Do any of you like to travel? Well–those of you who know me well will realize that I am one of those people who loves to see new places. Finally the chance came my way to see the West Coast! Up to this point in my short life, I have never been west of Colorado!

I am currently in Oregon, hauling hay for a friend. Harvest is actually coming to an end here but there is still hauling to do. I even managed to take some pictures!

In these first few pictures I am in the field waiting to be loaded.

In these next pictures my truck is being unloaded at one of the sheds.

This afternoon as I browsed through some of my pictures, I came across this sunset picture of the African plains. These giraffe are not fenced in, but are roaming freely in the Masai Mara National Game Reserve of Kenya.

Since coming to the United States in early 2006, I have owned six different cars.

I really like foreign cars. European cars are my favorite. Unfortunately European cars tend to have reliability issues that can be expensive to fix. I learned this the hard way. My first car was a VW Passat. It was a great riding car with excellent handling. The sad thing was that it gave me a lot of trouble. I ended up selling it at a loss, hoping my next car would be more reliable.

The bad experience with the Passat left me low on cash. Therefore, I bought an old Mazda 626 at auction. I had a lot of good times tearing around in this old junker.

After saving some money for a while, I upgraded to an Acura Legend. I resold this car within about a week or two.

After selling my Acura I went back to driving my Mazda for a while until I found a great deal on a Chrysler 300M in Oklahoma City. This is the car I miss the most. It was fully loaded with a black leather interior and lots of power options. The 3.5 liter V6 provided plenty of “get up and go.”

After several months I bought a Volvo on Ebay from Connecticut. Volvos are made in Sweden. They are very good quality cars. I made a flying trip out there to pick it up with very little time to spare before catching a flight to Kenya.

This was a great car though it was a little ugly. The worst thing about it was the terrible fuel mileage. I then bought the car that I currently own–my fuel economical Ford Focus!

Benji and I both have silver Ford Focuses. Recently we decided to take them out on a photo shoot. Our photographer was Aaron, a gentleman from El Salvador who is skilled at taking pictures. You can view some of these pictures by visiting either Benji or Aaron’s blogs.

It was a sunny Saturday afternoon when we set out in our Foci for Hutch. We drove to an oil refinery for the first set of pictures. (I think that’s what that place was) =) One picture we took was going to be photoshopped to have the cars driving opposite directions with us in the middle. This required two pictures. One with us on the road and another with the cars moving at about 35mph in opposite directions.

Next, we stopped in at Tyson Foods in South Hutch. We decided it might be cool to shoot some pictures of our cars in the midst of a bunch of semi trailers. Our daring photographer even climbed on top of the trailers to get some shots. Fortunately, we managed to get our pictures taken and get out of there before we were detected. Ask Benji what happed to his car while shooting one of the pictures that required some jumping action. I thought it was funny and he didn’t!

The last location of our photo shoot just off of Main in Hutchinson. It was a cool place with some old buildings. This is the location where some curious individuals stared at us like we were out of our minds. According to Benji, you get used to that if you are a photographer.

Now, to bring this to a close I would like to put in a good word for Ford. If you want a reliable, practical, fuel economical car, buy a Focus. If you have been paying any attention at all to those big signs at fuel stations, you may be realizing that fuel is no longer cheap. Not only do Foci sip fuel, but if something does happen to go wrong, parts are not expensive unlike it’s competitor, the Civic. Go Foci!

The title of this post is perhaps a bit random. I hope that I can write something that interests you readers at least slightly.

Right now I can’t transfer my pictures from my cellphone to my laptop because I managed to lose my micro SD chip adapter. Yeah, I know–way to go me. I have one ordered on Ebay–I’m hoping it will come soon. Once it arrives, I’ll try to post some pictures.

I’m not sure how many of you noticed that in my last post I misspelled a word. I noticed it a while later. Unfortunately by that time, my blog stats indicated that quite a few people had already read it. Crud. Oh well.

Next week my family is coming from Virginia! I’m pretty happy about that! It will be great to have them around here for a while! My dad will be working on Craig and Rachel’s house. Then Craig and Rachel will get married. Then my family will return back to Virginia.

This paragraph is a conclusion to this post. In conclusion, may I assure my readers that one of these days I’ll try to create a very interesting post. If you have any ideas, let me know.

Cheers,

Mombasaman