Running Bear's Coffee Shop May 2018


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TERRY -- My spouse has a program called "WAVE" I believe? It did the same sort of directions north of Destin when we were going to the Black River Campground in Florida. IT told us to turn about a mile from where we were supposed to turn and we went about 1/2 mile "rocking" back and forth until finally I said this is not where we want to be. Ever tried to turn a 32 foot RV around on a logging road - I'm here to say it was not easy, and all the while I am praying that we don't get stuck in the soft sand.

Glad to hear that you "escaped" from there - hope no scratches were added to your new truck?
 
bnsf971 said:
Good afternoon. It's thunder storming heavily and 79.
We are at our annual travel trailer rally. Since my wife has some troubles with her health, I decided to make a 2 day journey out of the trip.
I had a lot of possible places to spend night #1, only two of them had a space. Place #1 wanted 3 nights' camping fees for one night. Place #2 had a dry camping spot (no utilities) for $13.50 a night. It was supposed to be a couple of miles off the freeway. Our GPS, instead of directing us to turn right, told us to turn left, then proceeded to send us on a grand tour of Camp Creek, WV, and environs. We towed the trailer through and over some places I wouldn't want to take a dirt bike, and went into areas the "banjo people" were afraid to go. I finally managed to get us back to civilization, several hours later. Long after any self-respecting campground closed for the night. We ended up spending the night in the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel, in Beckley, West Virginia.
It turned out if the GPS had directed us to turn right instead of left, we would have arrived at the campground in less than 2 miles.
This is the second time this GPS has done this to us. First time was nearly a year ago, now this.
I do not plan to allow it to do it to us a third time.
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I learned my lesson in GPS back when it was only available in Avis rentals. Set the destination to Keystone CO and left the airport. It had me on a service road 50 yards from the interstate for over 50 miles. Shortest route algorithm at it's best. Next learned that GPS will put you on roads that any thinking man would never travel.

The days of using a map, knowing where you are and where you are going, are over. Land navigation is dead!
 
It’s “WAZE”, not wave and it’s totally amazing. It uses the GPS from the people using the app and google maps and who knows what to route you around road closures and delays and accidents etc.

I was driving from Portland to Seattle once and it told me to get off I-5 and take a back road. I ignored it, but it told me again at the next exit. Having learned from past mistakes, I listened. It routed me up over this windy road that runs along a cliff high above the freeway (near Kelso if you know the area) and as I look down I see traffic is stopped. Later my friends said they were stuck for an hour due to a bad wreck. Meanwhile, it routed me back down the other side of the hill, back on the freeway at the next exit with little delay.
 
My wife uses "WAVE". Very low Tech though. I have great difficulty with it though 'cause the pointer and the arm don't always indicate accurately and the command is often late.
 
Good Morning Everyone. 73° and clear, looking forward to 95° again today. Still looking at 100°+ from Wednesday on with 0% chance of rain. Summer's early this year. I will be able to park the mower for a while. Downside is that the pool has already reached 85°...It's still May for goodness sakes!
Out in the train shed yesterday, I spent about ten minutes in my project area before being distracted by something else. While in the process of trying to locate some traffic signs that I put up a month ago, I found a container with a couple of disassembled vehicles that I had been working on. They had already been re-painted and detailed and were just waiting for me to install drivers before reassembly. Since I am needing more vehicles for this scene, I found appropriate figures and amputated some legs so they would fit. Got everything reassembled and resumed my search for the wayward traffic signs. After thirty more minutes, I went back to the first box where they should have been and lo and behold they had returned home. Well at least I got the vehicles completed. After that I opened a beer and ran trains for the rest of the day. I'll install the signs later today while the spareribs are cooking.

Sure can tell that it is a holiday weekend, activity here in the Coffee Shop as well as the forum overall has been really slow.

Ken (D&J) - Have a good time with your friend's layout. Take up Sherrel on his request when you visit out there next month. After their visit to my layout earlier this month, I think that his wife is ready to cede some room over to him.
Sherrel - Thanks for the well wishes on the remodel. Two bumbling guys in that small confined space will be a sight!
Terry - Good luck with the rest of your trip. Be safe. "Banjo people"?? Is that a reference to Deliverance?

Regarding GPS and other map apps. I am still "old school" and use a map to plan a trip, making notes to myself regarding exits and directions (N,S,E,W, not left and right). However once in the car, my trusty navigator wife keeps up with traffic density apps and all of the other technology. We usually fare well, and have found that whatever app that she uses isn't always right. Fortunately we can usually tell ahead of time. Our only disagreements come with N,S,E,W, because she isn't very good at that and sometimes the maps are sideways or upside down. We recently avoided a 2.5 hour delay returning from San Antonio by taking a back road that paralleled the Interstate about 5 miles away.

Everybody have a great day, and grill your lives away. Vegetarian is an Indian word meaning “Bad Hunter.”

Willie
 
bob said:
It’s “WAZE”, not wave and it’s totally amazing. It uses the GPS from the people using the app and google maps and who knows what to route you around road closures and delays and accidents etc.
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LOL, BOB, I refer to it as MAZE!
Maneuvering around in downtown Charleston and Savannah ... she liked to have driven me crazy with that thing! Granted - it has it's place, but you can't switch lanes with a 32 foot box when it tells you too late to make a change nor go down some of the roads it wants you too! I learned to navigate from hunting in the river and creek bottoms growing up. I did get lost once! I listened to a friend that was with me and we eventually came out of the bottoms Four miles from where we thought we were.
My first job flying was with a Piper Distributor. My first 2,500 hours of flight time was half done in picking up new a/c at the factory in either Lock Haven or Vero Beach and taking them throughout the US. None of them had any radios nor navigation equipment installed-just a compass and the basic flight instruments - the other half was taking 7 new Super Cub spray planes to a guy in South Texas and then taking his 7 old/used J-3's and Super Cubs to Alaska - 44 hours of flying time for each - that was some really fun flying! A couple times I flew alongside a Great Northern passenger train waving at the passengers crossing Montana. I could throttle back just a little and pace them! (A J-3 will only go 93 wide open)
 
Good morning. Finally got into Syracuse yesterday around lunch time. Chicago was a real pain in the butt. Friday of Memorial Day weekend was not the best time to pass through. We did come across I-80 to avoid having to come through the city, but the traffic was still horrible. Not really used to that.

Found a really good restaurant close by the condo were staying at. The wife did some grocery shopping yeaterday evening so now we can avoid having to eat out. We won't have a lot of spare time once the tournament starts later today for us.

Sherrel - Not much fun flying stripped down aircraft. Hope you at least had a radio.
Grin.gif
Reminds me of the time I had to fly a Bell 47 chopper from the graveyard in Tucson that had been refurbished for the Highway Patrol. Had t wait for cold weather in January because the mountains we at just about at the max ceiling for the chopper. Fun trip. Not much at all in the way of instruments.

Bob - I don't have a lot of faith in some GPS units. We also use Google maps while traveling. I do have Tom Tom mobile on my phone and it has proven to be better than some of the factory GPS units installed in cars. We go to Reno just about every year for Nationals and my friend brought his Garmin that had just been updated. I had made the trip a number of times and it kept squawking for us to turn around when we were headed south to West Yellowstone. It finally recalculated when we passed West. It had wanted us to take the interstate to Butte and then south to I-15. Another 105 miles longer.

Gotta get over to the convention center.

Later.
 
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Sirfoldalot said:
LOL, BOB, I refer to it as MAZE!
Maneuvering around in downtown Charleston and Savannah ... she liked to have driven me crazy with that thing! Granted - it has it's place, but you can't switch lanes with a 32 foot box when it tells you too late to make a change nor go down some of the roads it wants you too!
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Well, it's not great for trucks, but for cars it's more like "amaze", since it will route you around traffic time and time again. As I said, it had me get off the freeway and take a windy 2 lane road up the side of a mountain. If I hadn't been able see the freeway, and had other friends who were at the Ren Faire with me tell me just how long they sat in traffic, I'd have thought the stupid thing was crazy. But it gets real time updates, and when the delay reaches a certain point (I think the default is 10 minutes, but you can change it), it will switch to an alternate route. So I've had it direct me to get off and drive through various cities and towns, but always with a reason.
 
montanan said:
Bob - I don't have a lot of faith in some GPS units. We also use Google maps while traveling. I do have Tom Tom mobile on my phone and it has proven to be better than some of the factory GPS units installed in cars. We go to Reno just about every year for Nationals and my friend brought his Garmin that had just been updated. I had made the trip a number of times and it kept squawking for us to turn around when we were headed south to West Yellowstone. It finally recalculated when we passed West. It had wanted us to take the interstate to Butte and then south to I-15. Another 105 miles longer.
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Yes, they can be annoying. Waze won't work for long trips, I think it has a 200 mile limit or something like that. The reason is that it calculates just about every possible alternate route. But for short trips, it's wonderful.

My car GPS really had me in trouble one time. While out photographing elk, I turned it on to find the quickest way home. It wanted me to go back the way I'd come. Well, one road was closed for winter and the other was a dead end. It was going to have me driving in circles. I later found out the problem was it was not considering "unpaved roads" in it's calculations, and the only way in and out was a gravel road, so apparently it was stuck on a virtual island at that point. Thank goodness I knew where I was.

I also carry maps, just in case. Came in handy a few years ago driving to Palouse Falls, WA. My old car didn't have built in GPS and my phone said "I have no signal, so you're on your own pal..." Time for the 2D navigation system to come into play, lots of windy roads in the Palouse, easy to get lost.

Felt like I was driving through the Windows Desktop for much of the trip.

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Hmmm -- Do they have a WAZE for locomotive engineers?
Could be the next big thing!

In other news: My replacement new, new battery for the new, newer old laptop battery was in the PO Box - It's working good- so far!
The Spousal Unit will drive me and her almost 97 YO mom to a wedding for one of the relatives on the Queen Mary ship this afternoon. YAY - free booze, but I will have to listen to WAZE there and back!
Maybe I can get a few good pictures?
 
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Howdy ....

Just a quick stop in the Coffee Shop for me. .... Family visiting us here at the lake from out of town.

Guess what I am doing ?

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Chet ..... I'm glad you arrived at your destination safely. Have fun. Driving across the Great Plains takes a long time. So does driving in Chicago traffic.

Sherrel ..... Interesting reading about your experiences.... It would be challenging to drive a large vehicle in downtown Savannah or downtown Charleston. ... Nice of you to wave at passengers on the EB.

Waze ?
 
Hello all,

Haven't been around much, but still getting some layout work done. I have a lot of the framing done, with about 10ft more to build. I started installing the back drop this afternoon. Its finally starting to look like something. Think I should start a build thread?
layout 3.jpg
layout 4.jpg


layout 2.jpg
 
santafewillie said:
I don't dare let my wife see this post. $40K! Wow!

Willie
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Yeah, well, I'm not really that upset. What else are we going to do with the money? As I think I said, we're living within our monthly income, we don't have a mortgage and I kept full medical insurance when I retired. And then, there's the look on the wife's face whenever she looks at what we bought. Right after we got it, she said something like "I never thought I'd ever own something like that."
 
Beady said:
Yeah, well, I'm not really that upset. What else are we going to do with the money? As I think I said, we're living within our monthly income, we don't have a mortgage and I kept full medical insurance when I retired. And then, there's the look on the wife's face whenever she looks at what we bought. Right after we got it, she said something like "I never thought I'd ever own something like that."
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Beady ... You Da Man! As they say on Strange Inheritance: "You can't take it with you!"

P.S. I like the loader. Lumber yard back home had something like that. They moved sawn lumber with it and also loaded logs on trailers with it.
 
Good morning. Cloudy and 54°. Supposed to go to 71°, and remain overcast. Guess the B.E.N.N.Y.s will leave early.

Hope everyone in the Catonsville - Ellicott City MD area are OK after yesterdays floods.

Garry: Happy that someone's having nice weather this weekend.

KenVA: Nice progress with the benchwork.

Sherrel: Now, what did I do? A wedding on the Queen Mary sounds real cool.

Hopefully, the weather will co-operate, and I can get the steaks grilled this evening, They're just not right grilled on the George Foreman...
 
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