Real Time View

I was walking to the coffee shop this morning and as I was about to step onto the crosswalk I heard a thunderous crunch. Heading the other way across the intersection was a small car that had driven through a deep drainage culvert running across the street. The impact from driving through this dip was a tearing noise that sounded very much like something under the car was no longer attached. An expensive dip in the road! And it made me recall the roads I have travelled recently as I have crisscrossed the south west. Readers may have already checked out my social blog buckle-up-travel where on August 26th I wrote a blog posting “ Crisscrossing the Continental Divide … ”. Many of the highways I took were in pretty poor shape. On the interstates, it was a different story as nearly every bridge was under repair, but driving any road other than the interstate was fraught with dangers. Washouts, potholes, and crumbling edges pounded the car continuously and often had you peering off the end

I will be spending this weekend in Austin, Texas, where I will be mixing a little business with some keenly anticipated downtime. Connect Executive Committee is spending the weekend in meetings there, and thinking about those volunteers - giving their free time to the User Group - brought back a lot of memories. Austin has great barbeque and I am looking forward to enjoying at least one night of dining at one of these establishments, before the Exec meetings start, so I have at least one of this weekend evenings with my dedicated-to-Connect family! I have been visiting Texas for more than thirty years, and one of the first trips I recall taking was during the hot summer months of 1977 to participate in the Datacom User Group meeting in Dallas, Texas. I had just recommended installing the Datacom product suite to my company, and the folks at Insight Datacom Corp (IDCorp) had invited me to speak. The picture I have elected to include here is of me during one of my earliest visits to th

Celebrating my first year of blogging to the NonStop community blog, Real Time View ... Over the past couple of weeks, I have spent most weekends out on the highways somewhere between Simi Valley and Boulder. I haven’t travelled exactly the same route twice during all that time. For readers who may be interested in a more complete description take a look at my other blog site  http://www.buckle-up-travel.blogspot.com/ next week. This past weekend, I decided to travel back to Boulder along the Interstate system that now closely follows the “Mother Road” – Route 66. The picture I have included here was taken of me “standing on a corner, in Winslow, Arizona” – a site made famous in the song by the Eagles “Take it Easy”. It’s a 20 miles off the Interstate with next to nothing there, but I had always wanted to do it. I spent a few dollars on a cap and a T Shire before returning to the Interstate and heading to Albuquerque. Back in the late ‘30s, over a million people left townships i

I have spent the past few weekends travelling back and forth between the front ranges of Colorado and the coastal valleys of Southern California. And even though these trips have become routine, they are proving to be anything but boring or tiring. The changes in elevation that you drive through, offer some spectacular scenery and the picture that I have included here is of me with my back turned away from one of the more scenic sites as I check up on my mail from my Blackberry. Between the different mountain chains forming the backbones of Colorado and Utah, there are incredibly beautiful elevated planes of stone that push up from the river canyons. As National Geographic has reported “sandstone buttes seem to whirl in place on the Colorado Plateau in Utah.” These areas of high ground, with varying amounts of level surfaces, have become a major feature of the region and groupings of them seem to be giant stepping stones leading up into the Continental Divide visible on the Eastern hor