Friday, 28th of December, 2001
Thursday, 27th of December, 2001
Wednesday, 26th of December, 2001
We then drove over to Fair Park to the Steam Locomotive Museum. They had one of the Big Boys 6-4-4-6 steam locomotives, the largest ones ever built. They also had a gigantic Union Pacific diesel locomotive, the largest of those built too. They have also restored an entire line of cars, and that was really cool.
For lunch we went up to the rotating restaurant on top of the 500-foot Memorial Tower. The view there was awesome, but the observation level below it was surrounded by barbed fence. That was pretty useless, good job we went to the restaurant too.
After lunch we went near the Dallas/Ft. Worth airport to the American Airlines museum. Though the primary purpose of the complimentary museum was obviously to show off how great American Airlines is, there was a lot of cool stuff there, like how commercial airport baggage handling works (which is all computerized using bar codes and so cool!) and technical stuff on aircraft maintenance (they replace just about everything every 18 months). There was also a display case telling the story of the Convair 990. The impressive display is the restored DC-3, and that was tight.
As the sun started to set, we went to SuperSpeedway, the best go-carting place I've been to. A couple unique ideas are a drag strip and slick track. The drag strip sent 6 impressive 300-hp V8 drag racers from 0-70 in 3 seconds. Sounds impressive, but the cars sat on a track and there was still no transmission. Sounds like you just step on it and feel the rush - not good enough for me to justify the $12 for 3 runs, so I showed my driver's lisence and went for 3 laps on the Grand Prix cars for $7. It was the best go-cart experiece I've ever had! The cars were nice, with real shock absorbers and decent engine and brakes, and I drove on a nice bendy track with tons of 180's and S's. The sharper turns were true brake-in, throttle-out, rear-end breaking loose for nice, long, squealing turns at ten-tenths. Wow! Nothing like driving a mid-engined kart at handling limits like that. And boy did they encourage it. They had it all computerized so you could see the time you dialed in on each lap. Wow! My first slow, get-used-to-this lap was 54.something seconds, and I got better. The next 2 runs were 49.2 and 48.6. I could have easily done 47 if I didn't blow my last series of 3 turns, which was just plain scary in a car I hadn't driven before. I somehow didn't hit anything, thanks to corrective maneuvers, and it was a blast! The car got more responsive as it warmed up, too, and the brake stopped being an on/off switch. I posted the top 3 times for the night, too, even the 54-second run, but apparantly that's due to lack of skill that night. The week's record was 41.2 seconds, and the all-time best was 40 flat. Must have been a hot Texas day! But I can't even say how much fun that was - my arms were even sore after only 3 laps of intense, low-ratio manual cornering! The slick track looked fun too, since it was purposely slippery so one gets those oversteering slides on typical speed-limited go-carts. But the height restriction was still too strict for my brother on that track, so he had to drive a 2-seater on the "Turbo Track".
Later on, a stop at Super-Target revealed more of the big Texas economy. They have gadgets too, like the motorized super-shopping-cart-pusher. That thing was schlepping at least 60 carts across the parking lot. Woah. Also, a new big machine I've discovered has "HOV" all over it. Apparanty, it does the job of moving, with efficiency, all those concrete blocks on the median to the middle of the highway to separate the HOV lane, and back to the median again whenever they want.
Driving around Dallas was awesome! I-35 was a huge 7/7 highway, and the city criss-crosses with Interstates and limited-access state highways. There seems to be at least three complete loop highways around Dallas! Texas is obviously rich. Interchanges were appropriately just as impressive. At I-45 and I-30, I went under a 4-level spaghetti interchange! Exit systems are huge though. You'd be driving on a 6-lane highway, 3 would exit, and you find yourself on a totally different highway 2 miles later without noticing! After a couple of confused diversions, I got used to all this, and it's all so cool.
Tuesday, 25th of December, 2001
Monday, 24th of December, 2001
I played for my church's Christmas Eve service tonight. Instrumentation for the night was simple: a violin, viola, and guitar. We played carols in the foyer as people came in, as well as all through the service. It was really nice getting to play Christmas carols, I'd missed the last 2 weeks of it at church.
Sunday, 23rd of December, 2001