Travel Log: Kansas

We were successful in getting on the road an hour earlier than usual yesterday morning as we left Colorado Springs to head east across Kansas. We actually spent about the same amount of time on the road yesterday as we did back when we drove through the Sequoia National Park, but yesterday was SO much WORSE. At least when we spent all that time in the car going through Sequoia National Park, there were lots of twists and turns to keep me on my toes. Driving across the eastern part of Colorado and the ENTIRE state of Kansas looks like this...

Kansas

Yyyyyeah, that picture is zoomed in as far as I could go, and there isn't a turn or a bump or a hill as far as the eye can see. I'm going to take this moment to sound a little like my children and say, "This is BOOOOOOOORING!"

My impressions of Kansas:

• Flat.
• Sunflowers. (Oooh! Those are pretty, take a picture!)
• Flat.
• Corn.
• Flat.
• More Sunflowers. (Oh, hey, there are some more sunflowers! Cool!)
• Flat.
• Wheat.
• Flat.
• More Sunflowers. (My wife is sawing logs in the passenger seat by this time.)
• Flat.
• Periodic small town with the town's name emblazoned across a water tower that looks like the head of the tin-man in the Wizard of Oz.

Flipping through the radio stations, I heard:

• Country music.
• Ads for tractors.
• Country music.
• Ads for bovine medicine.
• Country music.
• Ads for herbicide and crop planning consulting.
• Fire and brimstone preacher.
• Ads for soil analysis.
• Country music.
• One radio announcer was talking about the current economic crisis bail out plan and saying that if you find yourself riding a dead horse, the corrective action is to get off the horse, not declare the horse "living impaired" and try to revive it. I thought that was pretty funny.
  

I'm kicking myself now for not digging up my Sirius receiver and antenna to bring with us on this trip. They've been sitting in a box in the trunk of my car since we moved to Hawaii, because we can't get Sirius in Hawaii.

Pit Stops

We drove up Rt. 24 to Limon where we hopped on I-70 east. About the time we arrived in Limon, I had a sudden need to get rid of the coffee I had drunk back at the hotel. We pulled into the McD's parking lot.

Trivia Question: How long does it take a 7 year old and a 4 year old to slip on a pair of Crocs and get out of the car?

A) 1 second
B) 10 seconds
C) 100 seconds
D) 1,000 seconds

With my boys, it SEEMS like D. They take forever to put their Crocs on and get out of the car.

I don't know the exact amount of time. However (comma) I DO know that it took long enough for a gargantuan BUS to pull into the parking lot and discharge like 100 old geezers who all made a direct beeline for the restrooms.

I saw them all piling off the bus and heading inside, and it was like one of those slow-motion Matrix scenes with me letting out a long, low-pitched, "nnnnnnnoooooooooooooo!" as I tried to beat the geezers to the restroom. I managed to edge my way into the middle of their line from the bus door to the front door. Then, of course, one of the urinals was out of order, so that cut the volumetric flow rate of the restroom by 33%. In the end, everything came out alright, but it made that stop considerably longer than it should have been if my boys could just put their crocs on and get out of the car.

Lunch

If given a choice where to eat while traveling, I will always opt for a local, unique place to eat over a nation-wide chain of processed food. It's a good way to experience some of the local culture and more likely to get some FRESH ingredients in the food.

I did a little bit better job planning our trip today and had some places planned to stop. I wanted to stop in Goodland, Kansas to grab a geocache there.

Goodland's main tourist attraction is this really big painting.
(Note the obligatory water tower in the background.)

I emailed the owner of the geocache to ask for a recommendation for lunch. She recommended the Crazy R Bar & Grill.

Obligatory Self Portrait in front of the Crazy R

As much as it drove my wife nuts to drive past the Wendy's and other fast-food, quick-n-easy places to eat and get back on the road, I'm glad we actually went into town and ate at the Crazy R.

It was one of those places where the locals will walk in the door, see several people they know, wave and say hi, say hi to the waitress or owner by name, and have a seat.

On the other hand, it's also the kind of place where people from out of town walk in the door and all of a sudden the place gets reeeeally quiet and everyone in the restaurant is staring at you wondering who you are and why you're in their restaurant.

It was the type of place with the "menu" printed on a small card in a vertical plastic card holder. There were things like "Chicken Gizzards" and "Rocky Mountain Oysters" on the menu. They advertised old fashioned "soda pops." I had me a real honest-to-goodness sarsparilla! I'd heard of it before and knew it was something similar to root beer, but I'd never actually seen it offered anywhere, so I had to try it.

I figured you wouldn't believe me if I didn't post a photo.

The decorations were all sorts of antique tricycles and children's riding contraptions mixed in with local historical memorabilia (farm stores sale signs, local sports jerseys and propoganda). The food came in red plastic baskets (see photo above). Overall, the food was really good and I was glad we stopped.

My wife said there were people smoking at the bar. That surprised me because normally I smell that stuff a mile away and can't stand to be in the same room. I might have turned around and left if I had smelled the cigarette smoke when we walked in the door. (Sorry Sweetie!)

Dinner

We stopped at IHOP for dinner in Salina, Kansas.

The Lord works in mysterious ways.

For some reason, He didn't want us to get to Kansas City until LATE last night. I mean, first the whole old-geezer bus at McD's earlier in the day and now IHOP.

Our waitress took our orders and left us... for 30 minutes.

I kid you not.

THIRTY minutes.

It was SO long that I was seriously considering leaving a couple of bucks on the table for the coffee and juice we had consumed and walking out. I was going to take my family through the Wendy's drive through and get back on the road.

Then the waitress showed up with our food, including a mound of cold french fries on my plate. Nice!

No matter, let's just get back on the road, okay? As we stood up to go pay our bill, a large group of special-needs adults simultaneously stood up and headed to the counter to pay their bills. Unfortunately for us, they were seated closer to the cash register than we were and got in line first. Then they each had to pay for their own meal, and they had to pay cash, and they had to count out the change... Again, like the stop at McD's earlier, this stop took us a lot longer than we thought it was going to take.

So who cares? What was the big rush to get to Kansas City?

Well, I'll tell ya. Last night was a first for me. I got to meet a fellow blogger. FastNav who writes Checks with Chart invited me to join him for a beer and share some sea stories as we passed through town. I got my family checked into the hotel and headed two blocks down the road to meet up with FastNav. I didn't get there until like 10:30 p.m., but we shared some really good beer and some really good sea stories. (Thanks for waiting so long and thanks for the beer, man!)

Of course, at the end of our shoot-the-breeze, I had to break out my camera. FastNav said, "Oh man, I was afraid there would be an obligatory Blunoz self-portrait involved in this meeting."

Obligatory Blunoz Self Portrait with FastNav

And that, folks, is why there was no blog post last night.

Blame it on FastNav.

Statistics for Thursday:

63 Number of minutes the boys played quietly in the back seat before getting in a fight over the arm rest.

6 Number of inches width of the arm rest in the back seat.

2 Number of inches width of a little boy's arm.

20 Number of questions allowed in the game "Twenty Questions"

2 Number of questions required to guess YB's first choice of "dog" (The first question being, "Is it alive?" Yes. The second question being, "Is it a dog?" Yes.) For those of you who know my kids, they are both obsessed with dogs. They each have like 5 stuffed animal dog toys in the back seat with them.

3 Number of questions required to guess YB's second choise of "cat."

Military Bloggers

Checks with Chart pointed out an article about a 4-star encouraging military members to write blogs. The Navy Times article isn't very in-depth or mind-boggling, but the concept of an admiral encouraging us to blog surprised me at first. I've had a friend or two look at me with a raised eyebrow when they found out I wrote a blog and questioned if that was such a good idea. Like those skeptical friends, I was mainly surprised about the admiral encouraging military bloggers from the security aspect of it. Active duty bloggers pose almost if not just as much risk to security as cell phones with cameras.

Most of what I write here is about family life, raising two great little boys, and doing cool things around Hawaii. It sort of started out as emails out to all our wardroom telling them each time we found something new and cool to do. Then I figured if I posted it to a blog, then it wouldn't be pushing it on the people who don't care or don't want to read it, and it would make it available to anybody else doing a Google seach looking for first person accounts or "local" knowledge of things to see and do.

I intentionally stay away from many military topics so as not to raise any more eyebrows or invite unwanted attention about me inappropriately posting insider-info or opinions contrary to the top brass on my blog.

But then I said to myself, "Self, what's to say the admiral didn't mean for us to start blogging on the siprnet?" THAT would be a great idea. Aside: I realize in the article he talks about getting "published" - be it in journals or the Naval Institute Proceedings or blogs, so that implies the "open source" type of publishing, but I'm going to continue pinging on this secure blog idea.

You see, I'm all about not reinventing the wheel. Whenever I go into a new mission or experience, if someone else has already "been there, done that," then I want to find out how it went for them and learn from their experience. I want to learn from others' experiences and mistakes. Likewise, I generally try to go "open kimono" and push info to other boats that I know are going to do the same things I've done recently. Back during my DH tour, we had what we called the "Nav Net" where we had a large email distro list of all the SSN Navigators for sharing lessons learned and gouge. For example, I pushed a lot of info on the under ice transit of the Bering Strait to the Navs on Oklahoma City and Alexandria in preparation for their first WESTPAC deployments. In my current tour, I've both sought and pushed lessons learned for our Panama Canal transit, change of command, and having senior riders on board. I've also pushed a lot of decommissioning lessons learned over to the Augusta.

Tangential Rant: EVERY time each of the boats I have been on has gone into drydock, I have found myself making wise-cracks about, "Did you know that this was the FIRST time a 688-Class submarine has EVER gone into drydock?" The point being no, it WASN'T the first time for a 688 to go into drydock by a LONG shot, but it never ceases to amaze me the things that go wrong during drydocking because people didn't anticipate a problem before it happened. End of Tangent / Rant.

In hindsight, just as I shifted my local adventures stories from email distro to my blog, I think a siprnet blog would be a great avenue for sharing those lessons learned emails and putting them in a place in cyberspace where someone can do a search and find lessons learned about the next mission you've been assigned. For example, the one-on-one / point-to-point comms I've shared with the Augusta on decom lessons learned could have been posted to a blog. In that format, guys on future boats in decom could find and read these insights and lessons learned even after I'm long gone and the boat is being sliced up in Bremerton.

Okay, so there's some sort of Navy and Lessons Learned Database out there. The current lessons learned messages out there (like port visit lessons learned) are sterilized and formal, record message traffic type of stuff approved by the CO, and it'll have the ship's name on it. If it's fairly recent, then you could contact that boat and ask any questions that come to mind, but after a year or so when the key players have PCS'ed elsewhere, that ship will have lost that corporate knowledge of that event. The blog offers the advantages of offering frank, candid observations (be careful, I realize that can go to the other extreme, too), and more importantly, the blog would continue to be linked to me personally even after I transfer to other commands. A few years from now if someone reads my blog about decom and has a question about it, after reading my blog posts on the topic, they could email me directly for follow-up questions later on down the road.

I suspect nothing I'm saying here is new or unique. From what little I know about the academic discipline of "knowledge management" (KM), these are exactly the big picture objectives of KM.

In any case, maybe DoD should hire Google or some other big name company to start a Blogger-like site on the siprnet.

Oh wait... then again... someone thought hiring a big company to manage all the Navy and Marine Corps' computer systems was a good idea, and look what that got us.