JoeBlog

It’s less than a week to the start of our 16 day 6K road.    We are trying to finish up the house projects that we have in motion so we don’t come back to them.   This includes the tiling of the front room.  All the tile has been laid at this point (except for a few small pieces that need to be cut to size to fit to the wall) and all that needs to be done is the grouting of half the room. 

We’ve finally settled on a car.   My brother offered up his ‘02 Mercury Sable.  Its basically a prettied up Taurus like my ‘01.  Similar size and driving.   It does seem to get a bit better gas mileage.  In testing, we’ve been hovering in the 30 mpg range for highway mileage.  That should really help out with coming in under the gas budget.  Also, gas prices have stayed in the $3.00 range so that’ll help too (we used $4.00 a gallon as our budget baseline figure).  We didn’t really get the 4^th of July spike i was expecting but it seems like they are starting to creep up now.   I’ll be something we’ll keep an eye on but i looks like we’ll be okay

I’m currently testing (and writing this!) our WIFI subscription with ATT.  It was something i was ready to add to our DSL subscription (it would have been $20.00 a month) so that we’d have internet access at, as they report, 10,000 locations across the country.  Mainly McDonalds and it looks like all Barnes & Nobles stores (which is where i am right now in Plainfield, IN).    Fortuitously for us ATT decided just this week to add the wireless access as a free benefit to the service level of DSL we currently subscribe to.  So free WIFI across the country.   That should help with my goal of keeping this blog up to date as we travel across America.

That’s it for now.    I’m going to try out the GPS and see if it gets along with Microsoft VISTA now!