Fall Getaway 2022 - Day 2 - Albuquerque

When taking long trips that span several days it's nice to break it up by not having full travel days back to back. So we spent the day in Albuquerque with friends, visiting a US CostCo for the first time. I used to have a UK CostCo membership years ago, and to be honest the US stores are pretty much the same, good prices on quality goods if you don't mind buying in bulk. We had a good wander round, eyeing up the 4K OLED TV's as our living room TV is over 8.5 years old, but mainly we were there to bulk buy some vitamins and other supplements to send to my wife's parents in China. Despite being extremely busy checkout was fast and we tried a few items from their on-site cafe including the famed $1.50 hotdog combo and the delicious chicken bake.

Healthier home cooked food was on the menu for the evening, with some excellent chicken wings, delicious salmon and some healthy veggies, with my wife contributing a north eastern Chinese stew. 





Tomorrow we'll leave for Las Vegas, a near 600 mile run that will probably take around 9.5 hours...

You get some great views from Rio Rancho of the clouds rolling down the side of the Sandia Mountains:


 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The last single core CPU...

Image
    I decided to build a system using the last, and fastest, single core desktop CPU ever made: the Intel Celeron G470 from 2013. This Celeron was a bargain basement CPU back in 2013 and thus got no real attention or love, but it represents the end of a nearly 50 year era in "micro" or "personal" computing, an era that began back in the mid 70's with home computer kits that featured a single CPU, or core in today's speak, running the entire system. Unlike the earlier AMD Sempron 145, the Celerson G470 does have hyper threading, so it appears as two logical CPU's to your operating system, but make no mistake, there is just a single core on there sitting behind a thread scheduler. AMD introduced the first multi-core CPU on the desktop in 2005 (although  multi core CPU's have been around for decades as concepts and in specialty applications)  and frankly I'm surprised there was sufficient commercial incentive to introduce a
Read more

Robot vacuum cleaners need tire replacements?

Image
 Last week I noticed that Rosie, our iRobot Roomba S9 vacuum cleaner robot, was getting stuck in a few places that she never used to, mainly when she needed to climb over a bump of some sort like an anti-trip cable conduit. When I flipped her over it was clear that her tires had worn down as they were practically smooth with just a faint outline of where tire tread used to be. A quick double check of a photo of a new S9 on the Internet showed that they ship with chunky treads so I would need to find replacements. It turns out iRobot do not sell tires, although it is possible to buy an entire wheel module which includes the motor, suspension, wheel and tire for $35 each side. $70 was more than I would like to pay however so I tracked down a pair of tires for $12 on Amazon which claimed to be compatible with all Roombas. When they arrived the box had a couple of steps where they described removing the bottom cover from the Roomba, removing three screws to release the wheel module and the
Read more

Fall Getaway 2022 - Day 1 - Dallas to Albuquerque

Image
The first leg of our trip was from our home just north of Dallas, TX to a friends house in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where we would spend a couple of nights. As part of my trip planning I again used the "A Better Route Planner" app (ABRP) which suggested it would take 11 hours and 14 minutes to cover the 653 miles, requiring 5 charging sessions totaling 2 hours and 13 minutes. While it's not really necessary to bother with advanced planning like this, it does allow me to figure out where we will be at lunch or dinner time and figure out what food options are need whichever charging stop that is, after all, if there isn't much there, I know to hit a drive-through on the way. Once I've figured that out I extend the relevant charging stop to 45 minutes or so and get ABRP to re-calculate. ABRP is quite useful for trip planning but it's not as accurate as Tesla's own built-in nav system. It wanted us to make an additional charging stop in Tucumcari (bet
Read more