The Eagle Summit Tribute: Memories

Eagle Summit Casette-Based Theme Song:

(tie) Here I Go Again - Whitesnake

(tie) Back in the High Life Again - Steve Winwood

Most Valuable Passenger:

N.J. Ruys most likely logged the most passenger miles in the beaut. One trip to Colorado, 2.5 years of roommatesmanship during the Eagle Summit years? That kind of longevity is tough to beat.

Last Passenger:

R.M. Jones. Fitting.

Most Bittersweet Taxi-Runs:

(tie) N.V. Csabay and ORD.

(tie) M.L. Madden and MSN.

Worst Commute:

2004-05. 5:30 to morning teacher basketball league.

Top Five Eagle Summit Moments:

Spring 2004 Beach Party Shuttle with D.S. Lund.

Driving to/through/from North Carolina with a faded yellow mattress in the backseat, and Brian/Emmaline/Aaryn/et al riding shotgun.

Barreling through the 100-Year Floods in Fond du Lac on June 12th, 2008.

Driving my worldly possessions from Madison to Fond du Lac, one last time, in the summer of 2009...with my right-hand turn signal going off the whole damn way.

Sleeping inside the Eagle Summit, bathing in Lake Mendota and brushing my teeth in the public library - Fall 2009.

Trips Where the Eagle Summit was Vetoed as a Mode of Transportation:

Outer Banks 2004
Alabama 2004
Iowa 2006
Virginia 2007
Arkansas 2009
Colorado 2009
Virginia 2009
Lakewood 2009
Minnesota 2009
Washington DC 2010

The Eagle Summit Tribute: Crunching the Numbers

I bought my first car, a 1995 Eagle Summit, on Nov. 10th, 2003, for $1,800. Soon - this weekend, to be exact - that sweet, sweet ride will come to an end. Here’s a numeric breakdown of the Eagle Summit’s goodness:

2,287 days of ownership. (Although that mark is punctuated by two long stays in Hungary totaling just more than 365 days.)

And over the course of those more than six years? 56,569 miles driven. To put that income-esque figure into perspective, 56,569 miles is equal to:

= 350 round-trips between home and Madison’s capital square.
= 18 one-way drives across the breadth of America on U.S. Route 50.
= more than 2 trips around the world at the equator.
= more than 1/4th of the way to the moon.

(Do NOT doubt the Eagle Summit, yo!)

Doing some math, that’s 24.7 miles per day. The equivalent is one round-trip drive to the St. Vinnie’s on Fond du Lac’s southwest side each and every day. It also equals just about one mile per hour of ownership. Surprising.

At a purchase price of $1,800, minus the sales price of $1, I paid $1,799 for my 2,287 days of membership in the Eagle Summit club. The breakdown? 78 cents a day. 3 cents a mile.

Where’d the Eagle Summit go? 13 States. Not the original colonies, but WI + CO, IA, IL, IN, KY, MN, NC, NE, SD, TN, VA, WY.

And the null set? Zero is the number of Eagle Summit-related:
Accidents.
Speeding tickets.
Roadhead.
Border crossings.
Hitchhikers.
Animals hit.
CDs played.
Cigarettes lit.

The Eagle Summit Tribute

Goodbye my friend!


A multimedia tribute to a beloved ride, to come in parts.

(NOTE: Even seven years later, the Eagle Summit is still a little ambiguous. Puzzle-ingly androgynous. To this day, I have never really determined if the Eagle Summit is a man-car or a lady-car. Therefore, I’m uncomfortable using the gender-based pronouns “he” and “she,” and the inanimate pronoun "it" would detract far too much from the Eagle Summit’s obvious humanity, so instead I use no pronouns to describe THE Eagle Summit.)

How does a pirate say goodbye?

ALPs invited B. Johnson and I back - as legends - to run the winter retreat extravaganza. Desperate for a mid-winter reprieve, we opted for pirates.


A highlight? A new initiative centered on dowels: the Human Ladder. Give a large group ten 1.25 inch dowels and see what happens. Jump an electric Fence. Pass through a spider web. Or try see how high a vertical ladder the group can create.

And number of ALPs facilitators converted to typewriterism over the course of the evening? Four. Four good ones... It's been fun watching these kids grow up over the past four years. It's nice to hear the pleasure - and benefit - was mutual.

Will Me?

I recently created my first will that was not presumably invalid. Kind of exciting! I can only show off my favorite paragraph, though, otherwise there'd likely be hordes of folks trying to knock me off to get their hands on my sweet, sweet stuff.


Modest much, Jeremy?

How the States Got Their Shapes

Not much i like more than maps. But maps with answers? Oh-la-la.

How the States Got Their Shapes
Mark Stein

My latest public library check-out answers two of the most pressing questions of my existence:

1. Why is the upper peninsula part of Michigan, not Wisconsin?

(This one i actually learned years ago, thanks to a little snippit in the Journal-Sentinel. According to the paperwork that founded the Northwest territories, the boundary between Michigan and Ohio was supposed to be a straight line east and west from the bottom of Lake Michigan. But Ohio wanted Toledo, a good port, just north of that line. So two territorial armies stared each other down until Washington stepped in with a compromise: Ohio, you take Toledo; Michigan, we'll give you the copper mines of the Upper Peninsula, seeing as no one yet lives in Wisconsin to complain.)

2. Why does Minnesota have that little bloop above it's border north of the Boundary Waters?

A treaty between the US and Canada defined the boundary as the midpoint of a long string of lakes extending as far as Lake of the Woods. From the far northwest corner of that system of lakes, the border ran to the headwaters of the Mississippi. But this was back in the day before GoogleEarth, so no one really knew where the headwaters was in relationship to the Lake of the Woods. So they settled on a north/south line straight to the 49th parallel, the normal border all the way out to Washington State. Just happened the original point of origin was north of that line. So it goes.

Plus you get good maps, like "connecticut according to connecticut."

Updating an Old Map

My favorite random prerequisite class from undergraduate days? Geology of the National Parks.

One project, in between geology lessons based on pretty pictures, was customizing a geologic map of the amazing United States of America. I added, in red lines, the path of my travels.

But that was almost ten years ago - yikes - so when I found it in the way-back of my closet while cleaning/packing, i decided to update it before ceremoniously burning it in the wood stove. In sharpie, the places i've explored since Fall 2001.

The noticeable yet-to-explore areas of our country? California and Oregon, Texas, and the Northeast. All will come in time.