The Big Road Trip started very well on Sunday, August 5th. We drove away from the house the first time at 2 p.m. But then we decided we needed both sets of keys for the Tracker (which we’re towing behind the motorhome) so we went back to the house, got the keys and left for real at 2:15 p.m. Four hours and fifteen minutes later we were at my brother Perry’s home in Green River, Wyoming. The drive was completely uneventful. As we drove through Cokeville, Wyoming, the Flying J there had gas for $2.709 a gallon so we filled up and took a short break there.

We parked in Perry’s driveway for the evening. They had dinner ready for us and after dinner we sat out on their front porch until well after 10 p.m. visiting. Perry and Chris are so very fun to be with and so very easy to be around. We sure enjoyed their hospitality.

We slept in the motorhome and have the first few kinks worked out in how things are arranged. Tonight in Cheyenne will work a little better. This time we’ll extend the slideout, hook up the water, turn on the water heater, and actually make it a bit of home. We should be at the campground by 6:30 p.m. on Monday.

This morning Perry took us on a small tour of the area. I’ve got some pictures that I need to put up on the picture album from the tour. We first drove out into the high desert to where Perry works and he gave us a pretty good run down on his job. It was really fun to see where he works and to finally have a real image in my head of what his work looks like. Then we did a bit of a circle to one of the Lumbard Ferry across the Green River used by the pioneers, the Pony Express, the Oregon trail, and the California gold rush folks. We drove on a little further to Pilot Butte where we walked along the wagon ruts left from that time. A little further along we stopped at Simpson’s Hollow where Lot Smith and his small group of marauders harassed Johnson’s Army as they came west to invade Utah. After that it was back to Green River, close up the camper, hook up the Tracker, and head east. Right now we’re at mile marker 245 on eastbound Interstate 80 in Wyoming. We’ve got another hundred and twenty miles to drive. I’m beginning to feel like we’re on vacation … although I’m not sure what I’m on vacation from!

The days are still running together and I just noticed I had not written about mother’s birthday party last Wednesday. The original plan was that the fence builders would have the last of the fence up on Tuesday evening and we would go over on Wednesday morning to stain the fence and then celebrate mother’s 83rd birthday. Then my favorite brother let us know that he and his wife Chris (also a favorite) would be in Soda Springs Tuesday evening and would go home sometime Wednesday afternoon. That was great news as then he could help with the staining work! Then Tuesday afternoon we learned that the fence was done and that dad and the neighbor had finished the staining. Even better!

We drove over to Soda Springs and got there about 9:30 a.m. We visited a lot and then spent some time with dad out in the workshop rearranging stuff so he had a place to work out there. Mother is trying to get him to do his projects in the shop rather than on her kitchen counter, dining table, or the floor in between.

Perry brought over a DVD with his pictures from New York. It was fun seeing the town through their eyes. We had  a great visit.

We also had a nice birthday party. I took some video. It’s still in the camera. Maybe in the next few days I’ll have the time to get it loaded on the website! Mother really enjoys getting and opening presents … this time two books (Einstein and The Reagan Diaries) that should keep her in reading material until we get back from The Big Road Trip.

Happy 83rd birthday Mother!

It has been raining today. Other than a couple of thundershowers, I don’t think we’ve had any noticeable rain for four months until today. It has been raining since about 9:30 a.m. this morning — sometimes hard and sometimes soft — and it’s going on 1 p.m. in the afternoon. Hurrah! Along with the rain has come some significantly cooler temperatures. The forecast was for partly cloudy and occasional showers, but the radar loop shows a significant amount of rain still to come.

The only problem is that the new grass I seeded alongside the driveway has pretty much been washed away, along with the dirt I put there. I need something to protect it. The rain coming down the driveway has done quite a job of washing out everything I’ve put in place and deposited it all on the sidewalk. Time for plan B before we leave on Sunday.

The Big Road Trip schedule is almost complete. The only day still not confirmed is the day we plan to spend with Nina’s brother in Ohio. Hopefully today that’ll come together. Here’s the plan so far:

Sunday, August 5: Leave Pocatello in the afternoon after Church and drive to Green River, Wyoming where we’ll spend the night at my favorite brother’s place.

Monday, August 6: Spend the morning with my brother and sister-in-law, then drive in the afternoon to Cheyenne, Wyoming and spend the night in a campground there.

Tuesday, August 7: Up early and drive most of the day to Gretna, Nebraska (just west of Omaha) and spend the night in a KOA campground.

Wednesday, August 8: Another day of driving eastward to Tinley Park, Illinois (west of Chicago) and spend the night.

Thursday, August 9: Continue eastward to New Wilmington, Pennsylvania. We’ll spend three nights in a KOA campground in Grove City, Pennsylvania.

Friday, August 10 through Sunday, August 12: Have fun with Dawnmarie, Kirk, and the kids. We’ll leave after church on Sunday to drive to West Chester, Pennsylvania.

Monday, August 13 through Tuesday, August 13: Sightsee in the Philadelphia area with Daryl who is taking two days off from work to spend time with us! We’ll be camping in a West Chester, Pennsylvania KOA campground. Nina has been downloading all kinds of information on Philadelphia and already there isn’t enough time….

Wednesday, August 15: Drive in the morning to Clinton, Connecticut where we’ll camp in a campground just two miles from the beach. We’ll be staying through Sunday, August 19th. Nina’s sisters will be joining us and I’ll be seriously outnumbered. The plan is to spend all day every day at the beach, I think. I’m bringing plenty of reading material!

Monday, August 20: Drive back to Grove City, Pennsylvania and spend the night in a KOA campground there and visit a bit more with Dawnmarie’s family.

Tuesday, August 21: Drive into Ohio and somewhere meet up with Nina’s brother, probably in Marion, Ohio. We’ll spend the night in a campground somewhere in that area.

Wednesday, August 22: A full day of driving to Carthage, Illinois. There we’ll meet up with #1 son James and his family. We’ll stay through Sunday, August 26th and sightsee around Nauvoo, Illinois. We’ll do a temple session in the Nauvoo Temple while we’re there.

Monday, August 27: Start for home. We’ll drive as far as Lincoln, Nebraska and spend the night in a KOA campground.

Tuesday, August 28: Continue the trek westward to Laramie, Wyoming and spend the night in a KOA campground.

Wednesday, August 29: Drive the rest of the way back to Pocatello and home. We’ll stop in Green River for a short visit with my favorite brother … to get some popcorn … on the way.

So, twenty-four nights on the road. That definitely qualifies as a Big Road Trip! Most of the places we are staying have wireless internet access available so staying in touch should not be a problem. I’m looking forward to the trip, because when we get back, I’ll have to get serious about finding future employment….

Let me tell you, it’s hot here as well … but gasoline prices are going down. Since we are headed eastward in the motorhome on Sunday, that is welcome news. We’ve had a lovely stay here and will go home tomorrow morning so we can start the final push to have everything ready to leave on Sunday. Life is just cooking along….

I’ve no idea how I ever had time to actually work for a living. I’ve heard other people say that and I can now witness that it was true. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day to do what I want to do around the house let alone go off to work somewhere. I’m sure I’ll eventually get the majority of the things needing to be done here at home finished, but the list is pretty long (and Nina hasn’t even added her items to my list, yet!).

One big deal for the past several days has been getting Nina’s laptop working once again. On Sunday morning she told me that her laptop had a blank screen and wouldn’t display anything. I sat down and heard the dreaded “click …. click … click …” coming from the computer hard drive. I checked on line and determined that the laptop was still under parts warranty. A few minutes later the Dell technician had a replacement hard drive ordered and said it would arrive on Tuesday. The technician’s name looked to be from India, but I did this all through a chat program on their support web page. I really like dealing with support through chat. Not only is it more understandable, but I have a complete record of what was said.

Meanwhile, Nina needed a computer. I moved the iMac Mini over to her desk and set her up with email and a web browser. She didn’t have her address book, but if anyone wrote, she could at least reply. That actually worked quite well. The replacement hard drive arrived on Tuesday and then it was time to recover the machine. That turned out to be somewhat of a difficult problem that took the next two days to do.

A little more than a year ago I bought a backup system for the computers in the office. It was from Simple Share (who have since been bought by someone) and included what looked to be pretty good software from EMC. I set up Nina’s laptop and my PC to do a weekly backup. The first one would take a long time, then from that point only changes would be backed up. I would occasionally check and the backups were being faithfully done. However, we went on the cruise to Norway and the 28th of June was the last backup from Nina’s laptop.

The first step was to re-install Windows XP and the EMC software. The replacement hard drive from Dell came with CD’s to install Windows … except they didn’t include the Dell drivers CD. That was a couple-hour on-line chat (again with someone from India) who gave me links to each of the needed drivers. Finally Windows was running. I then installed the EMC software. It couldn’t find the backups. It turns out that there is a catalog needed, which for some unfathomable reason, EMC stores on the local hard drive. So, when the hard drive goes dead, the catalog is gone as well. The process to rebuild the catalog was very painful and took more than twelve hours to crunch through.

But then it wouldn’t restore! Two attempts wrote a whole bunch of stuff to the new hard drive, but none of it was accessible. I finally tracked down what was left of Simple Share customer service and the guy was of absolutely no help. All he could do was assist in properly installing the software. He could do nothing more. Finally, after more than an hour on the phone with him, I finally got him to open a ticket with EMC so I could get support there without having to pay for it.

I don’t like EMC very much. They make very good storage … some of the most reliable disk storage in the business … but they are VERY expensive and beyond arrogant. If you don’t buy a service contract, then you must have a credit card available and pay a $79 per incident charge for assistance with their Retrospect backup and recovery software. However, finally Simple Share opened a ticket and I was able to bypass the per-incident charge from EMC. The support person was competent, but even more arrogant than I had dreamed possible. Obviously everything I had done was wrong. I had used their wizard to do the restore. That was wrong. I should have gone directly to advanced options and set up the restore manually. It turns out that the wizard always selects the wrong catalog! How in the world does an ordinary, non-computer-geek person successfully use this system???

After following his painstaking instructions and patiently putting up with his very long lecture, the restore started for the third time. It would take six hours and would completely overwrite the hard drive. In the middle, Nina and I went out to the movie theater for the new Harry Potter movie. The restore said it was done when we got home … but the message that the EMC support guy insisted that I would see was not there. I rebooted the computer as that was what he told me the instruction would say. The computer would not reboot and said that there was a serious configuration error and that I would need to reload the operating system. It was now 10 p.m. and I was about at the end of my patience.

I let it sit for a while while I did some other things and just thought about it. If the computer wouldn’t reboot because of a configuration error, then just perhaps the boot partition was corrupt?? I put in the Windows XP CD, booted to it, and went into rescue mode. That mode is a very arcane, command-line process with a few (and very few) commands available from the old MS-DOS days. One of the commands I remembered would repair a boot sector. I found the command and ran it. I didn’t have anything to loose … if it didn’t work I was going to have to start all over again anyway. Fortunately, I had downloaded all of the Dell drivers onto the iMac Mini, so I wouldn’t have to go through the process of getting them once again.

After running the boot repair program, I rebooted the computer. Voila! It booted! And everything was as it was on the 28 of June. The process was finished. The computer worked once again.

So, today I put Nina’s computer back on her desk and took away the iMac Mini. When I bought the Macbook, it came with a free printer, so I selected an HP All-in-One printer that is a scanner, copier, and printer. I installed that printer in place of the five-year-old HP scanner/printer/fax machine and got everything working. Nina is back in business and she is quite happy about that.

Now I need to set up her laptop to backup to the Simple Share system once again. I think I’ll do it more often than once a week. I also need to figure out how to have the catalog written to the Simple Share disk as well so I don’t have to recreate the catalog when the hard drive fails.

The good news is that there was a fairly recent backup. Further, the restore eventually worked and I think I could do it much more quickly next time. Most people I know, however, would not be able to make the restore work and probably would have difficulty setting up the backup! No wonder most people don’t have a backup of their PC. When the hard drive fails, everything is gone. Not a pleasant thought at all.

I’ve also been doing some yard work. The previous owners had dug a big hole on the north side of the house to catch the water run off when it rained because there was no grass. As they left and we moved in, they had the yard hydro seeded and the grass has come in and the “pond” is no longer needed. I had 4 1/2 yards of dirt delivered, enough to fill the hole and fill in a few other places in the yard. Most of that dirt is moved and I’ll start planting grass tomorrow. We’ve had some pretty serious thunderstorms the past couple of days and I don’t want all that dirt being washed away!

In addition I’ve been working on some electrical wiring in the motorhome so that we can put the TV in a different location when we’re traveling. That work isn’t quite done (I need to go get a part at an auto supply store). There won’t be time to finish it tomorrow and I think we’re going to Soda Springs on Saturday, then down to Heather’s on Monday and Tuesday.

We’re planning a BIG road trip … and plans are changing almost by the hour. The objective: go swimming at Hammonasset Beach State Park in Connecticut and visit everyone between here and there while we’re at it. In September we’ll go up the Seattle to visit folks up there. When Chandler finally gets consistently below 100 degrees we’ll go there to visit. In the meantime, the trip to Connecticut is being planned. Original thought: Two weeks. First Revision: Three Weeks. Current Revision: 25 days. But the current revision won’t work. It seems that Daryl will not be there on his allotted two days…. He’ll be in Salt Lake! So there will be at least one more revision and likely more than one. About the only thing I know right now is that we’ll leave on Sunday afternoon on August 5th and go to Green River to spend a bit of time with my favorite brother and his wife. From there, who knows. There just isn’t enough time to do everything we want to do!

The new Macbook laptop computer has a camera built into the bezel above the screen. When I started up iMovie, that program connected to the iSight camera in the monitor bezel and viola, instant movie maker. So, I recorded about a minute of inane video and put it here. Now I need to figure out how to export it in Windows Media format!

We have been having scorching hot weather since the middle of June with no rain other than one brief thundershower since then. Every day has been 95 degrees or higher and I’m rather tired of all the heat. It’s hard to do yard work in these temperatures!

Tonight we went over to Ross Park and the bandstand to listen to the Pocatello Municipal Band concert. It was a lot of fun and a pleasant evening. I took some pictures ….