Texas County-Collecting Roadtrip & A New Car!

Later today, I will be leaving for Fort Worth, where I will be spending the night before heading out tomorrow for some county collecting in East Texas. The planned route is as follows:

Saturday:

I-30 East -> I-35E North -> Spur 366 East -> U.S. 75 North -> SMU -> U.S. 75 South -> I-45 South -> U.S. 175 East -> U.S. 69 South -> U.S. 59 South -> U.S. 190 West -> TX 19 North to Palestine

New counties: Henderson, Anderson, Cherokee, Angelina, Polk, San Jacinto, Trinity, Houston

Sunday:

TX 19 North -> TX 154 West -> TX 24 South -> I-30 West -> U.S. 380 West -> U.S. 75 North -> U.S. 70 West -> I-35 North to OKC

New counties: Rains, Delta

On this trip, I will collect 10 new counties and will clinch U.S. 175 in its entirety.

This will also be my first trip out-of-state in my brand new 2010 Mitsubishi Lancer ES! I bought it on Wednesday. I do still have the old Lancer (with 176,450 miles on it and counting) but I will be selling it to someone.

And here is the new official car of OKRoads...

ES

11.5 hours to go!

Good evening. We are 11.5 hours away from the beginning of the ESKS New England Extravaganza Roadtrip 2K9!! Today we picked up the temporary OKRoad-mobile for the trip: a 2010 Ford Fusion with just 640 miles on it when we picked it up. We'll double the miles on it just during the day tomorrow!! :D

We are leaving at about 6:30 in the morning and will hopefully make it to Indianapolis at 7:30-8 pm. The route for tomorrow is pretty straightforward, taking I-44 East to I-70 East to Indy. As long as the high speed Internet works at each hotel we stop at, pictures will be uploaded to Flickr each night of that day's travels.

We have been anxiously awaiting this trip for weeks now and can't believe it's almost here!!

ES

Car & Camera Stuff

I went to Midas last Saturday to have them check my "check engine" light which has been on and off for thousands of miles, and they told me that it could be just a glitch, and they reset the check engine light and told me to come back when it came back on. Well, on my way to work Monday morning, as soon as I passed the same Midas, the light came back on!

So today I finally got back to Midas, they checked it again, and it was just what they thought it was; the OKRoad-mobile (2002 Mitsubishi Lancer) needs a new front catalytic converter. Yay. That's several hundred dollars down the drain. I'll get an actual estimate on the cost on Monday, but since it has 166,000 miles on it & has been to 41 states since I got it 6 years ago, I think it's about time for a new OKRoad-mobile. So, after the New England roadtrip in July, I will begin car shopping! Yay! (hope you sense my sarcasm there) Thankfully I am taking a rental car on the trip, so my wife & I don't have to worry about how the OKRoad-mobile will do.

In other news, last month, I bought a new 12.1 megapixel Sony CyberShot camera (quite an upgrade from the 5.1 megapixel camera I bought in February 2005). I had a 1 GB memory stick already, but today I ordered a 4 GB memory stick for it. I ordered this so I can do a couple things:

1. take more pictures in a larger size than 640x480 like every other road scholar I know does, and
2. so I can take some longer road videos

Yes, I am hoping to take some road videos with my camera in addition to road sign pictures. I have yet to make a video but will probably start out with some of the local highways in Oklahoma City.

I am still working on captions for pictures from 5/23/09's trip from Oklahoma City to Warwick to Calvin. I have made it to Tecumseh so far, so not too far to go. Hopefully I will finish the captions tonight or tomorrow.

ES