Polar Opposites

Getting into the rental car in Austin, I plug in my GPS.  The unit powers up and the lady's voice is heard saying: "Awww, shit!!  We're in Texas.  For those of you that have not had the opportunity, nay pleasure of driving in a Texas city, please allow me to elaborate.  The highways have few on/off ramps in the common sense that there is an overpass and ramps to get on and off the highway.  They have frontage roads with one-way traffic that runs parallel to the highway lanes, and very short on/off lanes between the two.  For instance, if you're hungry for Burger King (not sure why, but jonses happen) and you spot on coming up on the frontage road, normally you'd take the next off-ramp and head down the frontage road to BK.  Not so in TX.  You'd have to get off the highway on one of the short, aforementioned lane, travel a distance to a turn-around point, double back on other frontage road, to another turn-around point that is beyond your destination and then get back to original frontage road to get to BK.  Now I'm sure that my kind readers in TX are laughing at me, that's okay.  It takes some getting used to the system down there.  When traveling through the meat of a downtown area (Austin, San Antonio, etc.) there is a huge network of bridges (Texans love their bridges), overpasses, and lanes for the sake of having additional lanes.  So, that leads me back to my original point of the pissed off-fa-fa GPS lady.  With all of these parallel lanes/frontage roads, etc. it is very easy to take a wrong turn and the GPS will not know until you've traveled a distance, sometimes a couple of miles, before she realizes that you've goofed.

 

Short on-ramp to I-410 S.A.

You'd better get up on it when you're getting onto a highway, and likewise stomp on the brakes whilst getting off.  And to make matters worse, the plant I was supposed to go to has a new address (well, new to the site where I get my plant address info).  The listed plant address is the back, employee entrance.  I sure got some weird looks when I pulled into there (after many turns in TX gun country) last July.  The following picture is from the GPS after gaining access to the site through the new entrance off of US 181:

Lovely

The trip was not too bad on site.  It was really physically demanding.  4 port rodders (slag clearing thingys) were stuck inside the boilers.  The rodder pulling tool was broken, so I had to muscle them out.  I was quite sore.  One there, boiler #1 decided to leak water/steam from some of it's tubes and the plant dudes had to shut it down.  While shut down, plants like to de-slag their boilers.  Usually plants use a large shot gun inside the boiler to remove the slag.  These guys use dynamite.  I managed to capture a shot video of the action.  It was quite loud, as they were blasting close to my level, luckily I was over on boiler #2:

 I'm gonna have to cut this post short, as I need to check out of my room in Rizhao, China.  I'll post the second part of this blog in a day or two.

Thank you for reading!

Kev