GatewayRedbirds.com

We take it for granted, but it's pretty amazing. You can take your camera out and take this picture in the morning:

[SHOW]

and then later that afternoon take this:

[SHOW]

In between, I also saw for the first time in my life where the Mississippi River ends:

[SHOW]

That's kind of amazing when you think about it.

I was watching that "Sons of Liberty" mini series about about Sam Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, etc. There was a scene where the Governor of Massachusetts wrote a letter to England about the uprising. They showed him "mailing" the letter, showed a ship arriving in England, and a subtitle popped up that read "three months later". That's the way it was. Now, as you demonstrate, you can be in an entirely different world in a matter of hours. Amazing indeed.

Yeah, I think about that stuff too, whenever I read some historical book, I find myself thinking, how in the heck did they go all these places?

Seemed like Lincoln traveled all over the Midwest. Then I read a John Brown biography, east coast - then to Ohio, raise some hell in Kansas, back east, Upper New York, went to UK to try to do some business. Then there's Samuel Clemens biography. or U.S. Grant. Those people logged a lot of time on horses, boats, trains.

It's really easy to kvetch about the process. Gotta pay hundreds of dollars. Go through the process of getting to the airport an hour or two before your flight, be herded like cattle through a body screening, bags checked, possibly pulled aside for no reason to be searched, sit around in an airport for an hour with nothing to do but eat overpriced food and/or drink overpriced drinks. Be exposed to the worst of humankind in the process, then be herded onto a plane so you can sit in a seat barely big enough for a normal sized person that is not in the slightest way comfortable. Get little to nothing to eat or drink unless you pay more money, then get off the plane and wait around for baggage in another mass of people.

But, you can't argue with the efficiency of moving people, speeds at which they can do it, and/or the overall safety record they accumulate whilst doing it. Truly amazing and an insanely great benefit to billions of people who can utilize it (not to mention business, but whatever).

NSFW/Language:

Mrs. Rad was detained and almost stripped search at the Denver airport when she flew to Boston a couple of weeks ago. Something triggered it - she couldn't figure out what was going on. They started interrogating her - where do you live? where have you been lately? She thought she was going to miss the flight. She said she lived outside of Boulder - I guess they thought that meant the country. Turns out it was fertilizer - she pulled a bag of lawn fertilizer out of the trunk when she put her bags in and somehow that was detected by security. Once she explained it, they set her free.

I've got to ask, why was Mrs. Rad traveling with fertilizer?

Besides, her name is Mrs Rad.

I wish the US had a real train system.

planet planet wrote:I've got to ask, why was Mrs. Rad traveling with fertilizer?

We all have our idiosyncracies