Rick and Reyna 2011 Roadtrip

August 17, 2011 Wednesday
ESNA Logistics has been working with Speed Global Services of Buffalo to provide clients of Speed with warehouse, distribution and transloading services in Los Angeles for over 5 years as I write this. We thank Speed for their trust and for the business they send our way. And I thank them again for the wonderful visit we had and for the opportunity to join them at a party for their customers on the 18th. I arrived at Speed's facility about 11 in the morning and met for awhile with Carl Savarino, President and CEO, before being given a tour of Speed's 500,000' facility by Joe Berti, VP. http://www.speedgs.com

Best part of visit is meeting people - Barb Saeva, Nicole Polley and Sarah Moss - that you've been talking to and working with for years.

Carl and Joe took me out to lunch to have one of Buffalo's specialties, a beef on weck sandwich. "Weck" is the type of roll . Quite good. Picture courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef_on_weck_sandwich

August 18, 2011 Thursday
Today is the big day. We get the VW back and we go to Speed's open house this evening. Now, I've called Martin, who has our VW somewhere in the Buffalo area, every day (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday) since he picked up the car from the dealer on Monday and all I ever got in response was "we're working on it". He needed to replace our fuel pump, but I'd also asked him to see if he could figure out the short in our headlights that caused them to go out every time it rained a bit hard. This morning he told me the car would be ready at 2, which was good since we had a party to go to later and hoped to leave town tomorrow.

Now all I had to do was find Martin's shop which is on Sheffield just off South Park Avenue in South Buffalo, a historically Irish part of Buffalo.

Martin's shop on Sheffield in South Buffalo.

Martin leaning in. Looks a lot like a shop inside the shop.

Reyna and I had driven over in our rental car and the car wasn't quite ready when we got there, so we had to find someplace to wait. How handy to find Talty's Tavern right across the street.

Notice the VW "dune" buggy beside Talty's.

Reyna with our new friends who turned out to be the folks that owned the dune buggy. (He does his own work on his VW, so he did not venture opinion about Martin's prowess.) We really had a lot of fun in our couple of hours at Talty's. At the time I didn't realize that this was an Irish bar in an Irish part of town as I ordered my usual scotch. It had been so long since somebody ordered scotch that it took them awhile to figure out how much to charge. After the bartender asked around he settled on $2.75 for call Red Label. I'll be back, but meanwhile we had a party go to.

Reyna and I went back to Motel 6 and changed clothes to go to Speed's open house. On the way back I noticed that the radio in the VW was not working and called Martin and he said to bring it back in the morning. He'd just billed me for 14 hours of trouble shooting the wiring, so he was a bit unhappy at this development.

Carl Savarino, Rhonda Augustine and Joe Berti in athletic themed outfits -- well Carl maybe not so much -- with door prizes for guests.

No, I can't remember when mine were so young and cute as Ms. Berti.

More cute girls. Thanks to Mike Diati, VP at Speed, for the memory.

So, after a wonderful time meeting Speed's employees and customers and guests, Reyna and I headed back to our Motel 6 out on the east edge of Buffalo near the airport. We had turned the rental car in earlier that afternoon, so we were in the VW and 2 cars on the interstate honked at us to let us know that our tail lights were out. Stop me if you've heard about our VW electrical issues before. Since I was already going back to Martin's in the morning, it would be just one more thing, and hopefully not delay our departure from Buffalo too long.

August 19, 2011 Friday

I left Reyna at the motel to pack us up or whatever and I drove over to Martin's about 9 in the morning and dropped the car off and repaired across the street to Talty's for breakfast. I went back to check about 10 or 10:30 and I wish I had pictures, but I don't, as the tail lights were undone and hanging out and 4 guys including Martin were working on it. I didn't disturb them and went back to Talty's. I went back over to Martin's again about 11:30 and found my car out in front with Martin standing in front of it looking at it as I walked up. The first thing Martin says without any other word is "I'm not working on this car anymore. I'm 71 years old and been doing this 50 years and this was the worst."

In all fairness to Martin the VW is almost 40 years old and many mechanics had fixed lights and wiring issues from time to time, so few if any of the circuits were as they should be. Anyhow, I didn't really care if Martin didn't want to work on it anymore, as it was fixed and away I went, but I didn't get far.

I got from Martin's back onto the expressway north to go pickup Reyna back at the Motel 6 and to head out of town. About 5 minutes on to the expressway, phhhht and off to the side of the road I went. Unbelievable - maybe 15 or 20 minutes since I'd picked up the car. This tow guy is hired to keep expressway clear so he towed me off at the next exit, and I called the AAA.

As it turned out, it just so happened that Joe Berti had told me earlier in the week that Speed has a VW chassis with an old delivery truck body on it that they use in advertising and promotion, so they knew a VW mechanic. However, by then my car was in the hands of Martin, so I left it with Martin. Since Martin wasn't having me back, I got referral from Joe to Ken-Ton Import in Tonawanda, which is on North side of Buffalo and pretty much diagonally opposite from where I was and about as far as you could go and still be in Buffalo. However, as a Premier member of AAA, towing distance is no problem (up to 200 miles okay and we did get our money's worth on this trip), so I was towed over to Ken-Ton in Tonawanda and they very kindly squeezed me into their Friday workload and started to work on the car about 3 that afternoon. By 4 they had it running. They replaced the 3 jacks/plugs on the coil -- who would ever have thought of that? Certainly not me. In any case, we did not make it out of Buffalo on Friday, but no big deal as Reyna and I found an Indian restaurant that had some of our favorite beers available, and we enjoyed one last night in the Motel 6.

Tomorrow will be Saturday and we are going east arouund Lake Ontario toward the Adironndacs and then on to New England States.

August 16, 2011 Tuesday

I don’t remember why now, but for some reason I do not have any pictures from a most interesting visit to our customer, ZOCHEM, this morning. Established in 1933, ZOCHEM is Canada’s largest zinc oxide manufacturer and the second largest single site producer in North America at the facility I visited in Brampton, ON. Various grades of zinc oxide are used in making rubber, paints, pharmaceuticals – sunscreen nose coat anybody? I was given a factory tour and saw how they smelt ingots of zinc and the molten metal is then vented through open air and up a shaft where the zinc oxide precipitates out for collection. The open air transfer from smelting vat to precipitating tower is very impressive pyrotechnic flow. I’m sure I’ve not done justice to the process and I really wish I had pictures. Their website gives an idea with some pictures of the plant. http://www.zochem.com/ Thanks to Vince Andronica for a very interesting tour.

We left the Toronto area in late morning and headed back west and south around Lake Ontario to visit Niagara Falls and then back to Buffalo.

Easy to take a plain old field of corn for granted last year.

Lots of vineyards.

Where there are vineyards there are wineries, but we were on our way to Niagara Falls, so did not stop to taste this afternoon. Now that I think about it, we did not stop at one. How did we skip all those chances? Will have to slow down on our next visit.

Wineries every mile or so. KM or so I suppose in Canada.

View looking east across Lake Ontario from Best Western Harbourside Inn in Jordan, ON, exit 55, from Queens Expressway. We stopped for lunch here on way back to Buffalo.

Mouth of the Niagara where it flows into Lake Ontario.

Old Ft, Niagara on US side across mouth of Niagara River from where we are viewing from Canada.

This young man told me that he fished here regularly with his grandfather. Looks like a bass to me.

Looking upriver and across the Niagara River at US.

Was dumbounded to see hibiscus, which are a tropical flower that I have growing at my home in Long Beach. Turns out these are called “hardy” hibiscus and can withstand northern winters. Who knew? Travel can be so broadening. J

Just like the ones I have at home except one of mine is white and one is gold.

Getting closer to Niagara Falls.

Parkway along the Canadian side follows the river to the Falls..

Over 16,000 plants form the face of the clock which is maintained by the Niagara Parks School of Horticulture.

Another thing for visitors – cable car across the Niagara River – begin and end on Canada side.

The cable car route from Canada to Canada.

Rainbow in the turbulence.

Downtown Niagara Falls on Canadian side. Falls a bit further up the River on the left. We're looking for a place to park.

Reyna heading toward the River below the Falls just across the street in front of her.

Looking across to US side.

I really, really tried to upload some video of the Falls here, but couldn't make it work. Anyhow, the flow is truly something to experience. It's wet all around from the mist. It's loud from the falls. The power of the flow is unyielding. Don't slip.