There and Back AgainHybrid Fun on a Summer RoadtripPart 1: Coasting to Hybridfest |
Part 1:
first leg to Hybridfest
Part 2: local Wisconsin tourism and slightly beyond Part 3: South Dakota, Black Hills Part 4: bangin' around the Northwest Part 5: meandering east toward Denver Part 6: doing tech at Denvention (aka Worldcon) Part 7: the journey home |
"I love the road, it's the people I can't stand"
In the spring of 2008 a slightly wild idea began forming in my mind as I looked ahead toward the rest of the summer. Hybridfest in Wisconsin was pretty much a given -- I had made that pilgrimage twice in the past and in June '08, already did a good part of that same distance and back going to a fuel-economy event in Indiana. But Worldcon also beckoned from the figurative snow-capped mountaintops of Colorado -- originally I wasn't planning to go, but as I learned that I could do it on the semi-cheap the appeal of getting there too and helping out my tech buddies grew. However, I would have to occupy about two weeks between the events -- and decided that the right way to do this would not be to go home in between, but to continue west from Hybridfest and wander around the northwest part of the country for a while, to *drive* through some of that "flyover country" and see it up close for a change. As time went on, I grew more confident that I could pull this off. Various arrangements were salted in around the key events themselves, although what I would be doing in between was still loose and undefined. That's okay, it would be one of those "serendipity" trips like my parents and I used to take back when I was a kid, with only a vague concept of a destination and path. I started with a baseline list of contacts and addresses and figured I would just build onto that as I went. The car was prepped as usual for a long roadtrip, and I'd decided to leave the heavy Prius tech-education demos at home and just throw in my small card table to put flyers on.
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Only in eastern Pennsylvania have I seen this amusing sort of load. [Here's another one from a different trip.] Some company in the area must manufacture these -- pretty much full size swimming pools, and they just get trucked like hot-tub shells to where they'll get installed. Things get interesting when someone wants to pass them, of course. |
Maybe when people get tired of cats [no, they'll never get tired of cats,
they're too photogenic] they can start doing
loltraffic instead.
Make no mistake, there's plenty of bad behavior out there. Someone should ask the AAA if the guy in the pickup was out to save any gas by "drafting" -- obviously not even thinking about it, given the way he blasted past the truck when it finally moved over. If AAA had any PR clue at all they'd launch a massive anti-tailgating campaign and teach the motoring public how to smooth out congestion and frustration with simple behavior and spacing changes. |
When the order is reversed, it's about ten times more dangerous. You could probably write your own captions for some of these, too. Or you could just phone in to their dispatchers; I'm sure they'd love to hear about this. What about that four seconds minimum buffer that the FMCSA and many other organizations advocate, as told to me by one of their Share the Road exhibitors who's also an OTR driver? |
Despite one or two by-choice slower stretches, I clocked off about a
mile a minute most of the way and passed the Ohio
border that evening showing a "moving average" of 55.3 MPH on the GPS
and an MPG of exactly 60.0 in the car's display. That includes all the
slow-rolling getting into and out of various stops, so such an average is
always lower than how fast anyone thinks they drove. That's also with an
altitude rise from 50 to 920 feet overall, since the bulk of the country is at
a considerably higher elevation than near-coastal New England, and there was
some amount of prevailing-westerly headwind.
I overnighted in some random rest-stop and reached Sandusky OH early in the morning. Clearly, much of Sandusky's infrastructure is dedicated to keeping the Cedar Point amusement park operational -- and that's reflected in their roads. Only if you take a tiny, almost through-the-orange-cones offshoot in the left lane here do you get into the town itself! Everything else heads for the park, with huge signs and special lanes to handle the volume. I missed this the first time and had to wiggle my way back through places that looked like blocked-off construction sites to see the town proper. |
Finally I went back up to the motel and raided a nearby AAA office for some new maps [well, they're still good for something], and then met up with Jay and his parents. We all piled into his Prius and left mine at the motel to save on parking costs, and got in early enough to park reasonably close to the admission gate. |
I didn't do too many pictures in the park, although I did keep the camera
with me. It was quite hot that day and I had it hung around me *under*
my shirt to help ensure it wouldn't fly away on a vigorous ride. But that
meant that it and the strap spent most of the day stuck to my soggy body, and
was very hard to actually shift around and bring out to use. I had this
little fantasy of getting some from-coaster action shots [like they tell you
not to try] but there was really no way it would have worked with my setup.
That's okay, since
other people
have raised rollercoaster image-capture to a fine science and I'm sure
many more examples can be found with some creative searching.
Anyway, I thought this emergency-access stair up to Raptor was visually interesting. Now all I gotta do is learn to hold the camera straight. |
Here's said big screen, which they project on during the evening laser/fireworks/multimedia shows. I was amused to see these Mac 700s mounted in weather domes, although one of them seems to be missing. Not likely to be one of the more frequently photographed items in the park, to be sure, just some amusement for the production-tech folks back home. These units are all the rage these days, apparently. |
However, it seems much more appropriate to drop a real ship into it instead. |
The tangled lower loops of Mantis struck me as somewhat artsy, even through the fence. You can see the first drop of Millennium way behind it. |
The longest wait by far was for Top Thrill Dragster, which is the tallest
big yellow loop in the earlier pix and was down most of the day. Occasionally
rumors would spread that it would open soon and bunches of people lined
up outside its closed gate, but that was for naught. Eventually it *did*
open late in the day and we queued up, but it kept having control trouble of
some sort. We decided that dammit, we'd gotten this far, and we'd stick it
out and wait. From our ill-informed standpoint of about halfway through the
stated two-hour line it sounded like the stuff that sequences dragster sound
effects with the ride's operation wasn't doing so -- we postulated that they
could certainly run the thing without that, since once that sucker launches
the last thing you're thinking about is a bunch of speakers making engine and
tire-squeal noises. Eventually they got it sorted out and we eventually
made it up to the front.
It is basically a railgun you sit on, using the new breed of linear induction motor that is becoming popular in the coaster industry, which accelerates the car to 120 mph in some idiotically short time and gaining enough kinetic energy to turn upward and *coast* over a 420-foot hump unassisted from that point on. [Sometimes it doesn't quite make it, and returns backwards -- the ride accomodates this.] That crests the highest structure in the park by far, almost in freefall. After screaming vertically down and leveling back out to streak toward certain doom, the electric braking kicks in for a stop almost as abrupt as the launch was. It's like the ultimate "pulse and glide" machine, except that they *squander* all that energy at the end. The braking system is a series of vertical aluminum vanes sticking up off the track that basically do the eddy-current thing with strong magnets in the car to damp the motion. After the car finally passes, the aluminum fins sit there with plenty of heat shimmer coming off the top -- no effort is made to save any of that claimed 10,000 horsepower used to launch the car. Oh well. Theme-park rides are probably one of the last things on the list to be "greened". I'd love to see something like this with about a mile more track bolted on to usefully convert all that extra energy into more gravitation-vector entertainment, but frankly it's pretty amazing how Cedar Point has already sandwiched the runs of its 15 or so rollercoasters onto the island and still has any room for any people. Maybe something run out over the water... but of course the waiting time would be *four* hours for something like that and it would be a huge project to build. Even with the long waits I think we got ourselves sufficiently roller-coastered out over the course of the day, not to mention mildly fried despite the sunscreen, and eventually made our way out the exit. Definitely a worthwhile trip, as Cedar Point is one of the major coaster destinations and I'd never been before. Jay and his family settled into the motel for the night while I briefly borrowed the shower in their room, grabbed a quick sandwich at the place next door and headed off into the evening, thinking to put at least some of the next stretch to Madison behind me before sleeping. For expedience I got onto the I-80 tollway at this point but did less than an hour before pulling into a rest-stop that was fairly new, huge, squeaky-clean and almost completely deserted. I decided that was good enough and tucked into the berth for the night.
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Seriously, this country needs a firm
smack upside the head
with regard to how we drive. In relatively recent years it has turned into
a real horror show out there, noticed particularly sharply by the members
of the
hypermiler
community who tend to be much more aware of what's around them. America needs
to wake up, get off the phone, and pay attention to what they're doing, without
all this "me-me-me-first" vehicular threatening bullshit. Especially when
they're calling themselves professional drivers.
These clowns are what can mar an otherwise perfectly enjoyable roadtrip and turn stretches of it into a nightmare gauntlet that makes you sometimes wonder how you ever get there alive. We supposedly have laws against reckless endangerment with a vehicle, and it's high time to put them to work. Police departments keep complaining that they don't have enough personnel to deal with it, perhaps without realizing that handled properly, these relatively serious and easily-proven violations could fund their own enforcement efforts and allow hiring and equipping of more traffic officers. The real challenge is to have it ultimately cause positive change in the target drivers rather than have it just be a purely punitive thing that people simply try to avoid. A sense of active cooperation and responsibility for the common good is what it's going to take, and America has largely forgotten how to do that. Trucking company dispatchers and safety officers *do* want to hear the reports from the road, because it's their only way of knowing what's going on. I've called in my share of bad actors and for balance, have even called in a few *good* ones and asked "this is great, can you get all your drivers to follow this guy's example?" [And for the record, I find somewhere to stop before making said calls, where I can review and discuss captured info at leisure. Yes, sometimes it makes my trip longer, but for a worthwhile cause.] Either way the people back at the trucking or service-provider companies have always been cordial and say they'll get right on taking misbehavior issues up with the drivers in question. Everybody knows the *theory* on what the right thing to do is, drivers just get too caught up in that common mythology that tailgating and being pushy somehow gets them there faster. It doesn't, or maybe only by a very slender margin, and the increased risk to themselves, everyone around them, and their own professional image far outweighs any perceived time/miles advantage. |
Another astounding idiocy about Illinois is its tollways; like some other states now they have *unattended* exact-change-only lanes so if you haven't bought into their privacy-invasion "iPass" or "iZoom" system and don't have exact change, they force you to just blow through the toll and try to remember to contact a badly-designed website later and pay after the fact. This is a *horrendous* setup for traveling out-of-staters who have no idea what they're getting into when they jump on an otherwise innocuous-looking interstate. Fortunately I managed to scrounge up enough coin, but it was close. Really, if they're going to charge for passage on parts of the US interstate system, they should be prepared to handle all forms of US currency and cheaping out on hiring toll personnel [or even just installing bill scanners, like any modern self-checkout lane at a store] is no excuse. |
I went inside and found the early arrivals, and then a bunch of us got to work and assembled up a couple hundred attendee packets. |
Later I went over to the nearby campground and got set up along with the other folks who opted for the cheap-sleep route. |
The mosquitoes were *vicious* all weekend -- as soon as dusk fell it was almost impossible to stay outside. Fortunately I was able to rig my window screens before they descended too badly, and dive into the protection of the car after running back from the shower. As long as no hint of rain was in the forecast, I had nice cross-ventilation at night. |
Friday morning brought the MPG competition, based out of Olin-Turville park
again. A few local press people showed up but it wasn't nearly as well-covered
as last year. No major networks this time,
I don't think.
Still, it has become standard practice in the morning before any of the contestant runs, to put members of the press into a car, give them some basics on efficient driving, and let them run the course to see how they do. They can do this with or without an advisory copilot along, their choice. I got teamed up with one who wanted some coaching, we jumped in one of the dealer-supplied Priuses, force-charged the pack to help get warmed up, and out we went. |
And my journalistic journeyman did quite well, especially for never having
driven a Prius before! Note the disparity between the car and the
Scangauge
below in the storage compartment -- I have no idea how the Scangauge was set
up or calibrated, but nonetheless we came back with some pretty good numbers
all round.
Now I'll admit I was doing a healthy part of his job for him -- watching the terrain, eyeballing the map, keeping track of what was coming up behind us, lighting the 4-way flashers when needed, gesturing over the roof to get people to go around, advising my driver on where to start a glide over this hill and oh by the way watch your RPM which is getting a little high, and see that sign waaay up ahead on the right -- that's where we turn so you want to get there without using the brakes if possible and that rise at the end should help stop us... Fairly soon his brain was full -- nothing against anyone new to the game, but he began to realize that most of us who had gathered for Hybridfest routinely keep track of all this stuff at once by ourselves on a daily basis. Besides a nicely executed run with some help from me, he also gained a deeper understanding of just how *aware* hypermilers are of all their surroundings and because of that they are hands-down the safest drivers on the road. |
As the official runs got started, Ron from Linear-Logic was on hand to make
sure everyone's Scangauges were set up and reset correctly. Including mine,
which I hadn't worked with at all until then so I had no idea what I was doing
and just let him punch the buttons and trusted him to make it accurate. Given
that they were running sort of a weird calculation offset in all these units,
I suspect that if I had also reset the car I would have shown a somewhat better
number there -- but heck, the idea is to have fun so I wasn't particularly
worried about it.
Since then I have dug into the Scangauge and its capabilities in much more detail. But I still have no clue how to best calibrate the tank offset percentage, and I doubt that anyone else really has it reliably right for a Prius yet. |
Hybrids pretty much owned the park that day. The big pavilion is in use almost every weekend, frequently for weddings. |
George Gladic's plug-in Prius conversion, using one of the Plug-In Supply Cal-cars style kits with lead-acid. He had a lot of info about this and gave a talk on some of his observations, although he's finding himself having to do a few hacks here and there to improve the system. |
Then I went around and raised the back seat and removed the the panel over
the battery pack service plug, and after checking that the vehicle was off,
pulled it. And noted how remarkably similar, nay, *identical*, it is to the
service plug in a Prius. Hmm, I wonder where GM is getting its hybrid parts?
At this point Kristin looked like she was just about to lose it, but she managed to barely cling to her professionalism as I put everything back together and turned the conversation to something more mainstream like interior luggage space.
(Image from seftonm) |
Meanwhile, Alexandra from GM engineering was getting a stern talking-to by Wayne, probably about all the fuel-sucking pigs on the market... |
Dinner was once again catered by Quaker Steak & Lube with ice cream from Culver's. |
I left the camera running in two-second timelapse-movie mode over the MPG awards, and then picked out some of the better frames out of the .AVI later. Presented here without annotation, because I certainly can't remember all of who's who! I think Evan captured this much more thoroughly but I figured I'd take a backup just in case. |
We re-parked outside the fair area and went back into the mercifully air-conditioned hall for the banquet. |
Felix Kramer, one of the original Cal-Cars guys, gave a short but poignant talk. |
The next day I spent the morning at the hotel giving my talk [again] and
listening to some others, and then headed to the Alliant again. Part of the
Dane County fair includes bands at night, so they'd set up a pretty reasonable
stage in the middle. So here are some obligatory "how it's set up" shots
for the techies. Pretty basic on the lighting, but then again that roof
probably has a fairly stringent weight limit and six-bars aren't particularly
heavy.
[That is *not* Jesse at the sound board, despite a certain resemblance...] |
I didn't really even think to take any pictures inside the hall that day, since others have covered the fest in much more detail. But that's where I spent most of the afternoon, including a nice long chat with Ron deLong about CANbus stuff, and then helped the staffers with teardown and loadout at the end. |
Go to Part 2: local Wisconsin tourism and slightly beyond
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