Report from Chico
Nov. 7th, 2019 08:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nosrednaydujWe ended up driving back to my parents' house a day early; Mom had another visit with her sister on Tuesday evening for her goodbye.
Man is the drive up through the desert boring! I traded off driving with my stepfather. We're both kind of control freaks about driving so it's hard to be a passenger :-) I got a lot of passing practice! Cuz trucks go 60 and everyone else (including me) wants to go 80 and so there's a lot of passing.
Their car has adaptive cruise control! So I got to play with it. Turns out, for long boring stretches, I want a much longer following distance than it gives me, when I've come up behind a slower car and haven't decided yet it's time to try passing. Maybe the distance is configurable. For near town moderately busy freeway traffic situations, I agreed with its following distance and let it pick. It also turns out that if I'm going to put my foot on the gas, I want to have complete control so I turned it off until I was done with my pass and had settled back near the original set point before I hit "resume".
Last night we stayed in Reno at a casino, had a nice dinner and a great breakfast buffet. I won $8. Big gambler here. My mom won $100! I let them pay for lunch.
Today we finished the drive: the part through the mountains was pretty, in a switch-back-y worried-about-the-rockfalls way. Again we shared the driving load. When I wasn't driving, I very much enjoyed the Feather River watercourse, it has beautiful boulder formations. We also drove by the epicenter of last year's Camp Fire. Lots of dead trees, lots of stumps where they've cut down dead trees, and in between, lots of new undergrowth (getting ready to burn in a few years, I suppose.)
My aunt is still alive. We get daily reports from Las Vegas. They're not planning a real funeral, so we kind of had a "pre-wake" or something with family on Tuesday.
I fly home Saturday. I'll spend Friday with my mom, getting our nails done and stuff.
Man is the drive up through the desert boring! I traded off driving with my stepfather. We're both kind of control freaks about driving so it's hard to be a passenger :-) I got a lot of passing practice! Cuz trucks go 60 and everyone else (including me) wants to go 80 and so there's a lot of passing.
Their car has adaptive cruise control! So I got to play with it. Turns out, for long boring stretches, I want a much longer following distance than it gives me, when I've come up behind a slower car and haven't decided yet it's time to try passing. Maybe the distance is configurable. For near town moderately busy freeway traffic situations, I agreed with its following distance and let it pick. It also turns out that if I'm going to put my foot on the gas, I want to have complete control so I turned it off until I was done with my pass and had settled back near the original set point before I hit "resume".
Last night we stayed in Reno at a casino, had a nice dinner and a great breakfast buffet. I won $8. Big gambler here. My mom won $100! I let them pay for lunch.
Today we finished the drive: the part through the mountains was pretty, in a switch-back-y worried-about-the-rockfalls way. Again we shared the driving load. When I wasn't driving, I very much enjoyed the Feather River watercourse, it has beautiful boulder formations. We also drove by the epicenter of last year's Camp Fire. Lots of dead trees, lots of stumps where they've cut down dead trees, and in between, lots of new undergrowth (getting ready to burn in a few years, I suppose.)
My aunt is still alive. We get daily reports from Las Vegas. They're not planning a real funeral, so we kind of had a "pre-wake" or something with family on Tuesday.
I fly home Saturday. I'll spend Friday with my mom, getting our nails done and stuff.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-08 04:05 pm (UTC)