Mandy and I will be travelling again soon so I thought I might dust off the blog machine and try a few posts before we set off on a trip to the western states. We plan to leave in early September to follow the Lincoln Highway, US Route 30, which was the first transcontinental highway to be completed. As we approach Iowa we will jump off of the Lincoln Highway and motor north to Route 20, the longest transcontinental highway.

Much of the the original Lincoln Highway has been bypassed with a new four lane Route 30 but with the help of Google Earth and Google Maps we have discovered most of the country roads that was, for most of the 20th century, the Lincoln Highway. It starts in Times Square in NYC and passes through 11 states ending in Lincoln Park in San Francisco. We will follow it from Upper Sandusky, Ohio to just beyond South Chicago. By design, the Lincoln Highway doesn't pass through large cities because of the influence of Henry Joy, president of the Packard Motor Company. He wanted the highway to allow motorists to drive coast to coast without fighting the congestion of major cities thus improving their transit time.

West of Chicago we will pick up US Route 20, the longest transcontinental highway. US 20 leads directly into and through Wyoming's Yellowstone National Park. It starts in Boston and follows a path through Yellowstone ending in Newport, Oregon.

Along our route we will visit many old rural farm towns where we hope to meet the locals and perhaps hoist a glass with them. We plan to visit as many national parks as possible including, Mount Rushmore, the Black Hills and the Badlands of South Dakota, Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons of Wyoming, Salt Lake and Canyon lands national Park in Utah, and finally Monument Valley at the border of Utah and Arizona.

The video above is me operating the heart lung machine for the last time in September of 2009. Over almost 43 years I ran 'the pump' over 5000 times. Equipment failure, especially in the early years, was not uncommon and we had only five minutes to fix a breakdown or we would lose the patient. We never lost a patient due to malfunction in all of those years although we nearly gave a few surgeons a heart attack because they could do nothing but wait until we resolved the issue.

The video shows the roller pump that propels the blood to and from the patient, the control screen, patient monitoring screen, the anesthetic gas vaporizer, blood filter (just like the one in the fuel line of your car), the blood reservoir, the oxygenator (artificial lung), and lastly, the screen of the echocardiogram.