a few days before the event, spent a few hours driving, then spent a few hours working each day. In the future, this will be how I try to stay productive when traveling.

My laptop is a very powerful ‘desktop replacement’ unit that weighs a ton and draws huge power. During the event in Dallas, I was rendering videos that people were creating and it went very fast on my workhorse of a laptop, but I was afraid to plug it into my truck after I cooked my wires last year doing that exact thing. Without plugging it in, I only have about 30 minutes of battery life, so I try to reserve it for emergencies.

While my wife is driving, or even when I pull into a rest area, I would be able to use a lower-power laptop more easily and I’d be a lot more productive.

We have a handful of pics from the trip and a bit more detail to make this blog interesting, but I also need to catch up on my work! Stay tuned as we post the pics and talk about the trip!

On the technological front, many new toys have been added to my arsenal… The Sierra AirCard 597E will provide internet connectivity for this trip, and the Mogul by HTC will be handling phone service. My goal is to work and function as if I’m still in my office, even though I’m on the road (but not while I’m driving). I’m also packing gotomyPC this time so that I’m always able to connect to my office PC. I have a new power supply which is a battery booster, jumper box, 12VDC-120VAC inverter, 120VAC to 12VDC convertor, and it has a floodlight and can inflate my tires… It’s the only power supply I should need, but it weighs a few pounds. I wouldn’t suggest hiking with the power supply in tow.

My LapTop is still the Dell Inspiron 9100 with a 30 minute battery life (maybe less). It’s a full throttled “DeskTopReplacement” or DTR version. It’s got the CPU and RAM to compensate for a short battery life.

I do plan on at least one phone meeting on the road and various other tasks while my wife drives.

Stay tuned to see how this turns out and if it’s a viable solution for what I do online. I expect good results this time!

The trip down will be blazing fast so that I can get there in time, but the trip back should allow for a couple hours worth of stops along the way. This trip will be over that weekend, from the 16th to the 20th, and from Wisconsin to Dallas and back!

Due to the rapidly spiking gas prices, it is cheaper for me to rent a more efficient car than haul my beloved beast down there… rental + gas is cheaper than ‘just gas’ for my truck!

Stay tuned next weekend for updates from the road!

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The next step for this is a set of big honkin’ wires that will run directly from the battery into the cab of the truck. I’ll engineer this myself to make sure there aren’t any issues, but I think I want a second battery and larger alternator to go with it. Losing that source of power and using a laptop that has a 45-minute run-time on batteries brought communications to a halt.

The Ubiquiti card was a god-send! I was able to connect to some networks that, based on their names, were over 1 mile away when I was still inside my truck (being inside vs. outside cuts the signal dramatically). I would like to get a magnetic mount external antenna so that I can work from inside while my connection doesn’t need to go through the steel cage of the truck.

The truck itself has Goodyear Fortera TripleTred tires which have a good rolling resistance (fuel economy) and AWESOME “stick to the road” capabilities. Yes, I tested trying to hydroplane and skid, but it didn’t work… these things stick! Couple that with a healthy dose of Rain-X on the windshield and I had a hard time knowing when it was raining! All I could go by was watching others slow down, other cars and their windshield wipers, and sticking my arm out of the window to feel the rain. The tires couldn’t feel the slippage… because they didn’t slip! The drops rolled off the windshield as soon as they hit… without using my wiper blades!

Another ‘technology’ that I used was a product called “5-hour energy”. It is about 2 ounces of sour liquid loaded with B vitamins that you drink in order to raise your alertness without caffeine. No edginess, no jitters, just alertness. It’s not what fueled the trip entirely, but once or twice my eyes got tired and this little gem stopped me from wondering if I should pull over or not… for a few hours! On the trip home, I knew how far I had to go and knew it was going to be tough. With 5-hour, I was able to get home in confidence and unpack the truck before falling asleep. I wouldn’t suggest drinking more than one, but then again… I’m not a doctor. Just be safe.

The next road trip will have a few things that this trip didn’t. I’ve been road trippin for years with no major issues, but then again, I’ve never tried to work while on the road through vast expanses of limited connections. I am so dead-set on trying this again with a few modifications to make it work better.

I suppose above all of the technology, what it really takes to be a road trippin mofo is the desire and/or willingness to eat and sleep poorly and drive incessantly while loving it! Without this ability you are no longer experiencing a road trip, you are just headed to a destination. But in the real world, I must work to survive. There has to be a way to combine the two!Православни икони

Personally, we didn’t get to see the biggest and best of the places we wanted to see, but we did meet some awesome people along the way. One of them was my partner in many internet endeavors whom I’ve never met face to face before (gotta love the internet!), another was my uncle who I certainly don’t get to see enough of! Many others were the anonymous faces and 20-minute conversations while traveling. We had some laughs, whoever you were! Of course, my whole family has had a great time driving around and seeing more of the country together. It was awesome to see my sons reactions to Mt. Rushmore, the Badlands, and Pikes Peak (even at a distance).

We made it to within a few miles of the first of many National Parks and Forests that we wanted to see. From Colorado Springs, Colorado, I can look up and see Pikes Peak which was on the list to visit firsthand, but this had to be scrapped due to emergency brake repair on my truck… only to find that the system was missing vital parts and others were broken for a long time. This came as a surprise since I had the truck looked over by a mechanics shop and specifically had (or was charged for) new brakes days before leaving…. how odd.

Add to this, the fact that the wiring in the truck failed early on in the trip and severely limited internet access and this trip has clearly been a miserable failure. Other obligations have caused the time/mileage clock to run out and we cannot complete this trip within an acceptable time frame.

I still have faith in the road trippin dream and lifestyle. I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to stay connected and stay ‘running’ out here and my next excursion ought to go quite a bit smoother… that’s the idea here… adapt and overcome. At this point, I am better off not pushing things and returning home to try again. Had this been a real vacation, I would press on. Since this is ’supposed’ to be a workweek for me on the road and I have lost the ability to work effectively, I need to regroup before doing it again.Подаръци

At any rate, we made it to Colorado Springs after having a blast through South Dakota (with no internet or cell-phone service). I’ll get into this more later and publish some pictures we took.

Sturgis, SD is having their annual rally and the entire state of SD was covered in motorcycles. It was fun stopping from viewpoint to viewpoint though areas like the Badlands and then running into some of the same people at Wall Drug (a must for anyone visiting the area on I-90). If everything works out ok, we may stop in at Sturgis again towards the end of the week.

Yesterday, I was at about 3k feet above sea level, today it’s 5k-7k, tomorrow is over 10,000 feet up! I also saw a high today of about 114 in South Dakota and a low of 65 or so here in Colorado Springs. From boiling to rather nippy… helluva day! It’s good to have internet and cell phone service again, even if checkout is at 11 am.

Time for sleep!Картини

I’ll take some time to spend with my uncle Dan in South Dakota south of Rapid City, SD. It is a “mildly radioactive town littered with rattlesnakes”, as my uncle puts it. But first, I’ll need to stop off in Wall, SD for FREE ICE WATER in the middle of a desert! It’s one of those Road Trippin’ traditions when I pass through there… like so many others!

Tags:road trip,travel blog

My laptop is an Inspiron 9500, desktop replacement unit… I picked it up used from Craigslist and got an excellent deal on it. It’s a power hog and weighs in at about 10 pounds, but it can run a lot of browser tabs, text editors, SSH windows and other assorted stuff so it’s worth every ounce. The games work well which keeps my son happy, too. I’m using an Ubiquiti 300mW Wireless Card which has an incredible amount of power. This translates to some really long ranges for wireless and the card is simply built for long-range access through the a/b/g bands. It’s a Cardbus card with an external antenna so I can switch between different antenna types for a focused signal from a fixed point, or the multi-directional antenna that picks up WiFi hotspots in any direction over a smaller range.

Typical ‘other stuff’ includes a tent and camping gear, an outdoor extension cord, 400W power inverter, AC to DC adapter, and a dvd player. Don’t ask how the DVD player got stuck in there as ‘required’ equipment, but it was tough to argue about the virtues of ’starry skies’ and the sanctity of a campfire with all of the other electronics making it on this trip.

How do I get my NetFlix when I’m on the road? Their ‘play it now’ section doesn’t have enough of a good selection just yet, but it is growing. One of those details that need to get worked out, but I can live without it for now.

The goal is to stay working for about a week while enjoying the country as we go. I have a handful of active sites that I maintain which require regular customer service. I am also developing a large-scale application for the web that I am contractually obligated not to talk about, however… ‘the project’ will be alright to say and any reference to it will be vague and about my efforts, not the details. If I can maintain this basic workload, this trip will be a success. Oh yeah… I also need to update this blog throughout the trip

When I was in my less ambitious years, I could sit in a room with my friends and things would fall silent, then you’d hear it… like little squirrels chirping… “road trip”. So fast and quiet, you barely noticed it, but my ears would perk up and I’d face in that direction like a prairie dog keeping watch. “What was that?”, I’d ask. Again, a quick, chirpy, whisper… “road trip”. All of a sudden, the room would rise to crescendo like a nest of chirpy baby birds…. “road trip.. road trip… road trip”. Off we’d go, 3 states away for a Snickers or a Mountain Dew. Why that far? Because we wanted to test the variance in the candy… or they have an ‘EXTRA king’ size bar over there… whatever the excuse was, it didn’t have to be a good one, we had our reasons. 3 states later we didn’t notice a difference, so we decided to return home. We’ll go somewhere else for something else later… doesn’t matter what, doesn’t matter where…road trip.

The Mofo part just makes it rhyme with the .info… cute name. It’s also a ‘code’ word we use when my son is around.

In short, this site is dedicated to staying connected and at work while maintaining a high level of play and mobility during the off-hours. What did you do after work today? What are you doing after work tomorrow?ПодаръциИдея за подаръкикониikoniикони