Indiana or Bust: Day 1

I hit the road this morning around 9am, and just pulled off 40 miles into Utah for the night. After driving 12 hours and 742 miles, I'm about a third of the way to Indiana (total is ~2,250mi). Everything is ahead of schedule because I'm (so far) lucky with the weather as the roads have been dry and look to remain that way ahead. I figured I'd push further today just in case there are storms or ice later on.

Some photos from today

Why doesn't Apple just put CarPlay on iPhones as an optional driving mode?

This 2003 Jetta Wagon doesn't have CarPlay and it was bugging me for such a long trip so I dropped into a Walmart and grabbed a tiny 5" CarPlay monitor thing for $99 to view maps while I drive and know when I get texts that can be read to me. It's so small it reminds me of having a Garmin or TomTom GPS unit in the early 2000s.

What's weird is the 5" screen is surprisingly functional and not too limiting, and then a thought hit me. You know what has a larger screen than this? Every modern iPhone sold by Apple.

I use CarPlay so much I usually bury my phone in a center console anyway, relying on the screen to do everything I need. Today I realized it's silly people have to buy one of these $99 things for older cars. Why can't they just turn their phones sideways and let the audio still output to bluetooth or via cables to the existing stereo while the iPhone can act as the mic to let you conduct calls or dictate texts to Siri?

It'd be safer than being in an old car and fumbling with your phone trying to pull up maps or texts. An iPhone in CarPlay mode could lock out all the phone and texting functions and act as a display you can only interact with via voice or very large buttons. It'd probably help them sell more "Max" sized phones too. Seems like a slam dunk/low lift kind of project for Apple, no?

Still the greatest

DJ Format's We Know Something You Don't Know showed up in one of my playlists and I remembered it not only has one of the best hip-hop videos of all time:

It also has one of the best rhymes in hip-hop by Chali 2na:

But until then, me an' the technati gon' play
I cradle-rob the mic like Rebecca De Mornay

Gutless but not dangerous

I was worried this car would be a liability when getting on freeways or going up hills because it's slow and I am pretty sure the turbo needs another rebuild. While the tiny diesel did great on gas mileage (~40mpg), it slows down quickly any time the road creeps upwards. Fortunately, I found it behaves exactly like the huge semi-trucks loaded down with heavy trailers that I'm sharing these same roads with. When I had to climb the Blue Mountains on the eastern side of Oregon, as I dropped from 70mph to 60 and then 50 as it struggled even though I was flooring it, I ended up in truck lanes next to a bunch of trucks doing the exact same thing.

Not once today did I block other drivers or get into any dangerous situations, as I could always jump into the slow lanes with trucks and keep up with their speeds. I guess that's just how overloaded diesel engines work whether they're big or small.

Pushing beyond

Tomorrow I'm headed across Wyoming and into Nebraska, which will be all new territory to me once I veer off the path to Salt Lake City that I've already driven half a dozen times.

It reminds me of being a kid and how my crazy parents never took any personal vacation days, relying instead on federal holidays and we always, always took long road trips during those small breaks as far as we could and still get back in time for their work.

Our biggest trip each year was usually a rare four day holiday like Thanksgiving, and any three day weekends in Summer meant we'd be on the road at 5am on Friday and get home late on Sundays. We did this dozens and dozens of times throughout my childhood and I've been to almost every corner of California, but I'm also keenly aware of how far you can drive in a day or two from SoCal, spend a day sightseeing, then high tail it back.

Growing up, heading to Las Vegas or most of Arizona was easy, but taking trips to San Francisco was rare and Lake Tahoe was always our big four day trip destination whenever federal holidays worked out. I still remember the first time I went to scope out my own apartment in San Francisco in the year 2000 because inside my head the whole time I was thinking "oh shit, this is as far into California as we ever went as kids, I have no idea what it's like north of here."

Onwards and upwards

I hope I don't jinx it but the Weather On The Way app says the remaining 1,600 miles are all dry roads without any major alerts or delays so I might just luck out and get to Indiana without too much trouble. Fingers crossed. 🤞

Next: Day 2 is afoot.