Oct 24/25 - traveling

Leaving Reading around 10:30, we arrived at Statesville NC before 6pm. We'd originally planned on stopping at Wytheville VA but we were going to be there before 5pm, so we called, canceled that reservation and made one further down the road.

The roads were busy but not enough to slow anything down. There were lots of trucks on the road and license plates from everywhere. That changed the second day of driving once we were on I95 where I swear that the second-most common plate, after the local state, was Quebec. Half of those PQ plates were on RV's towing cars.

There was a Ruby Tuesday fairly close to our hotel the first night so we headed there. We split a mahi-mahi entre and both had the salad bar. The fish was excellent, with great sides -- thinly sliced zucchini, sauteed and sweet potato fries. No complaints !

The second day started out slowly, with heavy traffic as we were not far north of Charlotte. We probably only lost 15 minutes though, before the stop-and-go 2 lane traffic became 4 with one of those being a HOV lane. Traffic got heavy again at Columbia but not enough to slow down.

Arriving home at 3:20 p.m. (nice to get home early!), I did remember to re-set the alarm first thing. However, I must have keyed the code wrong because the alarm went off and then I was talking to the alarm people who asked for my code. I gave it to them and that was that.

However, that was not that. Sandy's cell phone rang and it was the alarm people. I'd given them the wrong code. I talked to the guy again, gave him the code, but it was wrong. Huh ? I was sure that I knew what code I'd setup but then again I hadn't used the code, ever. He told me that the police would be on the way, they have to call them -- I understand -- and transferred me to the head office so that I could sort out the code. Well, the issue was that the number/name combo that I'd given them was backward, should have been name/number. The lady officer arrived, smiling, already knew that we were the owners -- no one would stay on the phone with the alarm co. and continue to burglarize the house -- but she did her job and checked my ID. She said that she liked these kind of calls :).

So that was our welcome home ! Everything was more-or-less ship shape except that it had been damper in the house than I'd expect. All was well in July, but I guess that the A/C doesn't have to turn on very often this time of year and therefore must be set lower to manage the humidity. I'll remember that for next year ...

The other issue is that the satellite dish isn't aimed properly. It seems that the 60 mph winds that they had at one point got the aiming off. I tried to do some work on it last night but was getting false readings due to the sun shining directly on it. That's the same thing that I ran into when working on it with Wayne last year, so I'll address that this a.m. once it's light enough to see where I'm walking on the roof !

Right now I'm doing some computer backup, since I bought two new disks that arrived a few days ago. With the way that these things fail, the last one less than a year old, I always want to have two boot disks. One is being setup as I type this -- takes a couple of hours to copy all those gigs onto a USB disk. I could probably have connected it as a SATA disk and this would have been faster ... but didn't. I'm not in a hurry anyway.

That's about it. I opened most of the hurricane shutters when we arrived but still have the thumbscrew ones to address as well as the upstairs bedrooms. Since no-one is there, I might just leave those for now.

Pizza for dinner last night, we were too tired for anything else and too tired to go out for dinner.

Biking ? Hopefully today !

Onward !