Finished!

Finished!  With the trip planning, that is.  Eighteen days, just over 6,000 miles, 84 supercharger stops, and 15 different lodgings.  Whew!  The lodging turned out to be the most challenging part.  Certain parts of the country (I'm looking at you, Yellowstone, coastal Maine, and Niagara Falls!) are damned near impossible to book for the season we're passing through.  Our goal was B&Bs all the way, but in five places I had to compromise on hotels, as there was just no B&B space available.  Also we ran into something new: in many places now, B&Bs have two-night minimums.  I did some research online as to why they were doing this.  The main reason seems to be to eliminate those pesky overnight travelers (like us!), as they're neither as lucrative or as fun as the stay-a-whiles.  When the B&B is in a market where the demand exceeds the supply, it's an easy way for them to sort out the more desirable customers.  That two-night minimum made it really tough to find lodging in some places.

I'm going to be building a cabinet to hold our new grill on our deck.  A good friend of mine, Mike B., is a very experienced cabinet maker – so I went to him for some advice.  It was very simple advice, indeed: use pocket-hole screws and ignore all the howls of traditional cabinet makers (who generally use mortise-and-tenon or finger joints).  So I took his advice, and invested in a set of Kreg pocket-hole jigs.  There are many makers of such jigs, but Kreg is probably the biggest and best-known of them.  I got the jigs a couple days ago, and yesterday I tried making a couple of simple joints, just to see how they worked and how hard it would be.  Bottom line: I can see why Mike swears by them.  They are ridiculously easy compared with traditional techniques, and at least as strong.  They also allow a few joints that are nearly impossible with traditional techniques, such as angled butt joints.  About the only skill required is to cut boards to the right length, and that's just not very hard!  It will be interesting to build this cabinet as a first project – it's reasonably ambitious for a first go.  There will, of course, be photos as I progress...