In Miles City. MT tonight. On my way to Seattle. The wind was terrible today and made for a very tiring drive. I called it a day here after fighting those high winds all day.
Last night I stopped in North Dakota and spent a little time at a pub I hadn't visited before. It was a good/bad experience. The good was a fellow came in smoking some cherry blend in a cob and we talked pipes, the bad was that when I went to the restroom someone stole five dollars from the money I had left in the bar. I would have happily snapped his or her neck if I had known who it was. I hate a damn thief.
I don't know about you but I just can't abide a thief. I feel the same way about a liar too.
I am on my way to Seattle with an over-size load, a fire truck, that I will deliver to the port in Seattle. From there it will take a boat ride to Anchorage and then another truck ride up to Whitehorse in the Northwest territory of Canada.
After checking in to the motel in Miles City I spent three hours and several pipe-fulls of tobacco installing Windows 7 on a partition of the hard drive of my laptop. Talk about frustrating!
The actual OS install took less than an hour, the rest was spent hunting down hardware drivers. The sound card, which works perfectly in a Linux install, was the most annoying. It took me over an hour to hunt down and install the correct (digitally signed) driver to make the sound work. Very, very annoying.
Now I remember why I prefer Linux over Bill Gates' mud pit of an OS.
I am now enjoying some Sherlock Holmes in a Peterson Bulldog and when it's finished (as well as the 6 pack I bought next door) I'll hit the sack. It's been a challenging and interesting evening and I spent a portion of it at the local watering hole in conversation with some of the local folken.
There are interesting people anywhere you go if you care to take the time to seek them out. Some of them can be, well, more than interesting, and others are just annoying. But they pass the time either way.
Ah well, at least the bartender remembered me.