Well it is about time for the great road trip of 2009 to get underway! We will depart Bulverde around 8AM Friday October 2, 2009 headed about as far West as we can go.
Our first stop is a mere 592 miles to Las Cruces, New Mexico. According to mapquest it should take about 8 hours to make the drive and our stop in New Mexico will put us in the Mountain time zone so around 5PM allowing an hour for stops along the way we should be pulling in for the night. 562 of those miles will have been on scenic IH10 through a whole lot of not so pretty West Texas.
Saturday morning (10/3) we will leave Las Cruces (again I'm shooting for an 8AMish wheels rolling time) booking it for Palm Springs, California. This drive will be one of the longest planned at around 660 miles and about 9.5 hours. We will drive through a good bit of New Mexico and all of Arizona (passing through Tucson and Phoenix) into California around Blythe, CA again changing timezones to Pacific. We should roll into Palm Springs AROUND 5:30PM Pacific if we again allow as much as an hour along the way for eats and breaks. We will log another 643 or so miles on IH10 on this leg.
Sunday morning (10/4) we head for our destination San Luis Obispo, California. Still a 5 hour drive logging 308 miles or so. We are supposed to attend a welcome dinner at the Siminoff Lutherie Camp Sunday evening at 5:30PM so we should have PLENTY of time to find the hotel, locate a place for groceries, identify some spots for Carolyn to scope out during the week and get to the dinner. I expect to arrive in SLO around 2PM if the traffic through the Los Angeles area and up Hwy 101 isn't too slow. We only get 70 miles of IH10 on this leg. We pass North of LA going through Pasadena and pick up Hwy 101 just North of Studio City and West of Burbank. We have 190 miles on Hwy 101 and I must remember to take my Scopolomine (sea sickness med) for this drive ... in the 1980's I drove along the coast up Hwy 1 North of San Francisco and got sicker than a dog ... maybe 101 won't be so curvey! We drive North along the coast from Ventura through Santa Barbara.
Once we "get there" we only have about 1800+ miles to drive to get back home ... gonna need new tires on MiniRita after this trip!!!
Whaaaaahooooooo .... On The Road Again ....
Just a brief note to subscribers of this web log ... I have created a new separate web log dedicated to my hobby interest in "Lutherie" ... building stringed instruments.
Hopefully, I can keep this more general log focused on "general things" like our adventures on our upcoming Westward-Ho roadtrip to California in October and keep the hobby specific things in a more focused log.
You can link to the "Lutherie Log" from this site's sidebar or this direct link and when there you have the option of subscribing to that separate log for email updates ... take a peek and see if you have an interest ... Link to Lutherie web log
Bade
Finally ... decided to get it finished and out of the shop so I can start something new ...
You can see completed pictures by clicking on this link and then using the arrows at the top to move forward or back ... => Sewing Machine pics
A few teaser images ...
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| From SewingMachine |
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| From SewingMachine |
These pictures are courtesy of our good friend Russ Wilkins. Russ is a very fine underwater photographer (published) and an all around good guy ... he shared these photos with me of our dives together in Cozumel this past June (2009).
On the boat ... two happy divers ...
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| From Cozumel 2009 |
A nurse shark we chased under a ledge ... pretty big 8' or so ...
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| From Cozumel 2009 |
A Sting Ray on the move ... some photo effects obviously ...
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| From Cozumel 2009 |
Tortuga ...
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| From Cozumel 2009 |
Another turtle ... over the sand ...
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| From Cozumel 2009 |
Silversides on the C43 wreck ...
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| From Cozumel 2009 |
Bade cruising along ...
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| From Cozumel 2009 |
Carolyn ...
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| From Cozumel 2009 |
Today is Monday, June 22, 2009 ... Carolyn and I have been in Cozumel for 6 days and will return home Friday June, 26.
To date we have done 10 dives with a total of just over 10 hours underwater. All of the diving has been very relaxed and typical "Cozumel
Clear" but today we saw something worth mention.
Today we saw a "Lion Fish" on one of the reefs at about 35 feet depth. This is significant for a couple of reasons .... first and foremost, Lion Fish are NOT native to the Caribbean sea, they are in fact typically found all the way over in places like Fiji and such. Apparently, in the last couple of years there have been sightings of Lion Fish off the coast of Florida and even some "mention" of sightings around Cozumel in the last several months ... BUT ... per a recent diver magazine article indicated there had been no "documented" sightings of Lion Fish around Cozumel. We had asked a couple of local dive masters about them and they had all claimed to have seen a couple here and there and even knew of one having been captured ... you see ... the deal is ... Lion Fish are not only highly poisonous to humans, they are also voracious eaters of other fish and are actually a very bad thing to have showing up on the reefs where they are not native. They are indeed beautiful ... but unwanted in this area. Regardless, one of our dive group today is a very fine underwater photographer and he took several pictures of this critter . I will share a picture once I get it from the photographer ... we believe this one to be a juvenile fish since it wasn't very big and not as darkly colored as the pictures we have seen ...
So ... we can log another creature as "sighted" in our personal logs ... we have also seen several sharks, barracuda, a splendid toad fish, seahorses, lobsters, crabs, an eagle ray, several eels, crabs and many other less exotics during this trip ... but the rare (so far) Lion Fish is the big deal ...
First I am happy to report that Martin Guitar's customer service representative, Paula Primrose, contacted me via email to let me know that my 1971 D-18 guitar has now been officially registered in my name as the original owner! This means that any repair work that I have done by an authorized repair shop will be covered by warranty ... significant because I recently left that guitar at Guitar Tex in San Antonio with a repair estimate of ~$500 ... clearly I am pleased that this expense will be covered by warranty instead of me. The work will be performed by master luthier John Thurston. John is a renowned guitar repairman from the Baltimore area that just recently moved to Texas (he lives in fact out at Canyon Lake) and Baltimore's loss is definitely our gain. The work he will be doing on my D-18 includes a "neck reset" which entails actual removal of the neck from the body of the guitar, correcting the angle at which the neck and the body join and re-gluing the neck back to the body. This is a very critical and non-trivial repair (in this case due to poor quality control in the 1970-'s at the factory) and should only be done by a trained and experienced repair person. I might try it on a wall hanger but not even maybe on a vintage Martin (particularly not one covered by warranty!!).
And ... I am pleased to report that Carolyn and I will be taking a fairly long road trip in early October ... I have been "selected" to be one of six attendees at a "Siminoff Lutherie Camp" for building Florentine style (Bluegrass style) mandolins. This camp will be five full days of instruction by the author of the definitive text on constructing "F5" style mandolins, Roger Siminoff . Roger is a world renowned luthier, master builder and it will be a real treat for me to have the chance to get personal instruction from such an artist of the craft.
The seminar will be taught at Roger's shop/studio in Atascadero, California. That's about 1600 miles one way from Bulverde, Texas and we will make the trip over three days in the Mini-Cooper. Should be a fun (but really long) drive ... gotta get Mini-Rita in the shop before then for its scheduled maintenance.
The seminar will include 5 days of lecture, demonstration and hands on construction. At the end of the seminar I will come away with an "almost complete" F style mandolin that I will complete in my own shop. This will be the 3rd mandolin build for me. The consensus in the craft is that it takes about 50 builds to get to the point where you actually know what you are doing ... I'm hoping that by attending the seminar I can skip ahead at least 3 or 4 ... but we shall see ... I'm going to build an F4 style mandolin which is a bit different than an F5 ... I have an A5 and and F5 so I'm branching out a bit.
The decision to attend this seminar has been a bit of a "... teach a man to fish ..." decision for me. The cost of the seminar and the travel expense is significant and equal to the cost of an upper-mid=level F5 mandolin built by either a well recognized individual builder or a well respected company (Gibson, Weber, Collins ....) ... BUT ... I do enjoy the hobby of making stringed instruments and the opportunity to learn directly from a recognized master doesn't come around every day ... consider this like a week of almost private 8 hour a day guitar lessons from Chet Atkins ... Roger is in fact that well respected in the craft.
It will be my intent to document our road trip and the seminar experience via this (or an associated) web log ...
I'll keep you posted ...