Pics of this leg.

Leaving Grand Canyon was uneventful, other than having our tanks still frozen from the cold nights, making it difficult to dump on the way out. We left south through Flagstaff and headed to Phoenix. Phoenix and its surroundings are strange—there are more strip malls here than I’ve ever seen in my life. If you want a pet food store, fear not, because there’s one in every third strip mall. We stopped at a Best Buy and picked up some things we forgot (card reader to get pics off of the camera, etc.) and after getting an appointment to get our batteries changed out (see Laid-Off Detour #1), we spent the day doing errands like laundry and more shopping. It was amazing to be in 92-degree weather after having just been in the teens the previous evening—no worries about frozen tanks anymore!

That evening we headed south towards Tucson. We pulled in to Catalina State Park, which was one of the nicer campgrounds we’ve stayed at. It was RV-friendly with partial hook-ups, looked nice and was cheap. Our neighbors were very nice and came over to visit the baby, see the Airstream and gave us fresh grapes. We planned to hit Saguaro National Park the next day.

Saguaro National Park is pretty, covered in its namesake cacti. The nature walks weren’t dog-friendly, and it was too hot to leave Lucy anywhere (we don’t leave her in the trailer in case a fuse blows or something, killing the air conditioner and turning the Airstream into an oven). After checking out the nature center, we took a driving tour, which was pretty nice. It turns out that the #2 threat there (after rattlesnakes) are freaking killer bees. They’re all over the place and hyper-aggressive. They attacked the truck most every time we stopped to look at something. The only way to get them to stop attacking is to run .25.-.50 mile from their hive. We never saw a hive, but saw tons of the inch-and-a-half long bees. They looked like scary large wasps to me.

Anyway, there were tons of interesting cacti. The saguaro are huge, some 20-feet tall, and they cover the landscape. Some cacti are in bloom now, but the saguaro don’t bloom for another month or so. I managed to get out of the truck and snag some pics without offending the bees, and escaped unstung. :) We decided to leave the next morning, heading for Tombstone.

Tombstone is the location of the shootout at the OK Corral. It’s a tourist trap, to be sure, but was worth a stop. The most interesting thing here is the Tombstone Courthouse Museum, where they have tons of historical items from the old west, including Wyatt Earp’s pistols. Wyatt’s house still stands, and is a for-pay museum, although we didn’t pay to go in. Fremont Street, the site of the famous gunfight, is still a dirt street, but is now lines with Disneyland-esque buildings which entice tourists with saloon food, western wear and ice cream. We walked up and down, getting rave reviews for our cute baby and nice dog, but didn’t stay long.

We left after a couple of hours, heading towards Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico.

This detour, part of our stay in Grand Canyon, requires some fairly dull background of how an RV works:

There are three power sources in an Airstream: 1. Propane tanks (ours has 2 tanks, each holding about 8-gallons, which is typically good for several days of normal use. The propane powers most important things: the kitchen, including the refrigerator, and the furnace). 2. batteries (which provide 12 V current for lights, fans, and the stereo). 3. 120/240 V AC shore power (provided externally). When you hear of a campground having “full hookups”, that includes AC shore power, which charges the trailer’s 12 V batteries and provides power to the household plugs, thus enabling the TV and air conditioner. RVs frequently use gas or propane generators when there is no shore power available. This works well, but uses fuel and makes noise (most campgrounds have restrictions on when you can run generators because of the noise). We have 2 pretty quiet Honda generators that can run in tandem providing all the power the trailer needs for 15-20 hours on 2 gallons of gas.

When we got Minnie, our motorhome, it came with two 12 V batteries, but ones that are supposed to be suited to RV usage, not starting cars. The batteries were never very good, and we swapped them for two 6 V golf cart batteries wired serially to look like a large 12 V battery. This worked very well, and we never had a problem with them. Unfortunately the Airstream’s battery box wasn’t big enough for the taller 6 V batteries, so we kept the two new batteries that it came with, which were much like the ones in the Minnie. And they sucked again. On top of that, though, I left the trailer plugged in since we bought it, thinking that its charger was sophisticated enough to keep the batteries charged without frying them. I was wrong, leading to some fried batteries. They worked, but even more poorly than before.

That’s enough of all that background. Remember the night it snowed and was freezing cold? Well, up until then, we’d run the generators when it was allowed, charging the batteries. When we had left home, I’d filled the propane, but one tank wouldn’t take any more, so it just had whatever was left from the last trip, which clearly wasn’t a lot. I didn’t worry too much about it, because we’d never completely finished one tank before finding a place to refill. So we had just over one tank of propane, and two generators full of gas. We ran the generators more than normal because of the shitty batteries. We ran the furnace much more than normal, because of the cold-ass weather. You can see a problem coming, I’m sure.

During the evening, we noticed the batteries were not doing well, the cold weather hurting their already shitty performance. We turned off everything in the trailer except the furnace and went to bed. The problem came when the batteries died completely during the night. You might remember back to how I said that the furnace runs on propane, not electricity, and think we’d be OK. Unfortunately the blower for the furnace and the thermostat that controls it both run on electricity. So when the batteries died, so effectively did our heat.

The baby was fine, cuddled nicely between two warm parents. But let me tell you that any piece of us that wasn’t covered with a blanket was fucking freezing cold by morning. 8 AM rolled around, and I had to haul my ass out of the warm bed and out into ice and snow to start the generators to get the heat back on. And, you guessed it, we’d run the generators so much to compensate for the batteries that they were out of gas. So I had to load the generators into the truck and drive to the gas station to refill them. That sucked, but the heat was back on and we’d survived.

The next night, we knew the batteries were on their last legs, and so really ran the generators as much as possible and kept our use of battery power to an absolute minimum, since the forecast was an even colder 17 degrees. The batteries died again, but we made it farther into the next morning and it wasn’t as bad as the first time. I went out at 8 AM again to start the generators. They kicked on but soon after—you probably guessed it—the propane ran out. We made it through, but it was clear we were going to have to be more on top of our power. We had the propane refilled (and this time, the second tank filled fine).

Seriously cold weather uses serious energy that we weren’t prepared for, obviously.

Upon leaving Grand Canyon and getting back to civilization (around Flagstaff), we decided to have our batteries swapped for the good ones. This required us to have the battery box modified slightly, so we began making calls to places in the area. There are a ton of RV places in and around Phoenix, and we found one that could accommodate us and they got it done in one day. While they worked on that, we picked up some other miscellaneous things we figured out we’d forgotten, including a car charger for our iPhones—yes, another battery problem. We had a car charger, but the one that we had in the truck stopped working and our phones were dying.

With big new batteries in the Airstream and our phones juiced up, we are finally no longer power deficient. :)

We started fairly slowly—there’s a lot to arrange before leaving for a 5-week trip that you don’t have to do as much of before a smaller trip. For instance, we canceled our trash collection for a month. We have 2 people looking in on the cats (since it’s a long time and it’s best to not over-burden just one friend—thanks again, Beau). We packed everything we could think of (knowing that’s really impossible) and set out from San Jose on Tuesday, March 31 at just after 2, heading generally towards the Grand Canyon.

We made our way through California through Gilroy, down I-5 and across US 40. Given that we have a baby and a dog with us and are towing a trailer, we move more slowly that we might otherwise, but we knew that when we decided to take the trip. We made it as far as Ludlow, a bit shy of the Arizona border. We pulled off in a rest stop to sleep for the night, which is a bit noisy, but otherwise fine (and free!). The next day, we got up, ate breakfast (one of the joys of having an RV for a trip like this) and made it the rest of the way to Grand Canyon.

We’d made reservations for the campground in the park through Sunday morning. One nice thing about state and federal campground is that they’re cheap—we paid $18 per night to stay right on the south rim. Accommodations that close can be easily over $300 per night. We had also packed the trailer to the gills with food from home, so we planned on eating in the trailer most meals (in fact, we only ate in a restaurant once while in the canyon, and it was easily the worst meal we had the whole time).

I’d been to the Grand Canyon before and was a bit underwhelmed. This time, with more time to explore, I enjoyed it a lot more. We did all of the free tours, which entail buses that take you along the various parts of the south rim and let you on-and-off as much as you like. The first two days, we hiked along the part goes from just above the visitors’ center to the start of the “red line”, which is a longer hike. We did that the third day, using buses to get to a lot of the points-of-interest there, and walking a little less. The Grand Canyon isn’t particularly dog-friendly—dogs (or strollers for that matter) are not allowed on the buses—but they did have a kennel that we used a little when we wanted to do something where the dog wasn’t allowed.

The weather was weird, but mostly in a good way as far as seeing the canyon goes. It was brisk the first day, but incredibly clear, leading to good views of the canyon. As we got back to camp, it started snowing, which we knew was a possibility, but it actually came down quite a bit more than was forecast. It got down to the mid-twenties that night, which led to some interesting trailer issues, which you can read about in the post (coming soon), “I need more power!”. The next night was even colder: 17 degrees. Our tanks froze, but nothing burst. Whew!

The days were cold, but not nearly as severe, and the crisp weather really made for some great views of the canyon. There are far fewer people in the canyon in the spring, and the guides indicated that the combination of the views, cooler weather and fewer people made this time of year one of the best to see the Grand Canyon. I had a good time and recommend coming this time of year if you can manage it.

Soon enough Sunday came, and we rolled towards Phoenix….

Pics are in my Grand Canyon set on Flickr.

Val and I, both being unemployed at the moment, have decided to treat this as an opportunity and are planning on leaving town for awhile. We’re loading up the Airstream now with the goal of rolling out on Tuesday. Our initial destination is the Grand Canyon, but our larger plan is to head east via the southern states, potentially getting as far as New Orleans.

We had plans to meet friends in Fruita and Moab the first week of May for a bike trip, and we now plan to meet them on the way back from this trip, which will make this about a 5-week excursion. We’re planning on being very flexible and taking more time if we find something really interesting and so aren’t putting too many expectations on distance.

We should be well-connected technologically-speaking—I’ve equipped the Airstream with a WiFi router that uses a 3 G wireless card to give us a mobile internet station, and of course we’ll have our phones. We’ll start looking for jobs remotely on the second half of our trip and hopefully have some interviews queued when we get back.

Anyway, we’re excited (and of course a little nervous) about such a large trip and the unstructured nature of our lives at this point, but we both think it’s something we’ll look back on as having been worthwhile, and hopefully that will bear out. Hopefully we’ll be able to, pardon the cliché, turn these lemons into lemonade.

I got this from the 1password support forums:

To enable 1password in Safari 4 Beta:

- Quit Safari - Locate 1Password in your /Applications folder - Ctrl-click > Show Package Contents - Contents > Resources > SupportedBrowsers.plist - Root > Safari > MaxBundleVersion > Change value to 5528.16 - Start Safari

Works great for me.

UPDATE:

I didn’t mention this in the main post, but the “1P” button doesn’t show up, but the keyboard shortcuts still do. Command-\ is your friend. (Thanks, Etay.)

UPDATE 2:

There’s a new beta of 1Password that supports Safari 4 beta. Go to Preferences → Updates, make sure you have “Include Beta Versions” checked and update.

I completely agree with John Gruber about the Best Picture Oscar. Well, at least I agree with the premise that he puts forth—I haven't seen WALL-E, so I can't really comment directly about that, although it's definitely on my Netflix queue. The Oscars is a popularity contest, not among people who love movies necessarily, but of the movie-making establishment. This means that the process in inherently political more than a straight vote on the absolute merits of the movie itself.

All that said, I had even less skin in the game last night. I hadn't seen any of the movies that were nominated. Most of them came out late in the year, after Ainsley came along, making it hard for me to get to the theater. Either that, or I didn't care about the movie. Either way, not a lot for me on this year's version of the Oscars.

Back in the day, my friend Todd and I used to play Street Fighter II in just about any venue we could, usually the local 7-11 or bowling alley. Now, many years later, Street Fighter IV is out for the home systems.

Despite my fond memories of SF2, I didn't pre-order SF4. The other entries in the SF series just never captured my attention like the second one did. But after reading glowing review after glowing review, and also because I was rained in for most of the weekend, I ran out and bought it.

The verdict? It's marvelous. The gameplay is very similar to what I remember of SF2, but it's been completely remade with a modern aesthetic and modern specs (it looks great on an HDTV). Aside from some really hideous character fight intros, it's a pretty game, and visually arresting. The new "black splatter" theme that adorns the game and its new "focus" moves is neat. It's fun to play these classic characters on a modern system (in my case, the Xbox 360) that out-powers a handful of the original arcade machines.

My only regret now is that I didn't pre-order it and also get the real arcade-style joystick, which is now sold-out everywhere. The gamepads the youngsters all use these days don't cut it for an old joystick-loving fogey like me.

This is the RV that we really need for the bike trips. No problem camping at the top of Gooseberry Mesa in this one!

(Via Squob.)

Not that I'd trade our 25-footer for one, but Airstream has just introduced a new European-specific model, the Bambi 422. Very cute. Apparently, it's lighter and narrower to accommodate the roads and lighter tow vehicles in Europe.

Dave

sent an email out about this year's version of the

Fall mountain biking trip

about a week ago. Val and I have taken our RV (

the Minnie

at the time) for the last couple of years, but was figured to be down for the count because of the new baby. The trip usually starts in Vegas, moves to

Gooseberry Mesa

(near St. George, UT) and then on to Fruita, CO and lastly to

Moab

, UT. This version is no different, although it is a bit later, being at the very end of April/beginning of May.

Since joining Veodia just a year ago, I've taken a bike trip to British Columbia (North Shore, Squamish) and used the rest of my time off after

the birth of my daughter

. Luckily, I've recovered enough time to string together 5 weekdays off. Val was cool with bringing Ainsley along, so we're going to pull

the Airstream

to meet the group for part of the Fruita/Moab legs. I can't wait.

Because of the dearth of vacation time, I had written off Gooseberry. I love Gooseberry (it's certainly in my top 10 places to ride), but I've been there the last couple of years in a row and haven't been to Moab in probably 5. I used to make an annual pilgrimage to Moab, so I definitely miss it.

Then, things started falling into place for me to be able to fly out for a weekend of riding in Gooseberry. Many thanks to Dave for offering to schlep my bike out to Utah so it'll be there for the weekend and also for doing pickup/dropoff duty at the airports.

It's going to be a most excellent spring!

I haven’t seen it first hand yet, but TiVo’s new search interface looks good. I wish they’d give the whole interface a polish, with HD in mind.

Also, all the new features, like Netflix, are obviously written in some other way from the main interface. They look different, take a long time to start and are slow. It would be nice to see them pull the whole thing together into one nice package.

Alex has always been infamous for his biffs on the bike, but now he’s been immortalized in the lastest issue of Mountain Cyclist (PDF link), the newsletter for ROMP. (Alex is on page 3.)

That shot is from our recent trip to Canada, where we were accompanied by ROMP’s president, who was apparently well-positioned for that shot. I should say that, as perilous as it looks in that shot, it was (as always) steeper and bigger in person than it looks in video or photos.

James Duncan Davidson, who also recently bought a D700, has a good blog post about renting lenses. I’ll have to try this before laying out cash on some of those pricey Nikkors.

Loving it so far. More soon.

JRuby is, as you might guess by the name, a port of the Ruby interpreter (which is written in C) to Java. Some benefits of this include easy access to Java libraries in addition to Ruby ones, but the main benefit seems to be the additional deployment options. In an organization where Java is a standard deployment platform, it can be easier to get a project written in Ruby through Congress if it’s able to run in a JVM environment that the company is already comfortable with.

As you can imagine, Sun is one of those companies. As Java’s creators, they’ve got an enormous investment in Java, but they’ve also been investing heavily in Open Source projects, and they hired the 2 lead authors of the JRuby project to work on it full-time as Sun employees. Now Sun has allowed a rewrite of an existing codebase in JRuby and Rails.

That’s some bleeding-edge risk there, but it looks like it’s going well so far. I certainly wouldn’t go that far yet, but I’m happy to see other Ruby interpreters gaining traction.