Sunday of last week I found out one of my close friends was driving to South Carolina to help his son move. He had planned to drive his pickup truck and tow his trailer. Unfortunately the truck blew its turbo and he resorted to towing a smaller trailer with his Jeep Gladiator. When his wife told me the story I felt bad for my buddy and offered to catch a flight to Atlanta and drive home with him. I didn't expect him to take me up on the offer but he did. I cashed in enough frequent flyer miles for a round trip to Hawaii and used it for a one-way ticket east. Tuesday evening at 10pm, my buddy Brett picked me up and we started the 30-hour drive back to Salt Lake City.
Brett has always been a fan of satellite radio and so I knew it would be a feature in his 4-month-old Gladiator. In addition, he had two 8GB flash drives plugged into the vehicle's media center USB slots. Both filled with countless hours of music. We also had endless streaming possibilities as Brett has an unlimited data plan and he is not afraid to hot-spot his phone.
My wife's Jeep came with satellite radio and I have a few channels I like to listen to. Brett's satellite radio has an additional feature where it keeps the previous hour's broadcast of all his presets in memory. That means we could start listening to a channel and then rewind for an hour. When we came to a song we didn't like, we could jump over it. When we caught up to the current broadcast, we just had to switch channels to another preset and do the same thing. Talk about an important upgrade. It has me rethinking the relevance of satellite radio. It also turned out to be our preferred method of entertainment.
While we could have taken the quick trip home, we wanted to experience a different route than Brett took all the way to South Carolina. Instead of coming back on I-70, we opted to use I-40 through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Then I told Brett we could add 19 minutes to our route and drive through Wolf Creek Pass which was made famous by the C. W. McCall song of the same name. Brett thought that well worth the trip and so we made a slight detour through Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. As we got to the beginning of the pass, we started listening to the entire album that contained the song as Brett had it on one of his flash drives. It didn't take long to get to the top of the pass and Brett turned on his phone's camera held tight in a cradle so we could stream the downhill portion to his Facebook account while listening to the song. The song only takes a third of the time as actually driving the pass so we listened to the song 3 times before getting to Pagosa Springs.
We had a great time on the trip and with all of the entertainment possibilities, the drive went really quickly. Of course 75 MPH speed limits helped move things along too. I don't know how we did road trips back in the 1980's with regular FM radio and tortoise-like speed limits.
