Two days after we left, the Internet access to my house went down about 1:50 am. The next day I was able to get a Qwest tech into the house to find that the Qwest modem had died. He was able to install a new device, but couldn’t program it. So, everything was still inaccessible.

I sent out a status about the problem on Twitter, but had no idea what to do next as someone fairly computer literate would need to be in front of the computer inside my house and I wasn’t sure who I could ask.

Yesterday as I was driving to South Carolina, a fellow I know who is an excellent systems admin at Idaho State University asked me on Twitter if I needed some help as he noticed the blog was still down. I called him and he said he’d have time that evening (Sunday) to go over to the house. I emailed him the info and he got it running. Hurrah!! I will be home somewhere about the 28th or 29th and everything otherwise would have had to wait until then.

A huge thanks to Ben (and his able assistant daughter)!!!

Right now we’re just south of Omaha, Nebraska. Nina is driving and we’re going about 67mph south on I-29. The road is bumpy and writing difficult. It’s a bright, sunny day with no visible clouds. Cell service today is pretty good.

Yesterday was far different. We spent the night Tuesday in Ft. Robinson State Park in northwest Nebraska. As we pulled into the campsite we lost cell signal. If you held your mouth just so and tilted the iPhone just right you’d get a week signal long enough to almost do something before the signal disappeared.

As we drove across Nebraska yesterday on US-20, there were occasional places with signal, but mostly not.

We left Pocatello on Monday afternoon around 3:39 and drove to Green River, Wyoming and spent the night in my favorite brother’s driveway. We had a good visit with them in Monday evening. After visiting their hole, someday to be a house, we headed east to Rawlins, then north to Casper, and east on US-20 into Nebraska and Ft. Robinson. The drive was mostly boring with occasional interesting bits. About eleven miles west of the fort, Nina said she was resigned to the scenery and expected little change. I agreed and then it changed dramatically. We went from flat, brown down into a bally with hills and rock formations and trees. I guess you either get scenery or cell reception, but not both.

We’ve now crossed into Missouri.

The road was so bumpy that I had to stop writing. We’re now in Springfield, MO at our son’s house. The drive today was mostly on the freeway and fairly boring. Yesterday’s drive was much better. We enjoyed the drive through northeastern Nebraska. The afternoon sun gave beautiful light. The cornfields and soybean fields were beautiful. We’re having a very good time.

Saturday it rained. Not the occasional thundershower, but a real, soaking rain. The entire region got close to an inch of rain during the day yesterday. The rain is quite timely as fields have just been planted for next year’s crops and the ground has been very parched. Along with the rain came a twenty-degree drop in temperatures. Friday we had a high of about 80 degrees, today the high was 54. Fall is definitely here and winter snow probably isn’t very far away. We’ll delay that for a few weeks while we go to Georgia and South Carolina for the next three weeks for our son Daryl’s wedding (hurrah!) and to visit Nina’s sister. This seems like a very nice time to be in the south as their hot weather has also abated. Even better, all our children will be at the wedding. I think that’s the first time in many years since they’ve all been in the same place at the same time.

Friday night we attended the first Idaho State Civic Symphony concert. The new music director, Dr. Chung Park, made his outstanding debut as the conductor. From even before the first note was played, it was clear to me that we’ve entered a new age of Symphony in Pocatello. I’ve no idea how the Symphony Board was able to persuade Dr. Park to come to Pocatello, but they’ve scored a major coup. The scheduled start of the concert was 7:30 p.m., but Dr. Park held an fairly informal question and answer session in the rotunda from 6:30 to 7:00. He was exciting to listen to and delightfully vibrant. It was almost like he didn’t want the session to end when 7 p.m. came around. We took our seats and promptly at 7:30, he came on stage, snatched up the baton, and launched the orchestra into Wagner’s “Prelude to Act III, Lohengrin”. He pulled music out of the orchestra that just made my heart soar. They followed up with a Hydn Symphony and wrapped up with Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with an absolutely outstanding soloist, Corey Cerovsek. He was just incredible … truely a virtuoso performance. As an aside, he obtained his Ph.D in both Math and Music at age 18…. I’m so happy we’ve got season tickets to the symphony this year. We’ll definitely make sure we’re in town for every concert!

Yesterday (Saturday) we made a quick trip to Soda Springs. Dad had a shopping list for me from Harbor Freight (he’s busy restocking his shop after he sold all of his tools a couple of months ago). My brother Perry and his wife Chris were also there and it’s been a couple of months since we’ve visited with them. While there we watched the first session of LDS General Conference. After the session and a quick lunch, we came home in time to watch the second session, load some things in the motor home, and for me to go to the Priesthood Session on Saturday evening.

This morning Nina had her usual meetings up at the prison, while I stayed home and watched conference. We then watched the afternoon session of conference together.

I love General Conference. It is a rejuvinating experience in all aspects … spiritually, mentally, and physically. For some reason each conference seems to be better than the one six months ago. Then, to my surprise, the MP3’s for all the general sessions have already been posted on lds.org. I’ve already listened to two of them for a second time.

What a great weekend: a fabulous symphony concert, a great (but too short) visit with my brother, time with my parents, General Conference, and rain. Life doesn’t get much better than this!

One of the apps on my iPhone is called gpsCompass which is a marginally useful application. Using the built-in gps information, the app shows the direction I’m traveling along with up to four other pieces of information. I have it set to show latitude, longitude, avg speed, and altitude. The most important of those for me was altitude.

I’ve checked it with the highway signs as we go over a summit and there’s a sign telling us our altitude. It’s usually pretty close. Right now the app tells me that I’m at 4,462 feet, plus or minus 156 feet, meaning that my real altitude is somewhere between 4,306 feet and 4,618 feet. If I let the phone sit still for a while, it’ll eventually resolve the altitude to be plus or minus 56 feet. I’ve never seen it get any more accurate than that. I’d certainly not want to pilot an airplane at that precision, though.

Another capability is that it’ll send an email with a google maps link. Clicking on the link supposedly brings up a map with a pointer to my location at the time the email was sent. However, my WordPress blog doesn’t handle the email correctly, or else the email is poorly formatted. First problem is that there’s no timestamp on the email. Consequently an important piece of information is missing: When was I at that place? Second problem is that the link to google maps is incorrectly formatted, so the blog software doesn’t think it’s a link. The email gets posted to my blog, but the link can’t be clicked until I later go into the post and modify it to be a real link.

Maybe it’s time to look around for something a little better.

There are currently 134 applications in the iTunes application store related to navigation, one of which is the gpsCompass app that I already have. There are more than ten applications that will send the current location by email. There are a couple that are setup to aid geocaching. There are others built specifically for subway systems (including New York, Seoul, Korea, Paris, and a bunch more, including the Utah Transit Authority, Trax, and FrontRunner maps and schedules). Others show traffic information (but only in places where that information is free, such as in London). There are some built for bicyclers. One is set up to help you find your car (take a position snap when parking the car, then it guides you back to the car later).

An application called Altitude does just that … shows the current altitude in either meters or feet. It costs $0.99 … pretty inexpensive. Another shows only speed (it’s free).

An application called iHere sells for $9.99 and contains all the functionality of my gpsCompass (which cost $1.99) but that seems pretty steep for this one, particularly where the application notes says:

If the application crashes during start, try resetting the iphone, or deleting and reinstalling the application….

At that price, it shouldn’t be crashing anything!

I’ll probably try a couple of the “email my location” applications and see if I can get something a little more useful. But, I’m not sure I want to clutter up this blog with that information. Maybe a new blog just for location information???

Meanwhile, it’s a fairly warm Wednesday afternoon. We’re going to a concert this evening, a French group Samarabalouf. They’ve been here once before and had fairly interesting music. This is the first Season of Note concert this year and it should be fun.

Tonight we went to the circus. The Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus was in Salt Lake City and we just happened to be here for the event. I came down to Heather’s yesterday as there was a Geek / Blogger dinner in Salt Lake that I wanted to attend along with a CTO Breakfast in Provo this morning. Tomorrow is Utah Wordcamp, again in Provo and I’ll be attending that event as well.

Nina drove down today and will go back to Pocatello tomorrow. The reason for her visit is for us to celebrate Heather’s birthday. While her birthday is next Monday, we’re leaving the next day for our Big Trip out east inspired by Daryl and Laura’s wedding on October 18th. Happy birthday, Heather!

As we were driving back to Heather’s after the fabulous circus performance Michael remarked that if his bedroom turned up empty some morning it would be because he had run away to join the circus. He was definitely impressed by their performance tonight.

We just got onto I-84 at Baker City, Oregon on our way back home. It’s about 5 pm. We had left the hotel in Bend, OR at about 7:30 this morning. We drove through Redmond and Prineville and connected with US-26 in Mitchell. There we joined the Travel Through Time Scenic Byway. What a difference this route was compared to the ugly route we came out here on — US-20.

Today we drove through farmland, along the ‘wild and scenic’ John Day river, down fabulous canyons, and over forested mountain passes. It was a visual feast compared to the sagebrush, rocks, and dirt by the mile last Thursday!!

We stopped at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument which turned out to be very intellectually stimulating respite. I left very pleased with how we’re spending out tax dollars there (as opposed to the $700 million … or rather Billions in today’s proposed bailout).

Another stop was in the village of Dayville where we learned that the Mercantile and General Store was for sale for a paltry $680,000 plus the inventory. We demured.

A little further down the road we stopped at Whitney, “Oregon’s most accessible ghost town.” What was once a thriving lumber town is now a few abandoned ramshackle, broken-down buildings well worth several dozen pictures. Narrow gauge railroads once criss-crossed this area and are now all gone.

The last remaining gold dredge is being renovated and refurbished in Sumpter. These amazing machines were engineering marvels. This dredge ran until the early 1950’s when it finally shut down more than a hundred thousand dollars in debt. Inside were memorial plaques on the walls from families whose fathers had been killed working on the dredges. Before WWII the dredges ran 24 hours a day, three eight hour shifts, 363 days a year with only Christmas and July 4th off, and those were unpaid.

Eventually we arrived in Baker City. Last time I was there was to visit the emergency room at their hospital. We were on our on our way to Seattle to see Jared, Wendy, Kendra, and family and I had come down with a severe cold and strep throat. I don’t remember much of that stop (or much else from that trip) except getting a very painful shot in the butt in the ER which didn’t seem to help much.

We’ve now crossed the border into Idaho. We’re listening to Charles Kuralt on Nina’s iPod being broadcast on the new Griffin FM transmitter I bought at BestBuy in Bend. It’s supposed to find the best frequency to use. It doesn’t work very well. Manual frequency search is still required.

We’ll be home in about four and a half hours. It’s been a wonderful trip.

We spent most of our day driving around the rim of Crater Lake at Crater Lake National Park. Nina’s first words as we got to the rim of the crater and looked down at the lake were, “Oh my!! Beautiful!!” And she was right. We arrived at the rim about 11 a.m. and took the next four hours to drive the circumference. We had lunch at the Crater Lake Lodge. By the time we got to the last third of the drive, though, we both had taken enough pictures of the lake. I took more than 90 pictures and am in the process of uploaded 45 of them to Flickr. At least, I think they’re uploading. The Flickr upload application says they’re uploaded, but when I try to close the window, I get a message saying that there is an upload in progress and closing the window will cancel it. When I look at Flickr, the pictures seem to be there but the set named “Crater Lake” hasn’t been created.

We’ve finished our playing in this part of the world. Tomorrow we’ll pack up and head back towards Pocatello. We’re going a different route back through Oregon than the way we came. We’ll go through Redmond and take route 26 through Prineville, Mitchell, John Day, and over to Baker City where we’ll get on the freeway back to Pocatello. The route is longer but a significant part of it through Oregon is a Scenic Byway and hopefully much more interesting than the sagebrush and rocks route we came through last Thursday.

We’ve had a very good time here. It was fun being with Nina’s cousin Linda. She’s delightful to be around and we’re looking forward to getting together again in some part of the world. We’ve certainly learned a lot about volcanoes and lava flows! This is definitely volcano country around here.

We have had a delightful Sunday here in Bend, Oregon. We were all up fairly early this morning and Linda packed up to head back to California. She’s not quite ready to stop playing, so she planned to stay at a small hotel on the beach in Crescent City, California on her way back to Burney and complete the trip tomorrow. We have had a fun time, the three of us, and the only downside to this day was saying our goodbyes. We’ll definitely need to get back together again Real Soon Now.

After Linda left, Nina and I went to Church at the Mountain View Ward. Meetings started with Sacrament Meeting at 10 a.m. It was High Council Sunday with good talks. This seems to be a very active, close-knit ward. Sunday School was on 3 Nephi 8-11 with a good teacher and very active class participation. There are some good scriptorians in that ward. We finished up with Priesthood Meeting and Relief Society. Then it was back to the hotel to change clothes.

We then took a drive for the rest of the afternoon. We first went back to Sisters, Oregon as there were some old trucks there that Nina wanted to photograph (see her blog for pictures and info). After that we headed east to Redmond, Oregon. On route 126 just before we got to Redmond, we stopped at two places almost next to each other where collections of old cars, trucks, mining equipment, and bunches of other things were on display. They were very fun stops. So much fun, that we didn’t stop at the Santa Claus Reindeer Farm nearby….

We had lunch / dinner at Applebees and then drove to Prineville, Oregon (no idea how the name of that town is supposed to be pronounced!) and then came back to the hotel. We’ve both been working with pictures (I uploaded a bunch to Flickr) and writing blog entries. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get some of them in the picture album.

Tomorrow we’re headed south to Crater Lake National Park. It’ll be a full day and I’ll think about blogging while we’re driving there and back. Maybe.