Sleepy Boy After School

Caleb under two really heavy, thick blankets with two dogs to boot!

 

Football With Some Snugglin' Hounds

I really like football season but it's almost like the dogs wait for Sunday afternoons to roll around so they can sit on my lap.  They were still trying to figure out how to get cozy in this pic, this didn't last that long.

They eventually settled on the two-tiered approach after a few injuries to my stomach and naughty bits.

 

Vaca 2021, Day 14, Pt 1 - Canyonlands National Park

This morning was a little more relaxed, perhaps more than Mama Chaos would have preferred.  I don't recall what time it was that we finally left our Air B'n Domicile, but I believe around 8:20 or so. 

Our first stop was Bitsy's Brew for some coffee's, and the boys each got a highly decorated waffle that was as big as their heads.  Great coffee here!  And I got stickers for my guitar case!

I, Dear ol' dad, did the driving from Bitsy's to the visitors center at Canyonlands National Park. 

Rob took over from there and did most of the driving in Canyonlands.

We head out onto the days first expedition!  This was some fun hiking.

Watch'cher step kiddies!

Back into the vessel with Rob driving and Dear ol' Dad navigating.  What could possibly go wrong...

When someone else is driving, it allows me time to gaze out the window and take pictures.  I was amazed at the difference in tundra.  One minute, all rock everywhere, the next minute lots of dessert vegetation.

Our second expedition of the day.

Have I mentioned that I absolutely adore pictures of trees like this against a beautiful backdrop?

Or this...

My favorite of the entire vacation due to the shadow on the ground!  This is pretty close to perfection!!!

It's been long enough now that I forget what the range in the background is, but still a cool pic of God's grand creation.

So this is what hiking too.  A giant guitar case handle made of stone.

I believe this is referred to by the locals as the Mesa Arch.  It's pretty dang cool to see but I couldn't help but think of the Road Runner and arch nemesis, Wily E. Coyote.

How do you dress up God's beauty?  With two more of God's beauties!!

The first step is a doosy!

Fams!

Fams2, this time with all of mom in the pic.  Rob needs to work on the family selfies.  He was in charge since I can't do them at all and mama chaos always has a finger in the picture.  Oh, and it was kind of bright if you can't tell by the looks on our faces, especially Caleb.

As I look out over such an expanse, I can't help but to admire the beauty of creation but also of all of the creatures out there that would like to lunge at me, rip a vein out of my neck and terminate me.

Looks like puzzle pieces.

This is the biggest pigeon that I've even seen!!  LOL!  This big boy (I think it was a big "boy" but I wouldn't get close enough to check!) was just chilling and didn't much care about any of the annoying humanoids wandering about.

After this, we headed back to the Moab food truck park to lunch and a small bit of dinner for after tonight's adventure.

We will be leaving in just a bit for an ATV tour called Hell's Revenge.  I was a bit nervous as I have driven ATV's, and while always fun, if you bring up the fancy youtubes and search for Hell's Revenge, you will see why my amateur butt was a bit reserved!  

Stay tuned...

2022 Driveway Incident #1 - The Amazon Truck

The Amazon delivery peep tried backing down our driveway in lieu of using the turnaround nearly the top. They backed off the left side twice and must have been frustrated because the backed into the yard far enough to get turned around.  You may have to double-click the pic to see the far tracks just a bit past that second tree on the right.

 

Electric Vehicles & How They Would Have Affected the S.M.C.U.'s 2021 Vacation

In December 2021, President Biden rolled out a series of new emissions regulations for passenger vehicles and light trucks.  This is expected to begin implementation in 2023 with revised (and more stringent) numbers in 2027.  This raises the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) to 55 MPG.

Bear with me here for a moment before we get to the actual guts of this post.  

EPA Administrator Michael Regan recently said  “This day is truly historic, at EPA, our priority is to protect public health, especially in overburdened communities, while responding to the President’s ambitious climate agenda.   Today we take a giant step forward in delivering on those goals while paving the way toward an all-electric, zero-emissions transportation future.”.

First to be noted,  there is a difference between the stated "new emission regulations for passenger vehicles and light trucks" and "paving the way toward an all-electric, zero-emissions transportation future.".  Let's ignore that for now.

All electric?  Okay then...  that seems like an astounding claim, to say the least.  So let's say this was implemented back around 2010, 3 - 4 years after Al Gore started his frantic hand-waving about global warming.  Let's pretend that we're, "an all-electric, zero-emissions transportation” nation.  

What would that have meant to the Schmitz Mobile Chaos Unit's 2021 summer vacation?  Let's take a look, shall we?

I used the fancy Bing.com to search for comparison of the best EV's on the market currently,  and more specifically, I used this link to build the spreadsheet below, so we can see what type of vehicle we may have been driving instead of a 2019 Dodge Caravan. 

You can double-click these images to see them in a larger form.  I've separated the bottom four out as three of them are over $100,000 to purchase, making them, not only unrealistic to my family but probably 95% of American families.  The other one is only available to rent or lease and get's a max range of 89!!

For our little experiment here,  I've selected the Nissan Leaf Plus off of the list as it's affordable to a degree, but honestly, the 4 of us couldn't vaca in this as it's simply not big enough to fit our fams of four and the luggage we needed to do the things we wanted.  

Here are the details for this vessel:

Yikes!  Max range of 226 miles?!?   Things just went South for us and we haven't left Des Moines yet!!

This was our path as we left home to get our first stop of the day, Kearney,  MS.

And it fits comfortably enough in our max range of 226 miles.  Seems safe enough as we would still need to locate a charging station, which would likely be a bit more tough than finding one of those filling stations where I could quickly pump some petroleum distillate.  A fella would have to allow a mile or 5 to find an appropriate place to plug our vessel in.  And honestly speaking, had we transformed our society over to these EV's, charging stations would be FAR more plentiful than they are currently, regardless of the cost to the average man to update the infrastructure required for this transformation.  

So how long would we need to stay at the Pilot Travel Center before our band of pirates hit the road again?  Let's check that out.

Here's what we drove for around $20,000 with a range of around 450 miles on a tank of gas:

Pretty sexy, if I don't say so myself!  Nothing says middle-aged over-weight man quite like a minivan.

This is our new ride for $13,000 more!  Apparently these zero emission vehicles (ZEV) are SOOOOO popular that I only have the option of the dark gray since there's only one on the lot/in transport to Hummel's Nissan on Merle Hay Road in Des Moines.  The price differ's slightly from the link that I provided but that's because there was a common options package included that I did not notice, things like floor mats...   And, again, to be fair there's not a lot of vehicles on any of the lots as I type this (Jan. 3rd, 2022) due to larger, more complicated issues.

The window sticker from the link on Hummel's web page...

A highly zoomed in view from the upper left of the full window sticker so we can try to calculate the charging time that me and the fams would need to plan for on our trip.  No lies, it would be Mama Chaos who would need this calculation to build her excellent itineraries that we follow.

EV charging time calculator that I used for the Nissan Leaf is at this link.

HOLY UNACCECTABLE RESULTS, Batman!!!  Nearly 10 hours!?!?  We only drove 2 hours and 37 minutes!

To summarize:

$33,000 + to buy a vehicle that won't fit a fams of 4 on a long vaca.

$3,500 more than my F150 that has a 650 mile range/10 minute "recharge" time.

Blackwell, OK (where we stayed the 1st night in "reality" America, is still 275+ miles away, outside of the max range of this toy vehicle, so we won't be able to reach Blackwell until Day 3, unless we calculated a partial charge of the vehicle to get us that far (after pushing a bit further than Kearney on day 1).

I wasn't a fan of EV's before I did this little experiment but I am somewhat shocked how bad they really are for a family like ours!  I fully understand that they would make sense for a certain segment of peeps who don't commute far for work and seldom travel, but for most American's, this is insanity!

And what about heavy freight if this was planned for full transportation?  You want to think about supply chain issues???  Holy smokes...  It would take a friggin' semi 3 - 4 days to get from Denver to Des Moines depending on what it was carrying!

Anyone care to fly in airplane using this "technology"?   I'll pass on that as well as the stupid cars.  

This is either total insanity or a sinister, diabolical plot against the American people.