Apolitical Musing (Hard to Do Lately)

Too much of my musings have been political lately.  You haven't seen them because I write them to vent and almost never publish them.  Mark Twain (one of my favorite writers) would write scathing letters to newspapers he thought were wrong.  When he finished the vent, he'd leave the letter on the dining table for his wife to read.  If she deemed it acceptable she would mail it to the paper.  I don't normally turn my blogs over to Carol unless she is mentioned in it.  Maybe I should.  Anyway, I have written three in the past month titled:: Watching a Grand Master at Work, Thinking About the Super Rich, and Congress and the Idiot Factor. While I won't publish any of them, perhaps the titles will give someone something to ponder.  I don't know.  However, I felt better after each one, which is the real reason to even do this.

This past weekend Carol and I drove our Roadtrek Camper (RV when Carol's not reading this) to Rochester, NY to visit our older daughter and her family.  The reason we drove the Roadtrek is that I needed to dump the holding tanks - the last, maybe next to last, step before storing it in its shelter for the winter. Since all the local campgrounds, both municipal and commercial, were closed for the season, our options were limited.  Petro Stopping Centers  is a chain of truck stops that have dump stations available - five dollars to use; free if you fill your fuel tank.  There was a center at exit 41, a few before our normal Rochester exit.

We accomplished both the dump, and a lovely family visit, including an early Thanksgiving dinner with daughter, husband, both kids and their current squeezes.  The weather turned cruddy - lake effect snow is a euphemism for really unpredictable storm info - but when we left Sunday morning, the trip was just fine.  I drove more slowly than normal until we past the snow belt, driving into the cold, windy, sunny morning sure of our goal, a luncheon with good friends, and an uneventful trip.  Just west of Schenectady that changed.   A deer, a doe I believe, ran in front of our vehicle so close that I didn't even have a chance to take my foot off the gas before I hit her.  She was not large, less than one hundred pounds I'm sure, but the impact at road speed destroyed the oil cooler and the radiator of the vehicle, dumping diesel oil and coolant on the NYS Thruway lane as I guided the machine to a stop on the shoulder.  Some safety interlock in the engine shut it down as soon as the oil pressure dropped, so I was without either power steering or power brakes, luckily I was already in the right lane.

All is well, no injuries, only inconvenience.  The vehicle is now in New Paltz, at our friend's body shop, to be repaired sometime in the next several weeks.  This is not a huge problem since the plan was to wash the Roadtrek and store it when we returned from Rochester.  All in all it was a good trip, considering that our doe could have encountered us on the way to, instead of from, Rochester.