UR Here; F is for Formula; Raindrops keep falling on my screen; Miles per gallon
URHere: Some time earlier in the trip – maybe a lifetime ago in Maine – we were told that towns painted handy signs on upward-facing surfaces to help air pilots with their navigation in those long-ago pre-GPS days. We were reminded of this when we saw mysteriously large single letters painted on the rock faces just outside of town. P is for Page, by the way…
… and F is for Formula. Janet Evanovich has written a series of tongue-in-cheek detective novels featuring a sassy female character who works for her cousin’s Bail Bond firm. She shops at Piggly Wiggly and her grandmother loves to go to funeral homes for viewings. Today we saw our first bail bond shop, with a Piggly Wiggly and a family-run funeral parlour in town too. We are entering Stephanie Plum-land and it is strangely exciting.
Raindrops (don’t) keep falling on my screen: You may remember that we had the screen refitted in a very determined and permanent way by Alan and his sturdy friend in California. Also when we were in Monterey, Griot’s Garage kindly gave us a bottle of rain treatment formula for the screen so that we wouldn’t be too dependent on the vacuum-powered windscreen wipers. We’ve not had much chance to check either of these, because it hasn’t rained on us, except for that overnight cloudburst in Cedar City, which led me to find this rainfall map of the US.
Raindrops still don’t keep falling on my screen: Which reminds me that our museum guide in the Edwards Country Museum in Kinsley (the one with the Midway sign) told us that her grandparents lived in the dustbowl – the result of trying to use European farming methods on the original buffalo sod/bison country. The original land grant size was 160 acres which is a quarter of a square mile, giving four claims to a square mile, and the classic grid of roads you can see which are each one mile apart. After they found how hard it was to farm the land, the plot sizes were increased to 320 and then 640 acres.
Miles? Per Gallon? We’ve been logging the amount, quality and price of petrol that we’ve put in the car (keeps me occupied). Maximum price for petrol so far: $5.40 a gallon in California. Here: $2.60. Of course, the American gallon is smaller than the fine old British gallon because the American pint is smaller than the British pint. But we are also starting to suspect that the American mile is longer than a British mile, because it seems to take a huge amount of time to drive past one. It is well known that time flows at different rates depending on the amount of incident, and we are starting to suspect that this applies to distance too.