{"id":378,"date":"2011-09-27T20:08:26","date_gmt":"2011-09-28T01:08:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/?p=378"},"modified":"2011-09-27T20:08:26","modified_gmt":"2011-09-28T01:08:26","slug":"random-musings-from-the-road","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/?p=378","title":{"rendered":"Random musings from the road"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I thought I&#8217;d add a post with some random observations I&#8217;ve made in the last few days:<\/p>\n<p>There are a lot more &#8220;road gators&#8221; (blown treads from retread tires) on the road this year. I don&#8217;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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>There aren&#8217;t as many vehicles (trucks or passenger vehicles) on the road this year. There do seem to be a large number of RV&#8217;s on the road. Some of these rival Jabba the Hutt&#8217;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&#8242; 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&#8217;t sure what I expected to see in the golf cart &#8211; a unicycle? a pogo stick? Anyway, this string of stuff was fishtailing madly down the highway at over 70 MPH.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I thought I&#8217;d add a post with some random observations I&#8217;ve made in the last few days: There are a lot more &#8220;road gators&#8221; (blown treads from retread tires) on the road this year. I don&#8217;t know if it is due to cuts in road cleanup funding, or truckers trying to get every last mile [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=378"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":380,"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions\/380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}