Hello from Price, UT
Sunday evening – October 7, 2018 (Sixth post of this travelogue)
Well, the trip is winding down. We are in Price, UT staying at the Ramada Inn (Google Map link).
{google_map}39.602669, -110.832215{/google_map}
As you recall, our goal is to stay at Holiday Inn (IHG) properties whenever possible. Unfortunately the Holiday Inn in Price is booked full and the Holiday Inn in Green River is no longer a part of the IHG group. So we settled for the Ramada. Strangely, we have stayed here a couple of times in years past – but it was a Holiday Inn at the time. I really don’t like Ramada Inns as a rule, but this one is fine and it looks like they may have a good breakfast.
Reno-Sparks is a bit over 1,000 miles from our house. We decided to break the trip home into three legs. Last night we stayed at a HI in Elko, NV. It was a very nice property and we received a nice upgrade.
Tomorrow we will travel home (about 400 miles). That is a bit longer than we like to travel in a day. When we were young we could drive straight through to Pat’s home town in Iowa (about 600 miles) but our tired old bodies no longer like to be submitted to that kind of “punishment”. Besides that, my sciatica issues impact how long I can travel at a time.
The class in Reno got off to a bit of a rocky start. There were 7 students – all employees of Barrick Gold Corporation (a huge mining organization with many mines in the Americas including two huge mines in the Elko area). The students had a lot of experience and seemed to have a bit of an “attitude”. On the second day things smoothed out a bit when they figured out that I was not going to read out of a textbook. I try to make the sometimes “boring” subjects interesting and they seemed to warm up to that approach. By the fourth day we were having a ton of fun – well, as much as you can have in a somewhat structured class. The last two days of class are shaft alignment labs with our training equipment. Without question, they were very skilled and were much quicker to get the exercises done than most classes and they did a great job. Most of the exercises involve the use of two different dial indicator processes and that can be a real challenge to most students. Once they get the alignment completed with the dial indicators, we put our laser kit on so that they can get experience with laser alignment equipment, and also, to check the results of their dial indicator alignment. In almost every case, the laser will show the students that they need to work on getting the dial indicator process perfected. These folks almost always hit very close to the target. The class turned out to be a good experience.
When we left Denver, there had been something like 8-10 straight days of 90 degree weather. For most of this trip the weather has been anywhere from good to fantastic (a few rain showers mixed in). The last couple of days have been quite chilly with a bit of rain, but still decent weather. Now it looks like we will get home in a snowstorm. I am going to continue to wear my shorts, but that may be a stretch when we get home {grin}.
That is all for this trip.