Road Trip in a Ford Escape

Yesterday I boarded a plane and flew to San Francisco where I rented a car and drove to my boat at Coyote Point Marina. As Monday was my last day at Sony, at least for now, I had to clean out my sailboat so I could sell it. I pulled all of the big stuff off the boat and loaded into the back of the rental car and then sold the boat to an old coworker. His one request was that I help put the sails back on the boat so he could start using it on weekends. I obliged and showed him how to get everything set up. I also showed him how to start the engine. Then I got in the car and made the 11-hour drive back to Salt Lake City. The flight was much easier than the drive.

When I made my rental car reservation, I had the option of several rental car companies. Ultimately I settled on Hertz as they had cars available and also the best rate. I set the rental pickup at the airport and then gave myself until 10pm this evening to return the car to the location 2 miles from my house. Talk about convenient.

National has always allowed you to select the car you wanted when you arrive at their lot. This is something Hertz recently started doing and I really appreciated it yesterday. I knew I had a lot of stuff to bring back, including a generator, 2 televisions, and a mountain bike, so I passed on the Ford Mustang. While it would have been a fun car, not everything would have fit. I also wanted something that got great gas mileage as I would be responsible for filling the tank multiple times. Ultimately I settled on a very new Ford Escape. I put the back seats down and the bike fit nicely. Then I just loaded stuff around the bike. The generator rode in the front passenger's seat next to me.

Lately all of the cars I have rented have had key-less starts. You just have the key in the car and press the start button. It is a feature I really like. I also quickly connected the car's sound system to my phone so that I could use all of the hands-free features. It came in handy as I talked with my wife and other family members while driving. That kept some of the boredom at bay. It also had satellite radio that I started using just outside of Lake Tahoe when the traditional radio stations started getting scarce. I began with music but by the end of the drive, I was listening to comedy to help pass the time.

I turned the car back into Hertz this morning and saved myself $50 by not doing it this evening. I have to say that I really enjoyed all of the electronic features in the Ford Escape. Before I connected my phone to the car, its own navigation system did an excellent job routing me and also giving me an ETA into Salt Lake. Of course it didn't take into account the hour nap I would need outside of Elko, Nevada but it did factor in stops for gas and that soft-serve ice cream cone from McDonalds at midnight. Ultimately my favorite feature in the rental car was the fact that I averaged 30 miles per gallon of gas while mostly doing 80 miles per hour (the legal speed limit for most of the trip . . . once you get outside of California). My mother-in-law is looking for a good all-wheel drive car and I highly recommend this one. Full disclosure: I own a Ford F-150 truck and also own 190 shares of Ford stock. While both of these may influence me somewhat, I still liked the car a lot for my California-to-Utah road trip.

Avoid SFO for the Next 3 Weeks

Monday morning I flew from Salt Lake to San Francisco (SFO) for my weekly commute. As we got ready to board the plane, the captain came out and said we had a 2-hour delay. They unloaded the early boarders and then posted that the flight had been cancelled. My heart sank. Then the gate agent said that we would be heading to Oakland. So in the matter of 2 minutes, the flight went from on-time, to delayed, to cancelled, and then to a new destination. Personally I think the relief of not having the flight cancelled made the new destination much more palatable.

Once we arrived in Oakland, the airline paid for Uber to deliver me to my office. While the distance from Oakland to my office is significantly longer than from SFO, I thought the airline did a great job of taking care of their passengers (it is Alaska for those interested).

San Francisco is repairing one of their runways over the next 3 weeks. Unfortunately the repair cuts through 2 other runways and so they are down to a single runway instead of the usual four. The construction is expected to be completed on the 27th of September and until then air travel in and out of SFO is going to be painful.

Knowing about the construction I have been checking arriving flights from Salt Lake and departing flights in an attempt to guess where my flight this evening would depart. All the flights have left Salt Lake and gone to Oakland so I know that is a constant. Monday night's flight flew out of Oakland. Tuesday's flight made it out of SFO. Then last night's flight departed from San Jose. When I woke up this morning I didn't have a clue where I would be leaving from. I got to the office and got word that my flight was cancelled. I immediately called the airline and was told I could get on a 1pm flight through Portland. While I rebooked the flight, I got an e-mail saying my flight had been changed to San Jose. I got put back on my original flight and then figured out how to get to San Jose. The airline helped significantly and so I can't complain about them at all.

Ultimately the problem is that the runways in San Francisco need to be fixed and they determined now is the best time to make the fix. That has airlines scrambling to accommodate delays and cancellations. So if you can avoid SFO for the next 3 weeks, do yourself a favor and avoid it.

Getting Technical

I flew back to the Bay Area this week and started working in earnest. That can be tough after a few weeks of Christmas and New Year's celebration events. Yesterday I quickly got through my morning ritual and starting working on a design document for one of my projects. I really got into it and didn't notice time passing. One of my regular lunch buddies had to remind me that it was time to go get food. It has been a long time since I got so involved in a project that I needed to be reminded about food.

When I first started this job almost 8 years ago, I didn't think I would be here this long. I got hired as an individual contributor and did technical things on a daily basis. Then I slowly got moved into management. Now I am several levels deep and rarely get to spend my days doing technical things. That is one of the things I want to change and am challenging myself to spend half my time doing technical tasks. That forces me to quickly move through my management tasks. Then I jump into my technical work and am finding it to be a lot of fun.

The scope of my technical project is rather large and so I get to do a bit of dabbling in various technologies. Yesterday I created a document spec for a NoSQL database. Then today I started doing some Python programming to populate that document. Tomorrow I will be looking at machine learning for another part of the project. This sort of reminds me of the weather in the mountains: if you don't like it, wait a minute.

Timing Airport Pick-Ups Correctly

My wife wanted to spend the weekend in San Francisco and so instead of flying home at the end of a week, I just stayed in the Bay Area and used frequent flyer miles to bring her out. Waiting for her to arrive on Friday felt strange as normally I am not in the office. When it came time to pick my wife up at the San Francisco airport, I had to figure out how to get the timing correct. Airports don't like it when you pull up to the curb and wait for an hour or two for a flight to land.

Fortunately my boat that I stay on in the Bay Area sits at the end of the San Francisco airport runway. I decided to try something new just to see if the timing worked out. My wife gave me her estimated arrival time as the plane took off and then I hung out on the boat waiting for her to land. As the time got close for her arrival, I sat out in the cockpit of my boat playing my guitar, and watching planes land. I saw my wife's aircraft fly by and had that confirmed when she texted me immediately upon touchdown. Then I carefully put my guitar away, closed up the boat, and started the short drive to airport.

I pulled into SFO just as my wife called from the curb. Timing worked out perfectly. I pulled up and my wife immediately got into the car without either of us having to wait more than 15 seconds.

There are a number of smartphone apps that show when flights arrive. You can also use the phone to tell your ride when you are leaving. Unfortunately neither of these take airport congestion into account. Nothing beats sitting at the end of the runway on your sailboat watching planes land.

Catching Up With Friends

One thing about spending time in the Bay Area and working in high-tech is that it is pretty easy to run into old work acquaintances. This morning I got a text from the former CEO of a company I used to work for. He wanted to get my opinion on a new project he is working on and so we met this afternoon for 30 minutes. It was good to catch up.

Last week, I was riding from my office back to my boat when I passed someone walking that I recognized. Amazingly we worked together at a company in New Jersey, yet here we were in California. Naturally I stopped and talked to him and it was good to catch up. Coincidentally, this friend worked with me at the same company that shared the CEO I met with today.

There are a number of old coworkers from my days at Oracle that reside in the Bay Area and I will often get together with them to catch up. After today I am glad that I make sure never to burn any bridges with those I have worked with in the past. You never know when you will run into them again. When you do, you want it to be a happy reunion and not an uncomfortable one.

True Civilization

This past weekend I had the opportunity to drive from Salt Lake to Gooding, Idaho. Ever hear of Gooding, Idaho? No, I didn't think so. The only reason I know it is there is because my wife's sister lives there with her family. There was a family event up there and so we made the relatively short drive to get together. During the quick trip I was surprised at how I found myself comparing life in small-town Idaho with life in Salt Lake and life in the Bay Area.

One may be tempted to believe that cities are much more civilized than small towns. After this trip, I believe the opposite is true. The first indication was the traffic and speed limits. While the distance I traveled was around 250 miles, the trip only took around 3 hours each way. That same trip in California would have taken over 4 hours. Why? Because the speed limit in Utah and Idaho is 80 miles per hour. It is only 65 in the Golden State. Furthermore there was no need to fight any sort of traffic as there were relatively few cars on the road. The last time I left the Bay Area headed to Salt Lake, I spent an hour or so fighting traffic just to get out of the Bay Area. I thought that was ridiculous given that I left at 9:30 pm.

My next observation came when we stopped for dinner. We pulled off the Interstate and found a relatively popular family dinning restaurant chain. There is an identical restaurant found near my home in Salt Lake as well as one near my office in the Bay Area. The menu is the same at each of the 3 places and one would think the food and service would be as well. Nope, not even close. This small-town restaurant in the middle of Idaho had significantly better service and the food actually matched what I saw on the menu. When does that ever happen? The menu always looks awesome and then the food gets to you and one would think it was run over by a truck before arriving at the table.

I thought about the joys of civilization as I drove to the motel to check in for the night. While I could find a much higher quality place to stay in both Salt Lake and the Bay Area, there wasn't a chance I would find the same quality for the price I was paying. The motel had clean rooms and a very nice swimming pool with attached hot tub. Again, a point for small-town America.

My final check was to pull out my smartphone and check the Internet connection. It was LTE speeds with a stronger signal than I get at my office in San Mateo, California. I did a quick check to see if there were any Uber drivers in the area. That is the one short-fall of a small town: no Uber. Of course the town was so small you could walk from one end to the other in a few minutes and so a taxi or Uber would be pointless, but I had to check.

With all of the technology we have available to us, why do small towns continue to shrink while large cities continue to get bigger? Can't we have more telecommuters? What is wrong with us? Small-town America is much more civilized than our overcrowded cities. Maybe we might want to start taking advantage of that.

Road Trip 2014

I am back in the Bay Area but only for one night. I flew out this morning and will be driving my car back to Utah tomorrow evening after work. For past road trips, I have wanted to leave work early to get an early start on the drive. Experience has taught me I am better off waiting until 7pm so I don't have to fight traffic from San Francisco to Sacramento. It can seriously add 4 hours to the drive.

My wife is laughing at me as I am working extra hard to be prepared for this trip. This evening I gathered with one of my co-workers and analyzed the traffic patterns out of the area using Google Maps with the traffic setting turned on. My co-worker even showed me how to look at statistical averages as it has been raining today and there were more than the normal numbers of accidents.

Rain in the area means it is snowing in the mountains. The car I am driving back is a 1998 Jeep Cherokee and one of the best four-wheel drives I have ever owned. It also has relatively new tires with excellent winter tread and so I should not be too concerned about the snow. I shouldn't be, but I am and so I am checking the Caltrans website that has cameras showing the conditions along the road. I have driven I-80 many times and so I know where the trouble spots are. Yes there is snow on the road and even an accident or two. However there doesn't seem to be a long line of cars because the road is closed, so that is a good sign.

The weather tomorrow will play a huge role in my trip and so I am checking out the my favorite website at www.weather.gov. While I may not appreciate some parts of our government, they do a very good job of providing weather information. Right now there is a "Winter Weather Advisory" for the first part of my trip, a "Special Weather Statement" for the middle of my trip, and a "Hazardous Weather Outlook" for the end of my trip. I could probably postpone my trip by a day if I need to, but the weather forecast doesn't seem to be improving over the next week and I don't want to hang out here too long.

Normally I drive all the way through without stopping. As it is winter and cold outside, I don't want to get somewhere in the middle of the Nevada desert and be so tired I have to pull over and try to sleep. I also have Kayak open and am looking at hotels in Winnemucca which happens to be the half-way point of the trip. I don't see any super cheap rates and so I won't be making any reservations. However if I come across something a little less expensive than $65 along the way, I may just pull in and get a good night's rest before continuing in the morning.

Yes my wife is right and I am probably over thinking this trip. I just want to make sure I get home safe and sound. After all, when something goes wrong on a road trip in the middle of the summer, you don't run the risk of freezing to death or having other cars slide into you.