Same trip in Texas this week. Same rental car. Same driver (me). Good old funny Bob in back seat and Mark in the front passenger seat.

Somewhere in Houston area, we come across a Toll booth. I checked behind the rear view mirror but could not find any contraption there – hence pulled to the “Cash only” booth. There were a few cars in front of me. And then suddenly I noticed a very thin strip on the left end of the dashboard which was the actual Toll transponder. And all the automatic booths were open.

A quick glance in the rearview mirror showed that the car behind was about two hundred yards away. So, I quickly shifted to reverse and backed the car out for a few yards so that I could swing by thru the automated booths.

Bob, who as I mentioned was sitting behind, rapidly realized that in case of a collision, he was likely to be the first casualty. He looked behind, saw the same car I saw and it had a far more pronounced hysterical effect on him than me 🙂

When I finally put the car in forward drive and drove away, a much relieved Bob declared “the life you may be saving is mine” – much to the guffaws of Mark and self 🙂

Remember that very funny friend of mine – Bob Hickey?
Yesterday, I was speeding along Texas highway I-45, taking full advantage of the speed limit of 75 mph on Texas highways (some might even argue I took full advantage and then some). Bob was probably dozing off in the back seat. I could not figure out since he had those cool looking dark shades on.

At one point, I suddenly realized that there was a turtle trying to cross the road! On I-45!! How it made it to the middle of the first lane I will never understand. In any case, I had just enough time to take a sharp swerve and then pull back without losing control at any point of time. Fortunately, managed to save the turtle. Although, if I were a betting man, I would not wager on the turtle crossing the road that afternoon. There was a really heavy wind turbine blade coming to meet him soon 🙂

In any case, the thoroughly startled Bob asked “What happened?”
“There was a turtle on the road”, I replied.
He was much relieved to realize that nothing untoward had happened – for example, me sleeping off at the wheel!! You would expect Bob to be further relieved that I managed to save the turtle. But then, you would forget that this is Bob we are talking about. He was probably more piqued by he having to wake up. His next reaction was –
“Hey Rajib, next time you see the turtle on the road, feel free to run it over!!!”” 🙂

It was a long four hours drive from Houston to Dallas last evening. Fortunately, I was traveling with two of my very funny team mates – Bob Hickey and Mark Meade. Somewhere near Rice, Texas, we came across this humongous item that was being transported on I-45. To realize the size of the object, check out the size of the car near the head of the truck and then compare the size of the cars towards the end of the truck to the object. I had no idea what that monstrous item was.

“What is it?”, I asked. The ever-smart Mark lifted his eyes from his phone and nonchalantly replied “Oh! It is a blade of a wind turbine” – like he sees them every time he drives out on his street or something. When we see the wind turbines in the field (generating electricity from wind), we don’t get a good idea at all how humongous these blades are.

So, we took bets on guessing the size of the blade. I came at 100 feet. Bob at 150 feet. And Mark at 120 feet. And Mark was right (the standard ones are 120-125 feet tall; that is a twelve story building!). From that we went to think of all sorts of trivia about wind turbines and blades. The one that took us most time to figure out was – how many bolts would they use and what size the bolts are. After a long discussion, we turned to that one version of truth – Google! A few searches later, we found the answers. Nearly 25,000 bolts and some of the bolts are 6 cm in diameter!! We were trying to imagine how they would look. And eventually decided to change the topic. So, we looked outside – just in time to see that we were driving along another truck carrying the connectors with all the bolt patterns!! All we had to do was lift our noses from our iPhone Google searches and just look out!

I had already speeded up to pass the truck. Realizing that we should keep a picture of the bolt pattern, I took the nearest exit and a couple of deft U-turns later, managed to catch up with the truck again. And that is how we got the picture in the bottom!

By the way, at that size of the blade, even at a sedentary speed of three seconds to one rotation would mean that the tip of the blade is moving at the speed of nearly 175 miles per hour (300 kmph)!!!