La Salle Explorers

[Jungle Rat]

Rip offs

[DooKSucks]

Friend of mine is in the CBD business. He gave me some
“Delta 8” stuff, and it’s hard to believe it’s legal. Very relaxing stuff...

[hedge]

Rip offs

We'll soon find out. I got a few bottles of THC-infused oils they advertise as having 100 mg per bottle for $15 per bottle. 10 mg is plenty for me, so that's 10 good doses for $15 or $1.50 per dose. Pretty good bargain...

[eCat]

Just got back from vacation in rural Alabama - I was around the Cheaha State park.

On the way down Thursday, I drove the entire time in a downpour and tornados. I'm talking trees across the interstate type stuff. Somewhere around Centre , Alabama my check oil light came on so I pulled over, checked my oil , it was fine, but the light was sending error codes and my car wouldn't let me drive 10 feet without a dash warning light and another warning on my navigation system. When your check oil light comes on and you have plenty of oil, its 1 of 2 things, the sending unit is going bad or the oil pump has stopped. If you drive with a bad oil pump you get a stupid prize of buying a new engine. So I'm listening to the car trying to decide in rural Alabama if the oil pump is working, it appears to be fine so we decide to drive as there is no obvious problem with the car.

I drive from Centre to Piedmont, again in a downpour and as I get in the Piedmont area my car starts missing out and I'm losing power. Now I'm convinced my oil pump has gone bad and I'm killing the engine, so I pull into this little convenience store and shit is bad outside , tornado warning sirens are going off, businesses are closing down and people are being told over the town loudspeakers to seek shelter. I can see an Auto Zone down the hill and I'm trying to decide if I should chance driving it, given I'm still an hour away from our destination and its 7PM in bumfuck where they are shutting down everything, so I decide to drive over there out of lack of any other reasonable options.

We get there and again - downpour rain, I am asking the guy to check my codes on my engine, he says he'll give me the code reader but he ain't doing it so I take the code reader, it says engine misfire which actually is better than a bad oil pump. Its in a coil that is in the front and I just happen to have toolbox in my car (Thank you Harbor Freight for your $29 tool set). I was able to buy a coil from Autozone and change it out in the parking lot - with tornado sirens going off , crazy wind and heavy rain. I was soaking wet.

About an hour later we're on the road, I"m still not 100% convinced that the car is fixed but its driving and getting me where I need to go. If I can just get there then tomorrow I will worry about what is wrong with it. So we finally get to the little town we are staying at. we've rented a lake house east of Birmingham near that state park. We had plans to go to a nice place to eat about 45 minutes from the house but that was gone and there is nothing around the place we are going. I stopped at a gas station that had Hunt Brothers pizza advertised but the guys tells me "We shut the pizza machine down at 7pm every night", so we see a Dollar General that hasn't closed yet, I stop and grab a DiGiorno's pizza , a loaf of bread , pop tarts and some potted meat. We head toward the house, the road goes from 2 lane, to one lane to gravel. Now we are driving the perimeter of the lake toward the house and come up to a bridge that has water running over it - its dark, I don't know the area, and I'm on a 1 lane gravel road with a lake on one side and god knows what the other. I get out, I'm already soaking wet so who gives a fuck at this point. I walk gingerly across the bridge. The water was never much more than ankle deep on the bridge and I felt it out to make sure it was a typical solid bridge.

We drove across without issue and finally found the house. What I believe happened is both the sending unit and the coils got wet. The errors were not related and once the car dried out over night it was fine. I was lucky to have the problem so close to an auto zone otherwise I probably would have just shut it down for the night and we slept in a parking lot.

So the rest of the weekend was uneventful, but on the return driving up I-75 between Chattanooga and Knoxville, traffic was horrible. At one point they had 3 guys on the side of the road just stepping out into traffic, stopping cars so one of them could dump a shovel ashphalt mix into potholes. That seemed crazy and it made traffic backup for miles but about a 1/2 mile past it we understood why. There were at least 7 cars on the side of the road with flat tires, just one after the other from hitting those potholes.

I'm over traveling for awhile.

[hedge]

That story would've been better if the bridge had collapsed when you drove across it. Not that I wish any harm on you, but it would've been funny reading you posting that, esp. after the buildup of what came before. Also, excellent use of "gingerly"...

[eCat]

If that had happened I would have just left the car there abandoned.

[Jungle Rat]

Damn. Almost got my wish

[Saint]

You didn't need the DiGiornos if you had potted meat. Guess you already got your stimulus big you're throwing around money like that

[eCat]

I was worried we might be stuck there for awhile

[innocentbystander]

There may not be any cruises leaving the United States until November 1st of this year.



Verdict is not in yet. But the head of the CDC clearly doesn't have any relatives who make a living in the cruising industry. DeSantis is threatening to have the state of Florida sue the Fed.

[Jungle Rat]

Desantis is a fuck head

[innocentbystander]

Desantis is a fuck head

I would agree that Governor DeSantis is not always agreeable. He can be short. But he has been pretty active lately signing all sorts of bills into state law around Covid-19.

They will start cruising in the Caribbean in 9 weeks, from the Bahamas to the Bahamas. They can't come anywhere near Florida yet and you can't get on the ship unless you have positive vaccination documentation.

[Jungle Rat]

I ain't getting on a floating petri dish for a long time.

[innocentbystander]

I ain't getting on a floating petri dish for a long time.

This.

This is the most common sense response to cruising and covid that almost all US citizens share. You are very smart.

[hedge]

They should let them run. Cruises are for losers anyway, so let them die. Even if every single person on every cruise ship died of covid, they would be refilled every time they came to port, b/c the people who go on cruises are zombies anyway and Trump supporters, so they don't care about anything, including their own lives. Wait, didn't eCat say he was going on a cruise?

[eCat]

I've signed up for 3 cruises, 2 of which have been canceled due to covid

[innocentbystander]

I've signed up for 3 cruises, 2 of which have been canceled due to covid

You can sail from the Bahamas in June.

https://www.royalcaribbeanblog.com/2021 ... lable-book

You have to have proof of covid-19 vaccination which is technically a violation of HIPPA (if you care) but since its the Bahamas they don't follow US law so they can do whatever the fuck they want.

Greece threatened to leave the EU if they weren't allowed to stop serving cruise ships. So there are a couple ships running back and forth from Israel to Greece just to give the Greeks tourist dollars.

[eCat]

I'm not that much of an avid cruiser. My wife and I want to do an Alaskan cruise and then we'll be done with cruising. I did a couple of those cheap bahamas cruises years ago, they were fun to bring the extended family on, eat 12 meals a day of junk food and go snorkeling, but I don't care to do it again. I'm on my 3rd year of trying to take an Alaskan cruise now.

Each time its canceled and I reschedule, it ends up costing me about $1200 more.

We are getting a trip to Glacier National Park out of it this year. We already burned the airline tickets and while I guess I could get them exchanged or whatever, we're just going to go and hike Glacier for a week instead.

[hedge]

Why did the airline tickets get burned?

[eCat]

I bought the first tickets with a combination of points and cash, and when I canceled them I was supposed to get a refund for the cash but Delta refused and gave me a credit with a free transfer fee. So I go to reschedule and I can't use the points for the same flight a year later and ended up spending an additional $700. Then about 3 months later I get an email saying that Delta was told by the federal government they are required to give refunds, but it was already so convoluted as to what my refund would be I just gave up. On top of that our original flight got canceled and they gave us essentially a redeye to return.

Then when the second cruise got canceled, instead of trying again we just decided to take an alternative vacation, since you can't buy airline tickets more than a year out anyways. I'll probably get burned when it comes time to buy tickets again, but I'm so fed up with the experience I'd just as soon wait and see what my options are with other airlines. Maybe we can drive to Dayton or Columbus to get better options.