Cars,Planes and Trains and the winner is Ezra Dyer.

A Two-Seater Fighter Jet at Love Field.

Allow me to be blunt and to the cause of it all. Since the stay-at-home orders went into place, watching a lot of web cams has been better than what is on television. All the episodes of the comedy and drama shows have been watched. Boredom isn't the problem. The problem is, all those webcam cameras are, "always moving away from the action." Truckee Airport has a great camera that pans up and down the runways, around the terminal building , down the row of extensive hangers and back around to the front tarmac where all the charters, general aviation, CHIP helicopters, and corporate jets park. The pan is always the same, counterclockwise from the facing runway. The view of the mountains with snow caps, the clouds coming over the Sierra Nevada Range near Carson City is most beautiful all year long.

Imagine 8 of these pulling a train 100 to a 110 cars long up a mountain.

But having a cam at an airport is pretty cut in stone that people who watch it are aviation buffs.  Pulling away from a plane just starting his roll down the runway to take off is what we all want to see.

So, you close out that came and go two miles into downtown Truckee where a cam is set up on the side of the The Truckee Hotel  at Bridge Street and Donna Pass Road. There, massive Union Pacific trains pull 100 to 110 car trains over mountain passes where east bound climbs are gradual and the westbound  climbs are steep. It takes a lot of horsepower to pull and push 100 or more cars up the mountains. Sometimes snow  slides comes down the side of the mountain onto the track. There are snow sheds along the way.Usually there are 5 engines leading, two in the middle of the train and one on the end,being the little engine that could as it pushes forward on the cars ahead. 

What I'm getting at is that the airport cam, the downtown cam is always moving away from the action. Watching the DFW Airport cam is the same way. The camera will move away from a big 747 coming across the "A" bridge and pan over the tops of green trees from Airfield Drive all the way to Arlington and  park there for what seems like a lifetime. By the time it pans back to the "A" bridge, that 747 is no where in sight. I tell you this because it resembles life in more ways than one. It reminded me that when I was growing up, we had magazines with writers that kept your mind moving and thinking and guessing and all we had to do is turn the page as we read. It even kept you anticipating what was coming next. You could not wait for the next article from you favorite writer. Then they would leave the magazine as it took you a bit to find them at their new mag.

Yesterday, I came across an article--on the web no less-- written by one of the young upstarts that I had followed for several years. Almost instantly, I was laughing as I read and the farther I got into the article the more I was laughing. It got to the point that I had tears running down my cheeks and still laughing to the point that I had to wait until I could stop laughing so that I  could finish the article. The guy. The writer. Ezra Dyer! He is working for a car magazine. Actually he has written for sev- eral car magazines. It made no difference if he was writing for an ant breeder, he is that good of a writer.

His story was about a French engineer that had worked for the French fighter jet maker who was retiring and his company hooked him up with a ride in the back seat of their fighter jet. Any other time it would have taken a lot of strings to get set up with a ride like that, but no one ask the guy if he wanted to go on such a ride. They just went ahead with the planning---LOL-- that's where the story gets really wild and to make a long story shorter and sill save the laughs, the whole retirement gift went south--really south-- after it went north on a rocket that malfunctioned. I'm still laughing about that story today and can't wait until I can read Ezra's next story again. I even sent a copy of the story to my brother. He's getting ready in  a few more miles down the road to retirement.