November 2021

Image 1 caption: Andy Rooney, and a fairly typical jibe of his

You may remember Andy Rooney. He was the white-haired, unruly-eyebrowed curmudgeon who offered cranky weekly commentary on “60 Minutes,” years ago. He didn’t always use this exact phrase, but in my mind, his remarks always opened — in his characteristically nasal, whining sort of voice — with, “Did you ever wonder why…?”

I’ve thought about Andy Rooney quite a bit while we’ve been on the road. Sooo many people and situations behave in ways and for reasons completely alien to me, and often annoyingly so (milk-of-human-kindness though I try to be). Know what I mean?

Consider, for example, vending machines. Specifically, for my purposes here, the sort of vending machines with a glass front — so you can see the contents, but must actually deposit money in order to get something: a bottle of water, a can of tea, a, well, a Yoo-Hoo or whatever. (Aside: we do not drink Yoo-Hoo.) It seems fair trade, right? Make your selection, pay your money, get the product.

Until going on this trip, I never thought much about these vending machines. Since then, though, I’ve noticed them quite a bit, and not merely out of curiosity. Here’s why — and I direct your attention to the photo below:

Image 2 caption: two rows of bottled water and other drinks in a vending machine.

Imagine that you yourself have stocked this vending machine. Proud of yourself, probably. It all looks so, well, so neat, eh? All the bottles and cans are leaning the same way, at about the same angle. And you’ve even been clever enough to turn the bottles of Gatorade (bottom right) upside-down, so they don’t get jammed by the coiled wire which dispenses them when their number is selected.

Now imagine that you are a consumer, with the need — at least the intention — to get a very specific sort of water out of the machine. You can see you’ve got, uh, five bottles of Saratoga and two bottles of Pellegrino to select from. Nope. You don’t want any of them. You might or might not want that oddball one, though — the one in slot #45.

The question is: what is it?

The only way to identify it is to, well, to buy the damned thing so you even know what it is you’ve just bought.

Andy Rooney would have understood.

Image 1 caption: Progress report, of a sort: this is how our trip planning/reporting software displays our route so far, through Thursday December 2. Unfortunately, you can’t interact with this version of the map at all — it’s just a screen capture — but I’ll have more info about a slightly more detailed version, below.

Yes, I know, you don’t need to remind me how long it’s been since the last post. At the same time, it’s very hard for us to believe it was less than two months ago that we left the Schenectady/Scotia NY area, bound for Vermont. That’s a lot of time in the car (and a lot of time between stops, too).

We’ve been intermittently logging our mileage along the way, sometimes recording it when we get to a stop, sometimes when we leave, sometimes forgetting to do it at all. But for what it’s worth, since leaving Greenville, NC, we’ve put about 6,000 miles on the (new) car.

The map above is a bit simplistic. I created it just by pinpointing the cities and towns where we’ve spent at least one night, and leaving the software to depict “optimal” or recommended routes. But such routes bear little relationship to reality: we often have deviated, by choice or circumstances, from the “plan.” Bad weather — and loss of GPS! — has forced us to leave highways; we’ve driven around within those destinations, quite a lot. (Y’know: grocery and other shopping, sightseeing, going out for dinner — that sort of thing.)

For a more complete picture, I sometimes check out a feature of Google Maps called the Timeline. To use it, you must be a bit, um, casual about letting your cellphone identify your location. So it’s not an option you’d want to turn on all the time. But it can be interesting! For instance, here’s my Timeline for a single day of the trip — it was the first day after we got our “new” car in August:

Image 2 caption: Google Maps is watching you (if you let it)! Basically, every time you turn a corner with your phone in your hand or pocket, the software makes a note of it, and saves it to your profile. (This is also how Google Maps knows, for example, that there’s traffic congestion ahead: all the “Google Maps on my cellphone” users are at a standstill. In other words, it’s not all creepy!)

On the map at the top of this post (Image 1 above), this appears as a single dot — and it’s the same dot for every day we spent “in” Greenville, North Carolina. Actually, though, we spent a lot of time driving (or just walking) around on that day. Which is why our actual mileage is so much higher than the straight-line distances seem to show.

(For the record, we did not actually “go to” all the labeled places in the Timeline map. They’re just points of interest, per Google Maps. We actually went on that day to Enterprise Rent-a-Car, to return the rental which our insurance company had arranged for us while we arranged to buy the new car; we drove west to the little town of Farmville, North Carolina, just to get out of town a bit; and we spent that night at the Courtyard Marriott back in Greenville. If I could zoom the Timeline map in far enough, you could even see what streets I’d walked along in Farmville, and all the wrong turns and backtracking I did on the streets of Greenville itself.)

The route-planning software I’m using lets you save its data in a form which can then be displayed in Google Maps for others to see, to zoom in on, and so forth.

Here’s what this exported Google Map looks like at the moment. (As you can see, I can customize its look a bit more; overnight stays of four nights or more are marked with green icons rather than the default blue. And Greenville, North Carolina, is marked with a “fun” auto-collision icon.)

Image 3 caption: Google Maps view — again, just a screen capture — of our travels (partially in the future, as I write this) through December 2. The gold lines are round-trip airplane flights.

You can see and interact with it (at a limited level — zooming, identifying cities and so on) via this link. Just remember: this is a map whose data has been exported from other software; the data doesn’t always come through 100% accurately. This will be especially noticeable when you zoom waaaaay in — the Google Map shows some very strange, in fact entirely imaginary, routes!

More coming up soon as this blog transitions to less of a day-by-day travelogue (you can see how well that’s worked out), and more of a “Here’s something we’ve noticed during the trip” record. Thanks as always for stopping by!

A New Series: Nits and Peeves (#1: Soft-Drink Vending Machines)

Wake Up! Wake Up! We’re Still Here! (Whatever “Here” Means Anymore)

Archives for November 2021