Engineering Break

Today we took a short break from skiing/boarding. Since no snow fell overnight and there are reports of snow tonight we decided to wait for more powder & add another day to our stay in Salt Lake. One of us is more enthusiastic than the other about the possibility of more powder. The other claims she's not doing 100% powder runs since it seems to shorten her boarding time. Maybe she needs to just dump her skis and board the powder...not happening, but one can dream.

We also took the time to do our laundry...fun time.

With time on my hands I did what any other self-respecting engineer would do....I pulled out the old calculator and crunched some numbers. Since we left home we have been 10,156 mi. and we have bought 411.5 gal. of gas. The car has averaged 24.7 mpg which isn't bad considering the cartop carrier we're lugging around. Last time we came out west we got about 26 mpg headed west and about 28 headed east. So far it looks like the cartop carrier is costing about 1-2 mpg which is about what I expected.

Now for an observation...drivers seem to be in a 'rushed' state of mind in this area. It's been quite sometime since we've seen drivers like they have around this city. Who knew...last night we decided to take a tally of the bad habits & sometimes very dangerous actions we've seen in our 5 days in the city.
-as we were in the process of backing out of a parking space a car came at full speed around the corner & swerved around us to get to the light...no brake action on their part.
-car driving the wrong way to get to the drive through, blocking the parking lot
-cars (multiple) weaving at high rates of speed on a packed I-15.
-car we had just seen pulled for excessive speed pass us 10 minutes later going at a high rate of speed...multiple tickets anyone?
-how about driving the wrong direction on a 4 lane road about a block in order to get to a cross over (2 times so far)...next to the parking lot speedster this one is jaw dropping.
-rolling stops, no turn signals and speeding are all common.