I thought I’d add a post with some random observations I’ve made in the last few days:

There are a lot more “road gators” (blown treads from retread tires) on the road this year. I don’t know if it is due to cuts in road cleanup funding, or truckers trying to get every last mile out of worn-out tires. I think it is a bit of both, as I encountered fresh ones in the road, with a truck pulled over a few 10th’s of mile further on with a blown tire. These things are really dangerous in a regular car, and could be fatal in an Atom.

There aren’t as many vehicles (trucks or passenger vehicles) on the road this year. There do seem to be a large number of RV’s on the road. Some of these rival Jabba the Hutt’s sail barge in both size and decrepitude. In particular, the nicer the RV is, the crummier the vehicle being towed is. In one case, there was a brand-new 40′ RV pulling a rusted-out pickup truck. In the bed of the pickup truck was an ATV. Towed behind the pickup truck was a plank-floor trailer (obviously home-made) with a golf cart on it. I wasn’t sure what I expected to see in the golf cart – a unicycle? a pogo stick? Anyway, this string of stuff was fishtailing madly down the highway at over 70 MPH.

It is really amazing that the pioneers got out here in wagons, on horseback, and sometimes on foot, with only a rutted dirt trail to go by, and sometimes not even that.

Tonight I’m in Sloan, Iowa which is a wide spot in the road a few miles south of where Sioux City, IA is supposed to be. There was a lot of road construction there, with most of the signs removed. I saw a sign for North Sioux City, and the next one I saw was for South Sioux City. Somewhere in the middle, plain old Sioux City was hiding.

This may not be entirely the fault of the highway department – the map on my PC shows the main east-west roads in Sloan to be (in order from south to north):

• 110th Street
• 100th Street
• 330th Street
• 320th Street
• 310th Street

Nestled in between 330th Street and 320th streets are 1st Street to 8th Street, running in the reverse order of the 330th – 320th sequence. Apparently, whoever laid out this grid failed math.