In The Market For A New Backpack

I bought this Swiss Gear back pack in 2006. This bag has been to Kenya, Seattle, San Diego, Connecticut, Sicily, Italy, Greece, Georgia, Germany, Japan, Ecuador, Michigan, Montana, Wisconsin, Rhode Island, Poland, Texas, Tasmania, New Mexico, North Dakota, Finland, Florida, Alabama, Amsterdam, Australia and Alaska. I didn't take it to Isle Royale. I bought a special backpack for Isle Royale and a strap on that new backpack broke on the second day of the trip.

But my back pack is wearing out.  You can see the fabric is starting to tear. That round hole at the top was the new thing in 2006 because you could thread your ear buds and listen to music playing inside your bag. I never did thread my ear buds through there but I could have.

I kept my cell phone in that tiny pocket on the strap! That was a cellphone where you had to press the 7 key four times to get the letter s.

The strap on the left partially melted when I rode my motorcycle to work. I must have hit the muffler with it before I got saddle bags. Sometimes that strap would whip my thighs in the wind and boy, howdy, that hurt. I am in the market for a  new backpack now. I hope the new one lasts 15 years like this one did. So long Swiss Gear back pack. Thanks for carrying all my stuff. You were real comfy.

 

Long Road

I have thought how fun it would be to follow one road from beginning to end.  Highway 61 or Highway 52 seem like good roads to follow.  Never once did I think about following Highway 35 but in the past two days, I've covered most of it.  We left Saturday morning and got on Highway 35 about 8 a.m.  We drove 11 hours on Saturday.  Today we continued on Highway 35 from 7 until about 10 am when we got off around Oklahoma City.  It's a good road.   It's fast and smooth and mostly straight except for those redtail swerves (that is when I peer up at a redtailed hawk a little too long). This highway has lots of gas stations with clean bathrooms.  Highway 35 continues through Texas all the way to the Mexican border.  But we were headed southwest.  As we drove we saw things change.  We saw donkeys mixed in with the horses and cows.  The lakes were wet instead of frozen.  In Missouri the fields had a greenish tinge.  Mourning doves started showing up on the roadsides.  Oil derricks dotted the fields in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico.  Some of the rivers were dry.  On some dry spots sand lined the fence posts and the trees were so uncommon that some of them had 4 birds nests in the same tree.  And we saw cotton fields.  I wanted to stop and take a picture of the field of cotton but we went by so fast and all the others we saw had already been harvested.  Now the two days of hard driving are finished.  Tomorrow we plan on seeing Carlsbad Caverns and the Roswell/Area 51 part of the state.