In the recurring theme of avoiding freeways at all costs, I took AZ-89A out of Prescott towards Sedona. The road continued to amaze me. There was another section outside of Prescott Valley where there were about 10 miles of 20mph curves. I got bottled up behind some people, but that didn’t make it any less awesome. I think the most incredible part was getting into Jerome, AZ. When I saw the signs indicating the milage into the town, I assumed that it was at the end of the curves. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. You end up rounding a 20mph corner and seeing the “Entering Jerome” sign. The town is built upon the switchbacks back down into the desert. Houses and stores are terraced into the side of the mountain itself, and you make your way back down the desert floor through the town. I should have stopped to take some pictures, because it really is pretty amazing.

The weather started to heat up when I hit the valley floor. Things started to head into the 90s, and I knew I was back in the desert. I stopped at a little store outside of Sedona to grab a Gatorade and stretch my legs. This area is another one of those “this is Arizona?” moments. There are lush green trees by the river, and it actually seems like a livable place.

After the store there were some more incredible curves, but the traffic was ridiculously heavy. Cars were lined up for miles while the Sedona tourist set gawked at the scenery around them. It’s bad enough the road was signed at 20mph, but you had motorhomes that were clogging things up at around 5 mph.

I stopped in Flagstaff for a fuel stop, and then it was back into desert riding again. There are many things you have to fight about this kind of environment. First is that you are essentially in one position for long periods of time. Normally when you’ve got some curves in the road, you have to shift your weight and move your arms to maneuver the bike. Not so on straight desert roads. Your throttle hand also gets more abuse because it isn’t actually working, it’s just trying to keep itself in the same position all the time. You kinda develop some ways of combating this like being able to straighten your fingers while still holding the throttle open, or standing up on the bike for a few seconds to restore some circulation into your legs and ass, but it’s mostly just trying to fidget around to keep your body parts, and you, from falling asleep.

I got another Gatorade in Tuba City. It’s near reservation lands, so it had the obligatory “Injun Smoke Shoppe” in with the convenience store. Outside of Tuba City was my first real worry of the day. On the horizon were intermittent thunder clouds. For quite a while, the road managed to almost purposely weave its way around the rain that I could see falling. My biggest worry was the road being flooded out, and becoming impassable for a motorcycle. My exhaust pipe is much lower to the ground than a large truck or something. I didn’t really hit rain until a bit outside of Kayenta. The rain was falling fairly hard, so the droplets were big and hit with some force. I decided not to don my rain gear because I figured it would be over soon. I didn’t experience much more than three minutes of rain, and the roads stayed fairly sane.

I gassed up again at Kayenta, and grabbed a sip off of the Camelbak. I was going to go to the bathroom, but it turns out they were closed here due to “low water pressure.” I don’t know exactly what that means other than I’d have to hold it until the next stop. I also enjoyed some of the lowest gas prices on the trip. That $4.169 is for premium, not regular unleaded. I don’t know if this is just the price of gas, or whether Navajo Reservation taxes are just lower than State + Federal that you pay on the outside.

I was starting to get pretty fatigued by this point in time, so at Teec Nos Pas I stopped at the post office and got off of the bike for just a minute or so of shaking myself out. You’d be surprised at what just these little stops can do for you. I had intended to stop at Four Corners and take some pictures about 5 miles down from Teec Nos Pas, but I saw the line of RVs and cars going into the place and thought better of it. Most of those vehicles have air conditioning and can afford to stay out in the sun for a while. I’d end up sweating my ass off. Instead, I pushed through to Cortez.

Outside of Cortez there was a little traffic backup. There was a Harley-Davidson there without a windshield and the front end looking pretty nasty. Everyone seemed okay, and they had a flatbed tow truck to pull someone out of there. When I went by, I could see what the situation probably was, because there was a Harley shaped dent in the back of the SUV pulled over at the side of the road. It looked like the Harley rear-ended it for some reason.

I had a snack at McDonald’s in Cortez. Just a few chicken nuggets and a large drink. The Barq’s root beer was terrible because they had the mix set way too low. It turned out to be slightly brown soda water rather than any sort of root beer substance.

There were storm clouds in the distance between Cortez and Durango. I again decided to play a “wait and see” attitude towards my rain gear. This mostly paid off. I stayed dry until around 5 miles outside of Durango. This was actually okay, because after a day of desert riding in the heat, getting wet was a pleasant change. It was only 5 minutes of riding in the rain anyways, so it wasn’t that miserable.

I stopped at a gas station in Durango to throw on my jacket’s rain liner, and zip up the vents in my pants. It was also a good opportunity, since I missed the turn to stay on US-160 through Durango. Everything was pretty good until I had to go travel on the gravel roads to Dawn and James’s house. Normally, it’s not a huge deal, but the rain was sprinkling on me, and making the road surface a little wet. This made the traction even less than it would normally be on a gravel road. Plus, I had to take the roads so slowly that I couldn’t really leave my visor down because there wasn’t enough wind to clear it of the rain. That meant I just had to keep it up, and deal with being pelted in the face with raindrops.

It took me a while to traverse all the gravel, but my TomTom performed admirably and I made it right to the house without any incident. For this reason alone, it was proabably a great buy. I’ll seriously have to look into getting the “Rider” version that’s built for motorcycles. The biggest plus I can see is having a better screen for seeing in sunny weather.

I arrived around 7:00 local time (I lost an hour due to the Pacific to Mountain time change), and had dinner with the family. Unfortunately, Ian wasn’t able to eat with us because he’s become sick. This isn’t the sniffles kinda sick, but apparently the puking all over the house sick. He did come upstairs after dinner when Dawn, James, and I were chatting. James was gracious enough to offer me a couple of beers and I eagerly accepted.

At around 10:00 I trudged my way out to the trailer to set up camp for the next couple of days. As I’ve written before, the trailer is kinda a cool place to hang out. I spent a couple of hours writing and unwinding from the fairly harsh day. Another day closer to Springfield…

Total Fuel Cost: $36.85
Not Budgeted

I made the decision last night that I’d go ahead and swing through Prescott. There’s a Motel 6 there, so it’d be fairly cheap to stay there, and it won’t add too much to the budget. Unfortunately, that decision meant that I’d be switching the two-day layover in Mesquite to a one-day. I know that Grandma was disappointed a little, but I think this side-trip had to happen.

The problem with planning a trip from Mesquite to Prescott is that there’s this huge hole in the ground in the way named the Grand Canyon. You have to pretty much go around it to get anywhere in Arizona from Nevada. I was trying to avoid Vegas like the plague because traffic there really sucks and apparently they’re tearing up every roadway in existence there anyways. I chose to take the road that skirts Lake Mead. This way I might get to see some scenery as well.

Before I left, I managed to dump the bike on its side. I guess this is good luck since dumping it when it’s stationaryis a whole lot better than when it’s moving. I had the bags all loaded up and realized that I wanted to do my morning chain-lube job. I’ve learned on these long trips just to do it at the beginning of every ride day, and it keeps things nice and lubricated back there. Unfortunately, with the bags on the bike becomes a lot more unwieldy to put on the centerstand. I didn’t heed the warnings the bike was giving me about how bad an idea this was, and it went over on the right side. I had to warn Grandma off from helping me try to lift it up since it’s heavy, and I couldn’t remove the one side bag that was squished. There was no real damage to the bike, other than a little spilled gas on the ground.

You could see where the county maintenance ended on the Lake Mead road, and the Federal road began because the quality of the road surface went to absolute shit. I really wish I had an adventure-tourer for this sort of thing because I was getting shaken all over. The lake was scenic, but nothing to really write home about. I think because people in Nevada don’t really know what lakes look like, they’ll go off about Lake Mead. Incidentally, this is also a great way to go because if you enter the recreation area near Moapa, you don’t get charged an entrance fee, and when you turn on to the road towards Hoover Dam, you don’t get charged like everyone else.

I headed towards Hoover Dam on US-95. They are doing some heavy construction by the dam itself, and I saw the makings of a really high bridge over the Colorado River. I’m thinking that the purpose of it is twofold. First, I think that they just want to widen the road to four lanes. Second, I fully expect them to shut down car traffic going over the dam itself. They seem to have become so concerned with terrorism on the dam that they’re freaking out. There are security checkpoints at both ends where they pull over and inspect vehicles like RVs, or whoever they like. They also have signs in the parking area warning people that they’re not allowed to bring anything over a certain size on to the dam.

I texted back and forth with Dylan on the dam because I just had to send the obscure musical reference “Standing on the edge of the Hoover Dam…” to see if he’d get it. Of course he did.

The road out of Hoover Dam was pretty boring. It was four lanes all the way down to Kingman and straight. It was a little hot out, but nothing that was too oppressive. I stopped for some gas and some lunch in Kingman. I ordered some stuff from Carl’s Jr. since we don’t really have those back east, but for some reason I wasn’t really interested in the food. I picked at it while I rested, but I did manage to drink two 32 oz. containers of Squirt.

US-95 follows I-40 for a while, and then takes off south towards Phoenix. Again, I managed to find what is a divided four-lane highway most of the way. My endurance has been way off, and I’m only really able to manage 70 miles before getting off of the bike. I’m not sure what to attribute this to. I could be out of training, or just getting old.

On the last real stop of the day, I grabbed a Gatorade in Congress, AZ. I soaked my shirt in water since it was topping 100° again. As I was about ready to leave, a guy that’s about the definition of cowboy walked up to me. He had the hat on, and even the stereotypical “one squinty eye.” He asked me if I was going up Yarnall Hill. I just told him I was going towards Prescott on AZ-89. He just wanted to warn me to be careful since there were a lot of motorcyclists that get killed up there.

The hill was pretty severe. 20 mph curves abounded, and if you missed, it was off of a sheer cliff. There were around 5 miles of these, and suddenly at the top you came into the little town of Yarnall and everything started to change. The temperature started to drop and there were little fields popping up by the side of the road. It was a harbinger of things to come.

I finally made it to Wilhoit where my friends lived, and I managed to find their place. I hadn’t really told anyone I was coming, so I didn’t really expect anyone to be there. They were apparently at work, and I left a note with my cell phone number on it so that they could call me at the hotel if they wanted to get together.

I headed into Prescott and got the payoff for the entire side trip. For the 17 miles between Wilhoit and Prescott there are some of the nicest curves I’ve ever seen. Other than having to follow a motorhome through about half of them, it was pretty fun. It’s kinda like Orofino, except where in Idaho you have 40’s and 45’s, this is full of 20’s and 25’s. The curves are so severe that they just set the speed limit of the whole stretch of road down to 30. It’s too bad these were at the end of the trip when I was all tired and not able to take full advantage of them.

Prescott is also nothing like what I expected. You get a couple miles out of town and you start to notice that there are ponderosa pine trees by the side of the road. It had been raining recently, so I also smelled the scent of a real forest. The temperature dropped into the 70s, and things became pleasant. It almost reminded me of somewhere like Bend or Sisters. I didn’t really expect something like this in Arizona of all places, and was pleasantly surprised.

I checked into the Motel 6 and took a quick nap. I bought the $3 Wi-Fi connectivity they had so that I could check in on everything. I ended up getting a text message from my friend that they had gotten my note, but couldn’t call my phone for some reason. I e-mailed her back the telephone number to the hotel. About a half an hour later I ended up getting a call from her. They were having dinner with their in-laws, but she’d give me a call later.

Papa John’s pizza was for dinner. I probably ordered a little too much. I wanted to say by the phone in case my friend called and honestly I was a little too lazy to go out. Her husband gave me a call a while later, and I agreed to go out to their place to hang out for a bit. This meant that I’d have to traverse those curves on AZ-89 again. It’s a different experience in the dark with lightning going off all over the place. I ended up taking it really slow both ways, because I didn’t want to fall off of the cliffs to the side of the road.

I got back to the hotel around midnight and decided that I needed to revise my departure time to 9:00 instead of 8:00. I set my alarm and pretty much passed out. I’m glad I made the decision to head through Arizona. It was great to meet up with friends, and the roads at the end were incredible.

Total Fuel Cost: $25.63
Not Budgeted

The morning ride was actually cool in the desert. Between Battle Mountain and Austin was in the 70’s. What made the ride grueling for most of the day were the desert winds. I felt like I was going to be blown off the road most of the time, and I was angling the bike into the wind for most of the day. This makes the ride pretty tiring. It’s not like going around some mean curves, because at least you can see those up ahead in the road and prepare for them. It requires that you keep the bike constantly muscled into the wind, and you have to be ready for a gust that will blow you around. It’s stressful, you’re always on guard, and it’s fairly athletic. I really hope I don’t have to do too much more of it, but something tells me that Kansas will be even worse.

I met a group of Harley-Davidson riders going down Hwy 50 in Austin at the gas station. There are a group of curves to the east of the town on Hwy 50, and the first guy there was laughing at his buddies because he was the one having fun in them. They were from around Austin, TX, so the joke was pretty good. They asked my advice about Oregon, because they were headed towards Astoria and the Columbia Gorge. I was pretty wiped out from the winds, so I spent a while chatting with them about stuff at the gas stop.

It gradually started to warm up on the way down to Tonopah. My endurance was starting to suffer a little bit, so I at least got off the bike for a quick drink in Carvers. There’s nothing there, and the gas station looked long since shut down, so it was grabbing a nip out of the Camelbak and stretching my legs.

I backtracked into Tonopah to grab some lunch and tank up on some more gas. Coming back out of town, I saw a missile mounted on a pole on the side of the road. It turns out this was the entrance to the Tonopah Test Range where they ran the stealth fighters out of when they were still classified. There were signs all along the road about low flying aircraft.

I stopped briefly at Warm Springs to make sure that I was on the right track. There literally is nothing in Warm Springs. The buildings that are there are dilapidated and look like they’ve been closed for some time. But it is entrance to the Extraterrestrial Highway. It’s named this because it’s the closest approach to the famous Area 51 at Nellis AFB. I had wanted to go on this highway the last time, but it was flooded out when I had tried to go. It’s lucky that I got gas in Tonopah because there was a sign saying that there was no gas for 111 miles. It was pretty much right on. The entire length of Nevada Highway 375 lacks a single gas station, and there’s pretty much only one town along it. Luckily Dylan didn’t come, because his fuel tank isn’t big enough for a run down the ET Highway. He’ll have to fix that before we tackle it one of these days.

The one town on the ET Highway is Rachel, NV. This is where they have the “Little A’Lie’Inn” hotel. Using the word “hotel” is rather generous though. I didn’t really know about Rachel until I rolled up to it.I wanted to stop, because the wind was again hampering my endurance to around 50 miles without stretching out at least a little. There’s no gas in Rachel, but the A’Le’Inn is a bar/hotel/etc. I didn’t go inside, because it looked pretty sketchy, but you can see the pictures from outside.

I started to see the light at the end of the tunnel in Rachel. I continued on to Alamo which was pretty much the first opportunity to get gas. I got a chance to get a good stretch, and doused my shirt in water to get cool on the road. By this time the temperature was approaching 105° F. I don’t know why, but I was very nervous that the bike was going to begin overheating for some reason and I kept a close eye on the engine temperature. To its credit, the VFR performed admirably, and didn’t really give me any trouble. Things were a little greener by the side of the road because there were a couple of lakes along the way that provided an oasis-like feel to things.

I saw one of the weirdest things that I have really encountered right at the junction between US-93 and NV-168. It was a new community named Coyote Springs. It exemplifies Southern Nevada for me. It was essentially an entire city that was being created from nothingness. The first thing done, of course, was a golf course. The web site says they have plans for 150,000 homes. These people are literally creating life from nothingness. Apparently their major problem has been acquiring water rights for the community. It’s mildly ridiculous to have to bring in water just to start a whole new city.

I made one last stop in Moapa just to stretch the legs again, and grab some cold water. The water in the camelbak was pretty much dead by this point in time, and the temperature continued to rise, averaging out at 108° or so. I buzzed the freeway for the remaining few miles into Mesquite, and when I hit the exit it was 111°. I was glad to see Grandma. She heard the bike, and greeted me at the door. Dinner was some cold cut sandwiches that tasted really good after just getting off the road. We went out later that night to say goodbye to one of Grandma’s Salt Lake friends that was visiting, and I convinced Grandma to stop by the liquor store to grab some beer. I found some Arrogant Bastard, and things were mellow. A good end to a tiring day.

Total Fuel Cost: $49.78
Estimated Fuel Cost: $54.94
9.39% under fuel budget

The day started out with goodbyes, and the final views of Corvallis for a few months at least. I decided to push through to Sweet Home with the fuel I had on board, and that would give me a nice break before the stress of the mountains. Everything seemed to be performing okay on the motorcycle, and I started gathering some fuel statistics as well using MPG on my iPhone. It’s actually a cool little app. I talked to a fellow motorcyclist in the gas station in Sweet Home for a bit. He was really interested in my “crotch rocket” and was apparently thinking about getting one in addition to his cruiser.

Unlike the last time Dylan and I were there, the Cascades were awesome today. It was sunny, and dry. The morning started out a little nippy, but I elected to go without any rain liner or insulation, and I think it was the right choice. Things warmed up, and the forest was at its best. I got a pretty clean run at Highway 20, and was able to pass up cars fairly quickly after getting behind them. They seem to have paved over the gravel spots that were there for a few years, which makes it a little better for motorcycles. The paving job isn’t the best, so you can’t go barreling into those corners like you normally would.

I saw another couple of BMWs at the gas station in Bend. They were headed back to Colorado after a trip they took to British Columbia. I almost had a disaster with the TomTom when near Black Butte Ranch I noticed it had completely fallen off the mount and was hanging by the power cord. It turned out that it needed a little more cutting in Bend to make sure the plug fully clears the mounting. After that it stayed put all day. Unfortunately, even with my makeshift sunshade on, it’s not really completely visible when riding. I can cup my hand over it and see well enough to get the data I want though. It would be so much cooler if it had a nice bright screen like the iPhone.

I expected that the trip to Burns would be dry and hot, but amazingly enough, I got rained on. I decided to grit it out and just get a little wet. It kept things cool, and wasn’t a bad choice at all. There was some construction along the way, and I had to wait for a pilot car.

McDonalds was lunchtime for me, since I wanted to get back on the road quickly to preserve some time for other things. It hit the spot, and I was out of Burns after some gas in the tank. Crane was a short hop from there, and it was nice to hang out with Grandma for an hour or so. I got to stretch my legs and rest up for the remaining 200 miles or so. Grandma seemed to be doing well, and recovering nicely from her dental work. She seemed happy to see me.

I really drove had out of Crane, flogging the bike along at 75-80 mph. This made some really good time, except when I had to wait for a herd of cattle to cross the road. I made my next stop in McDermott to grab the final gas break. The wind was kicking up a little when I was filling up, and it seemed some weather was on the way. Around 30 miles out I got caught up in it. Again, I decided not to do any rain gear, which was probably fine. The major problem was that there was terrible wind. It was whipping sagebrush across the roadway which I was hoping not to get caught up in. Worse was that I had to suck down to the bike to and lean into it to try to not get blown off the road. It let up after a while and I found a small sliver of opportunity to make the rest of the way into Winnemucca. Shortly after I arrived at Aunt Sue’s house, the sky opened up and started dumping, complete with thunder and lightning. It’s continuing to do so tonight, and we’re thinking that a fire may have been started somewhere since there is a burning smell in the air.

Dinner was some cheeseburgers and the meat was really good. I helped Aunt Sue with her computer issues, and got her Macs up and running again. We did some teaching on how to do a few things on the computer, and she seems eager to try some stuff out. I got her signed up for AIM so that we can try to do any remote debugging that needs to happen, and that should allow her to talk to some folk too. She was thinking it might be good for Grandma since she just inherited Mom’s old 12″ PowerBook. We’ll have to see if we can get Grandma Internet service first. They’re CenturyTel out there, so I’m thinking some DSL services might be available (even though AT&T cellular service is non-existent in Crane).

Weather seems to be okay for tomorrow, and I don’t see an road closures along the way from Nevada DOT.

Total Fuel Cost: $55.35
Estimated Fuel Cost: $49.41
12.02% over fuel budget

I have done a lot of electrical work on the bike to get the many accessories I like to run working. I like having lots of technology on the bike for some reason. I ended up installing a setup where I have a couple of cigarette lighter sockets on a cord that goes into my tank bag. This allows me to have the TH-D7A and GPS III hooked up to bike power. I have an aftermarket fuseblock that I bought a couple of years ago that I can wire all of this into. Additionally, I put another cigarette lighter socket by the tail light that accepts the adapter for the TomTom navigation system. Originally I wanted to solder wiring directly to the TomTom 12V adapter so that I could seal it up a little tighter. Unfortunately, the soldering facilities that Dad has just aren’t really up to the job. I ended up having to buy a “universal” adapter from Radio Shack to fit the TomTom. It ended up being designed for the older One series, and it didn’t fit quite right into my One 130. A little work with my knife cutting off some excess plastic got it to fit in the socket. Along with the RAM mounting equipment, it makes a pretty good setup. The major problem with the TomTom is that under full sunlight, the display is fairly worthless. On their “Rider” series, there is a large sunshade that solves this. I had to whip up my own out of some velcro squares and the cardboard from a FedEx envelope. We’ll see how it performs.

Even though I struggled with the heated grips, they still aren’t fully operational. It turns out that the major problem with the control panel that I have on the VFR is the LEDs I decided to install. I think I need to go with some sort of marine LED indicators because the ones I have ended up corroding. I took the indicator LED out of the circuit for the grips, and soldered it directly to the switch. This worked before I had the faring put back on the bike, but it started to default to the always on position when it was fully assembled. I ended up pulling the fuse. I’m not sure if I’ll need them anyways. There’s not really any danger of killing the battery because the power is switched to the bike’s ignition. If it’s not on, you won’t get any heat. This seems to indicate that the switch, like the LEDs, isn’t as waterproof as I’d like. I’ll have to see if I can find some alternatives that look good and fit the holes I’ve drilled.

The Givi bags seem to mount up and work well. I like the way they’re packing up in general, but I’m having to get used to how wide they make the back of the bike. It would have been nice to have the E52 Maxia, but I ran into time constraints. I’m ending up shipping some of my stuff home instead of bringing it on the bike. This is okay, since it’s really not stuff I’ll need on the ride anyhow. I think I acquired a little more stuff while I was in Corvallis than I anticipated (including a full suit).

My boots weren’t in as good a shape as I had hoped. During one of my recent rides, the heel of one of them came unglued and wasn’t doing so well. Again, if I were rich I’d buy another set of them. These Alpinestars are like eight years old, and were involved in the crash of the original Pikachu. I have been having some weird issues with having sore heels while I’m on the bike, and I think it’s related to the shape of my boots. I repaired the problem one with some shoe goo, and put some of the “gellin’” insoles in them for good measure. I hope they’ll perform well on this trip.

I’ve always wanted to have some Gatorade rather than straight water in my Camelbak, but it tends to encourage the growth of unwanted organisms when you have sugary drinks in your hydration system. Recently I found that Camelbak actually has some sugar-free tablets that you dissolve in your reservoir that solve these issues. I couldn’t find any at Peak Sports in town, but I did find an alternative. More comments on how they perform when I get down the road a ways. I also have my typical box of power bars sitting in the tank bag for quick snacks.

After I fitted the bags, Mom ended up tipping over the bike by hitting the bags with the yard waste container. It knocked out the glue job that Steve and I did a few years ago when I was coming through Colorado Springs and had a problem. It also bent the brake lever. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a brake lever in time because it was on backorder for some reason. Fortunately, I was able to get a new tail light. This is the first time it’s had one since like 2003, so while it’s irritating that Mom dumped my bike, at least I got a tail light out of the deal.

We had a small get together of the family here at Mom and Dad’s house to make sure I could see everyone before I left. Dad bar-b-qued stuff on the Traeger, and it was excellent as usual. Folks hung out for a while, and it was nice to see the immediate family before I had to get out of town.

So, everything is as prepared as it gets, but I’m still up at 2:30 a.m. worrying about things. I have this persistent fear that I’ll become stranded out in the middle of the desert in Eastern Oregon or Nevada in the oppressive heat. The bike has been purring along as well as I could ask it to all summer, so I don’t think it’s going to fail me, but you never know.

I’ll have to pick up a 12V cigarette adapter for the TH-D7A (PG-3J) because my original one was destroyed on the trip in 2005. I left it unplugged for a while, and the cord fell into the chain and got shredded. It should be relatively cheap through Ham Radio Outlet.

I already tested the setup, and it seems as if people are receiving me. You can check out the current location at http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/find.cgi?call=NH6Z-10.

I’m trying to get some sort of APRS setup running by then. If nothing else, I can bike power my TH-D7A and Garmin GPS III combo, but it’s really not optimal for what I want to do. I’m trying to get these:

Micro-Trak 8000 FA
Byonics GPS2

And semi-permanently mount them to the bike in a modified cowl. I’m not sure that I’ll get that far though, it’s a bit of work and ordering to get the setup done. You should be able to track where I am at using URL.

Day 1 (Mon, Jul 21) - Corvallis, OR to Winnemucca, NV (No Layover):
481 mi - 9 hours 44 minutes
Average Fuel Price: $4.623
Estimated Fuel Cost: $49.41

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Day 2 (Tue, Jul 22) - Winnemucca, NV to Mesquite, NV (2 day layover):
532 mi - 9 hours 43 minutes
Average Fuel Price: $4.647
Estimated Fuel Cost: $54.94

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Day 3 (Fri, Jul 25) - Mesquite, NV to Bayfield, CO (2 day layover):
534 mi - 9 hours 56 minutes
Average Fuel Price: $4.524
Estimated Fuel Cost: $53.68

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Day 4 (Mon, Jul 28) - Bayfield, CO to Denver, CO (2 day layover):
324 mi - 6 hours 25 minutes
Average Fuel Price: $4.473
Estimated Fuel Cost: $32.21

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Day 5 (Thu, Jul 31) - Denver CO to St Joseph, MO (no layover):
562 mi - 10 hours 5 minutes
Average Fuel Price: $4.289
Estimated Fuel Cost: $53.56

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Day 6 (Fri, Aug 1) - St. Joseph, MO to Bloomington, IN (no layover):
503 mi - 11 hours 18 minutes
Average Fuel Price: $4.278
Estimated Fuel Cost: $47.82

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Day 7 (Sat, Aug 2) - Bloomington, IN to Akron, OH (1 day layover):
379 mi - 9 hours 17 minutes
Average Fuel Price: $4.426
Estimated Fuel Cost: $37.28

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Day 8 (Mon, Aug 4) - Akron, OH to Hancock, NY (no layover):
404 mi - 8 hours 56 min
Average Fuel Price: $4.513
Estimated Fuel Cost: $40.52

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Day 9 (Tue, Aug 5) - Hancock, NY to Springfield, MA:
198 mi - 4 hours 59 minutes
Average Fuel Price: $4.616
Estimated Fuel Cost: $20.31

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Since I am essentially a guest at Kattare, I decided that it might be a good idea to reduce the footprint of Tsunami. Before I was running an AMD Athlon XP based system in a 4U generic rack mount case. This was rather large for the things I was running. The first thing that came to my mind was the possibility of moving to a Mac Mini instead. It had a lot of attributes that were very attractive. It’s small. It has a fairly powerful Intel Core 2 Duo processor in it. The amount of memory it can take is quite sufficient for a small server. The price was also decent, considering my student discount for such a thing.

I ended up picking up one at the University of Oregon Bookstore in Eugene. It turned out that they had a floor model that they were getting rid of, and were giving an additional $100 off the price. This was a really good deal since I ended up paying like $400 for the thing. Not a bad price for a server with a 1.83 GHz dual core with 1Gb of memory. The disk is a little small, and it’s the slow laptop sized drives, but for the traffic that Tsunami typically runs, it’s not a big deal. I’m planning on throwing an additional gig of memory in it since it’s fairly cheap, and adding some external USB 2.0 or Firewire storage to it (I want to see if I can pick up a MiniStack from NewerTech). There was a small problem in getting it since I forgot my UO ID in Springfield, and they didn’t want to really accept my WNEC ID. They ended up calling Apple to make sure I wasn’t trying to scam them. It’s surprising that they had to run this through their Apple rep, and it took a couple of days to clear. I would imagine that Apple would have things in good enough order that there would be a toll-free number, or a web page to consult for this stuff. The Apple Store never really has an issue with my purchases.

Once I got the hardware figured out, I had a decision to make regarding software. The AMD based Tsunami was running Gentoo Linux, and I’ve used it for a long time on my servers (ever since I switched from FreeBSD about five years ago). Gentoo worked fine, and the security updates were fairly good on it. The install process is necessarily complex since Gentoo is targeted towards a “roll your own” mentality. My problem is that I’ve become very lazy in my old age, and I’m getting tired of tinkering with things quite so much. With law school going on, and having to do work for Kattare, I don’t have the time or inclination to be fixing my server all the time. Especially when my e-mail is so important to me. While Gentoo was pretty stable and such, it required some intricate futzing to make work correctly all the time. I realized that MacOS X Server was very similar to my setup on Gentoo. The e-mail that ships with MacOS was in essence the same as what I was running on Gentoo: Postfix for an MTA, Cyrus IMAPd for a store, and a LDAP store for users. What was attractive is that there were some nice clicky buttons to set up all of the options for e-mail. Spam filtering with SpamAssassin was a check box in Server Administrator. Adding users was as easy as slamming in them into Workgroup Manager. Likewise, Apache server was doing the web duties for both MacOS and Gentoo. And, again, the ease of setting up Apache on MacOS was impressive.

So, I decided that I’d try out MacOS to see if I could make it work for my server. So far, it works fairly well. The nice thing about most of the stuff is that if you don’t like the choices that Server Manager gives you, you can always ditch it and edit the files directly. I’ve been resisting doing that for various reasons, but, honestly, the only thing I can think of that I’m missing is the ability to add SPF records to my DNS server. I have some security concerns with the granularity of the clicky buttons in the Apache configuration, but it’s certainly not a show stopper. The stability of the machine has been comparable to my Gentoo server in every way.

One of the huge advantages that I like about running MacOS instead is the ability to VNC in and get a standard MacOS interface. It allows me to install graphical programs that I’d normally use on my workstation. I ran into some problems getting it working 100%. The big issue is with Apple’s LDAP implementation: Open Directory. In the default configuration, Open Directory users are not able to log in via VNC. Unfortunately, the iCal Server (which is pretty nice) requires that its users be in the directory, and not as local users. After doing a lot of research, I learned that the only way to really get OD users to authenticate with VNC is to change the settings via Apple Remote Desktop 3.0. This was kind of an annoyance, but once I discovered the trick, wasn’t too much of a problem to set up.

I’ve also had some issues with runaway processes. Once it seemed like it was Clam Antivirus (which is used in the E-Mail server), and the other, sshd. I’ll be watching things a little more closely to see why these things were going crazy. As usual with UNIX based stuff, killing off the processes solved the problems without a reboot of the entire machine.

Another nice thing I found by accident with the box is the firewalling. It turns out that MacOS X has a daemon that runs and watches the authentication logs to see if there’s any authentication failures. When it finds excessive amounts, it will throw that IP address in the firewall for a period of time. This shipped on by default, and I didn’t have to do anything to set it up. This is really smart, and impresses me a lot. If you’re interested, check out emond and afctl.

I’ll have more updates about what I encounter a they come up.