Heh. Here in California there is a bridge between Oakland and San Francisco (known, rather obviously, as the Oakland - San Francisco Bay Bridge).

Some months back they had to close it for a day.

The normal drive from Oakland to San Francisco over the bridge is about 10 miles and in usual traffic takes 20 min or so.

While the bridge was closed the trip became roughly 110 miles and 3 hours.

And then there is the Chesapeake Bay Bridge/Tunnel on the East Coast. A 20 or so mile beast. There are major storms in that channel every year (we call them 'hurricanes') and almost invariably a shipping barge gets pushed into the bridge, "taking out" a hundred feet or so, necessitating a repair that can literally take weeks.

That changes the 30 minute drive from the southern end of the DelMarVa Peninsula to Virginia Beach (Hampton Roads, VA) into a 6 to 8 hour fiasco involving Washington DC and the infamous Beltway and worse.

It's not so bad now that they have actually built a parallel bridge, with each being one way. But there have been at least two instances where *both* spans have been damaged in the same storm. See previous paragraph.

This makes traffic re-routing in California's Bay Area look like "heaven on earth" in comparison.

And yes, there are people that live on the DelMarVa Peninsula's southern end and work in Hampton Roads (major naval facility there).

I sympathize with their plight.

The only problem with the Chesapeake Bay thing is that on the DelMarVa side there are no ports or piers or any other facility to handle a ferry, which I presume would have to carry vehicles.

Wow!

West Texas Intermediate (Crude Oil): $49.90/barrel @ 3:10PM EDT.

Regular Gasoline in NJ at COSTCO:
Plainfield
Edison
North Brunswick
All at $1.819/gal.

Almost makes me want to move back.
Almost!!!

Back in the '70s when I was last in Germany a 1 liter stein at the beer hall was one Deutschmark, which was (back then) 26 cents American. Oh yeah, you weren't buying the stein. You were buying the beer with which it was full.

26 cents.

It *still* amazes me.

How about at one of the big beer halls in Muenchen?

My favorite city in all Germany is Nuernburg.
The Altstadt is pretty beyond words, and the Sunday morning church bell thing is, well, unique.

We stayed in Nuernburg and made the daily drive up the autobahn to Bayreuth while "doing" the Ring that August. Quite memorable!!

All at $1.819/gal.

Almost makes me want to move back.

(Follow up: instead of New Jersey, Vince decided to move to Venezuela, where gasoline is currently selling at the equivalent of 0.02[12~USD per liter.)

[ Source: http://www.globalpetrolprices.com/gasoline_prices/ ]

2015-01-10 10:56 from IGnatius T Foobar

All at $1.819/gal.

Almost makes me want to move back.

(Follow up: instead of New Jersey, Vince decided to move to Venezuela,

where gasoline is currently selling at the equivalent of 0.02 [12~USD

per liter.)

[ Source: http://www.globalpetrolprices.com/gasoline_prices/ ]

If I were going to move off-continent, it would be Navassa Island (in the Caribbean).

After all, the only thing that would beat my Mountain, being the very rarest of rare DX is it !!

--K2NE

Pour another round of drinks, I've got a "me and the lads down the pub came up with this theory"

So we know that the Sun is made of hydrogen, right? And that it creates energy via a fusion reaction that converts hydrogen into helium, this much is pretty much agreed on, not just by scientists but by "scientists" as well.

This got me thinking.

All that hydrogen being converted into helium ... eventually the Sun is going to have so much helium that it's going to just FLOAT AWAY. Just like a party balloon. Are we prepared for that? Or maybe it's started happening already, which is why we had such a cold winter last year? I just came back from a great vacation at the beach, and I'm concerned that we won't be able to do that again if the Sun floats away.

We're at a pub, of course we need the selfie sticks. How else would we take a picture of ourselves drinking to science?