COVID Cross Country Campaign

My siblings and I recently completed a cross country drive in order to be with family for the holidays. It was interesting for a variety of reasons, of course including how the mere circumstances of the drive sound like a made for TV movie. Siblings driving home for the holidays in the middle of a pandemic! Oh, and there’s a super intense election going on! We had some interesting stops along the way, and seeing the progression of how seriously people were taking COVID at those stops was both fascinating and terrifying. I won’t dive too deeply into any one part of the trip, but here were some notable things:

• We left on Halloween and stayed the first night in Nevada. It was great! We got an extra hour of sleep thanks to daylight savings and continued on our drive, expecting to see the Hoover Dam and Grand Canyon that day. All was going well until we realized we didn’t have as much time as we’d expected to see the Grand Canyon. After planning on being there for an hour and a half, we arrived about 15 minutes before sunset. The reason for the confusion? We forgot that Arizona does not do daylight savings.
• We drove through and did some quick hiking through the Petrified Forest in New Mexico. I had honestly never heard of it before this trip, but it was super cool. Definitely recommend checking it out if you’re in the area. We talked to a super helpful park ranger whose name was Bill Fee. Too funny.
• There was no WiFi at two of our first four stops, and not by design. The first place cut out ten minutes after we arrived and did not turn back on. Another had been knocked out a week earlier due to inclement weather and hadn’t been restored yet. It coincidentally happened to be on election night, which was probably a good thing in the end.
• Two stink bugs crawled out of our rental car! Two! So weird.
• We played a game for long drives that a friend introduced me to called transitioning cow. The object of the game is to spot a cow transitioning from standing to sitting or the other way around. It’s harder than it sounds. We saw zero on the entire drive, though we did see a pooping horse.
• Another game was counting the number of Trump flags to Biden stickers, or other memorabilia. Not surprising given the states we drove through, but the final count was:
  • Trump: A lot. At least 15-20
  • Biden: 1 sticker
  • Joan Jett: 1 graffiti saying “JOAN JETT 4 PREZ”
• The definitive tap water ranks:
  1. Sparta, NC
  2. Nashville
  3. Oklahoma City
  4. Asheville, NC
  5. Albuquerque
  6. Flagstaff
  7. Las Vegas
• I’m very tall. The shower experiences for this trip were…interesting. They included
  • Two normal-ish ones
  • One in a trailer were you had to hold the shower head and I did not fit in the shower
  • One that I couldn’t get the water to heat up and another were the water wouldn’t cool down
  • One I had to squat down the whole time since the shower head was below shoulder level
• There were at least three miles of traffic - mostly big rigs - backed up going the opposite direction on I-40. No clue why and couldn’t tell because it continue onto an interchange with another freeway.
• Saw an truck pulling an oversize load that was a tank. Tanks are gigantic.

It was a fun trip overall, and certainly worth it to see family, but hopefully we don’t have to do things like this too much longer.

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Things I’m Doing:

• Building up a strength of schedule tool for my fantasy football league to help inform me who has a tough/easy schedule the rest of the season
• A tool for merging fantasy football projections together, which is mostly an exercise in fuzzy matching names together across sources
• Coming up with random multi-class D&D characters

Things I’m Reading:

• Technical Credit: Got to this from another blog post. Pretty cool thinking about how to be smart from the start and accrue credit instead of debt in the workplace
• NBA Meta-Mock: Cool stuff from Evan Zamir on using Bayesian inference to see how the NBA draft might play out
• Thaw of the Third Pole: China’s glaciers are melting, which is not good
• Heart of Darkness: Classic book. There are some parts that aren’t exactly kosher in today’s world and that should be taken into account, but the rest of the prose is pretty enthralling. Conrad really draws you in to Marlowe’s narrative.
• The Binti Trilogy: They’re a bit more YA than I was expecting, but a fun, quick read about a girl from a desert village who travels to school, only to be thrown into the middle of a centuries long war between other races.