The Dayton Cowboys hit the road

I have a couple of meaningful and, you know, deep posts I've started writing, but it's going to be a few days before I can finish them. I've been and will be pretty busy these couple of days.

Besides my on-going job of volunteering for the Chamber, I've had extra cleaning and organizing to get done. Erik and Hessu will be getting here tomorrow evening, then the Dayton Cowboys© will be leaving at o-dark-thirty Wednesday morning.

Dayton, Ohio, is the site of Hamvention, the goal of a yearly ham radio operators' pilgrimage. Hamecca, if you will. It's the big annual amateur (ham) radio event. Erik and Hessu are a couple of Finns who are going to it. You see, Rich is a ham radio operator (since he was, I think, 12 years old). When he was working for Nokia and traveling to Finland six or eight times a year, he made friends with a bunch of Finnish hams. He visited them when he traveled there, they'd do radio stuff together, and a few of them would come here for a few weeks every year (usually timing it so they could be here for Hamvention). They stayed with us. Erik and Matti were the ones who came most often, and I simply loved having them visit. They were perfect house guests, charming, interesting, and low maintenance, and I was very sorry when they stopped making their annual treks. (Matti got a new, very demanding job. Erik got married and had kids. You know how it goes.) Well, this year Matti won't make it, but Erik's girls are older now, and he'll be here tomorrow! Hessu, whom I've never met, is coming as well, and I'm sure I'll like him. Finns tend to be a likeable bunch, as a rule.

Texas and Finnish flags
fly at Hamvention in '03
(That's Jouni, Erik & Matti.)

All these guys who make this trip, in years past, used to get a little bit…well, wild is the wrong word. Silly isn't the right word, either. But they're both in the ballpark. They would…well, okay, here's an example. One of them bought a radar gun at Hamvention (no, there was no actual reason for it, he just bought it), and they spent the two-day drive back playing Trolling For Tail Lights. That is, they'd be cruising down the highway, point the radar gun forward, pull the trigger, and see how many cars would hit the brakes to get back under the speed limit. See? Not wild, or silly, exactly, but something not too far off.

When they first started planning their trip, I asked Erik if he thought they'd be more sedate now, since they're all older, or if they'd be like a bunch of dogs off their chains because it's been so long. He speculated that it would be both. I have a feeling he's right. We'll see, though I suppose it may take a while for me to hear the details of some of what they do.

I'm calling them the Dayton Cowboys, BTW, because a road trip across the U.S. has a little bit of mystique to it and, well, they're coming to Texas, after all. Plus I thought flying fifteen hours just to drive for two days deserved some kind of special recognition. And that's just the name that occurred to me as I put it on my calendar for Tuesday: "Dayton Cowboys hit the road."

So Rich and I have both been tidying up for the guys' visit (it's amazing how much stuff accumulates in the corners and on every horizontal surface). They'll only be spending the night, then leaving very early on Wednesday morning. But we're doing some cleaning and organizing that should have been done long ago, and trying to get it done before they get here.

Meaningful posts later, after the guys are on their way. For now, back to shoveling.