Yoopers

 

We’re not really Yoopers.  We just found the hat.

 

But here we are.  The Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=107013362562471418011.00047964b60d16d130156&ll=46.528635,-88.000488&spn=8.510549,28.45459&z=6

 

Not far from Marquette.  Still around Lake Superior.  We’ve been to the lower portion of Michigan before, but never the upper.  In California parlance, we’re in NoMi (as opposed to SoMi).  (NoCal and SoCal.)

 

It was raining this morning when we woke up in Wisconsin, and it rained all the way here.  I think we need a windshield wiper on the Rearview Camera in back.  When it’s raining while we’re moving, all I can see in my camera screen on the dash are giant water droplets dancing.

 

Driving in the rain gets me to thinking about the weight of various machines and their tendency to hydroplane.  It occurs to me that because we’re so heavy, we might not have the same tendency to hydroplane as a car would.  I wondered this in a trip report a year or so ago, and got some answers, but it’s still an issue in my head.  I don’t know the physics of it, but it seems to me if you have a vehicle with a certain size tire (say, a bicycle with bicycle tires) it will have a tendency to hydroplane at a certain speed.  If you multiply the weight of that vehicle by ten, on the same size tires, I would think it would push the tires through the water and keep it on the road longer.  Which brings me back to the motorhome.  We weigh 35,000 pounds, so we’re pushing down really hard on the road.  We have bigger tires than a bicycle, though, so we can’t really address the tendency to hydroplane just from weight.  It must be a calculation of weight, combined with the footprint of the tires.  But on our tires, if we multiplied the weight by a factor of ten, would we be less likely to hydroplane?  (at least until the tires burst because they’re not rated for ten times the weight.)

 

Now we’re in the Eastern Time Zone, but we’ve left our clocks on Mountain Time.  No struggling with time zone changes for us!  We still stay up for the news (Colorado channels).  All our neighbors go to bed really early.  And you wouldn’t believe what time it gets light!