Chicago Roadtrip

Wow and triple Wow! I drove for pretty much the last 3 hrs. It was so incredible. Actually you gotta take I-70 once in your life and see the beauty yourself. The rock formations, the colors, the views. I’ll post pictures tonight including one where I fall off a cliff and had to be rescued. :-) I had no idea it would turn into this. That’s what I’m talking about adventure/fun. You don’t get to see this sheer beauty by flying. It gets you quickly to your destination, but all this beauty you miss on out. Often I couldn’t say a word on how amazing things looked. Right now in Green River, UT. The only option to eat something was at Burger King. I couldn’t eat the burger. It tasted disgusting. The soda was the only thing which was good. Going to have Tic Tacs now. :-) Pic below is Green River. Still about 3 more hours to go. Cell Service is spotty.

So finally I’m in bed all comfy eyes closed and ready to fall asleep. Then I think what’s going on? I feel like I’m in the middle of an airport runway. It’s so bright in the room. I can’t sleep with that. I actually had to fear some plane might mistake those lights as a runway and land right in the room. Ok time to investigate. I didn’t need to turn the regular lamps back on, there was plenty of light. Find out it’s the hairdryer on the wall with a nightlight attached on the bottom in the vanity area. The sink was kinda setback in the room, but no door to close as the shower/toilet was separate. But that was no nightlight. It was a searchlight. As smart as I’m I figured the hairdryer must be plugged in behind the mounting plate. Probably some stupid safety issue. They don’t want you to unplug it. So I ripped it off the wall (ok I didn’t :-) I only pushed it upwards and off it was). To my surprise there was nothing behind it. I said to myself: Michael, you dummy it’s plugged in to the outlet on the wall right next to the dryer. Ok so I tried to fumble it back into the mounting plate (can’t leave the room trashed like in the movie Hangover :-) I tried for a minute and gave up. I was too tired and figured I’m going to do it in the morning. At least I managed to close down the airport for one night. Don’t ask me why I didn’t turn the lights back on. Now it was dark like in a cave and I had to find my way back to the bed. Luckily I didn’t bump into any walls or pieces of furniture. You think I could sleep then? No way I was too excited about something I found in the hotel where I’ll be staying tonight. I saw that on the website and I knew this is the place to get a room. Guess what: They have an indoor pool and there is a nice big long slide. How often do you get that? I love slides. Ha Ha Ha. Sometimes I’m like a little kid. Yes I did manage to get the dryer attached to the wall in the morning. The things you do when you are tired. I’m actually laughing about this whole event myself now. It’s funny.

Well left an hour late. Woke up to a bunch of emails saying “my site is down”. Then 911s (emergency emails) from a customer started coming in. I’m still half asleep. What’s going on? But I wasn’t getting any pages from the monitoring system. Something was weird. I could access everything fine from my laptop. I try to figure what’s up and then I see they all are using Comcast. After some tests I see that somewhere along the route the data travels that Comcast and GlobalCrossing are not happy with each other. Traffic stalls. So I figured I have to quickly reroute the traffic from my end through a different outgoing provider. I did that and everyone who had problems said Thank You. Certainly not something you want to deal with first thing in the morning. Such a thing shouldn’t really happen because if a connection goes down between two providers traffic shouldn’t go there anymore. But Comcast is a little bit too big to ignore and if I can fix it from my end, I don’t have a problem with that. But certainly it wasn’t my fault. Then had a quick breakfast and went to the coffee shop I took pictures yesterday. My coffee is soooo hot. I can only have little sips and I already burnt my tongue a few times. Plus I’m boiling up. Had to put the A/C way down. But its only 56F (13C) outside. Ok I have to tell you guys about the airport runway lights story in another blog entry. It’s so funny. Stay tuned. I have full bars, but Internet doesn’t work. Hopefully I’ll get soon to a different tower so I can get this out. Yes I did clean the windshield of all bug guts. :-)

Made it to Cedar City. Small town. According to Wikipedia estimated 27k residents. Elevation 5846 feet (1782m) Looks pretty. Have to catch up later with pictures. I let my friend Eric rest while I drove the last part of the trip. There was a problem with the Internet connection in my room. Cable didn’t work. WiFi too spotty. Had to change rooms. Adventures. :-) Now going to check out historic downtown before it gets dark.