Canada to Mexico in an hour

[E.J. Peiker]

Cool video but I'm disoriented  The video says Hotel stop in Louisville, KY but the route map does not have Michael getting anywhere near the state of Kentucky???

[Christopher Sanderson]

Fixed!

[E.J. Peiker]

Ah it all makes sense now.  I was wondering why I could find no signs of Indianapolis

[peterpix]

Watched until Louisville, BUT I gotta get a life, can't do it anymore !  Thanks for posting though

[Peter McLennan]

I love this.  What a great idea.  And perfectly executed, too.  Seamless.  The camera mount is excellent.

It's absolutely hypnotic to watch.  White lines strobing, flash-frames of somewhere, somewhere, somewhere.  The weather gradually changing as the day goes on.  Endless trucks.  Can't wait until the world begins to turn green again.

I'm only as far as lunch in Ohio but I'm on for the ride.  FUN!

[E.J. Peiker]

The other thing that was cool was the slow transition from no leaves in Canada and Ohio to full fall foliage in Arkansas.
Also Michael passed at least 20 times as many vehicles as passed him

[paulbk]

"So what you see below is the entire forty hours speeded up 40X.."
Love it. Driving at 2,600 mph (this can't be right, someone sober calculate the relative compressed view speed) is not so bad.
This is what I picture an F1 driver sees.

[John Camp]

I have Pandora on my computer, and when I started watching the video, went to Guy Clark radio (one of my stations.) Robert Earl Keene's extended version of "The Road Goes on Forever" came up about the time of the first heavy rain storm, and the long instrumental section at the end of the song was almost perfectly in time with the windshield wipers...

One comment...Michael may *feel* safer driving in Mexico than he does in Oklahoma and Texas, or walking around Toronto, but he isn't. Texas has a disgracefully high murder rate; but Tamaulipas state, where he crosses the border, has a murder rate eight times as high (2012.) The city of Nuevo Laredo, which isn't especially large, had several times the absolute number of murders as Toronto in 2012, and Toronto is one of the largest cities in North America. I'm not saying that all of Mexico is unsafe -- much of the danger involves those areas controlled by the drug cartels, and with easy access to American gun dealers. For those parts of Mexico without easy access to border towns or certain trans-shipping ports, as down in Sinaloa, the murder rate is quite low.

[michael]

As you surmise, my comments about safety in Mexico don't refer to the border areas or places like Mexico City. There are also states within Mexico where the drug gangs hold sway.

Thus my comment about getting away from the border as quickly as possible, getting on a major highway and heading south.

What needs to be borne in mind is that the vast majority of the violence is gangsters against gangsters. But yes, civilians get caught in the cross fire. Some areas are quite lawless.

Nevertheless, much of Mexico is very safe and the countryside and the people are warm and gracious.

Michael

[Jim Pascoe]

I'm assuming overtaking on either side is allowed in the US, but it does seem unsettling to a European, especially at 2500mph!

Also, I have not been to the America's yet, but I was disappointed not to have seen any cowboys and wagons, or have I been watching too many old films.....
It all looked much like driving across France or Germany.

Jim

[Hans Kruse]

Haha, what a crazy idea 

PS: I didn't see it all. Interesting comments about safety and share the feeling about guns.

[Peter McLennan]

It all looked much like driving across France or Germany.

Jim

That's the problem with driving on freeways.  They look the same, everywhere.

Freeways are like eating at Mcdonalds.  They're not a meal, they're a solution to a problem.

[michael]

Unlike in Europe (and even Mexico) there is very little lane discipline in Canada or the US). The passing lane is simply treated as a driving lane on 4 lane divided highways.

This means pulling up behind someone that is driving slowly in the left lane and flashing your lights a few times. Sometimes they get it, and pull over, sometimes not. The only solution then is to carefully pass them on the right.

Sometimes you'll then see them in your rear view mirror, pulling over, but often as not a whole stream of cars will have to pass them on the right.

In some places when flashing lights to request that the person pull into the slower lane one has to hope that they don't have a gun in the car, and are in a bad mood. (Just kidding, of course. I've already received enough nasty emails about my gun comments in the article. No more thanks.)

Michael

[fredjeang2]

I started to watch it and couldn't stop. In fact,
I was looking for the momento in wich the landscape
will stop to be prairies like...momento that never came until the end part.
I hope you had good music not to fall asleep in such endless boring
flat countryside untill Mexico.
Or Cris jokes were that good to maintain the moral high.

Then, the other point that was catching me watching it,
is that I noticed that they are hardly overtaken by other cars...
but the fastest on track.
So I was like waiting the moment I could see a car actually overtaking them...
wich barely happened.
Most of the time it was because they were stucked beween trucks and then
they would overtake the cars later anyway.

Bottom line:
1) They are the fastest drivers of the prairies.
2) They listen to good music
3) They drink a lot of water

[Christoph C. Feldhaim]

Watching this video is plain self-hypnosis.

[Peter McLennan]

A few tech questions for the production department:

1) what vehicle?  ( ie how high off the pavement is the camera)
2) how did you manage all that data?  How often did you have to swap cards?
3) what would you do differently next time?

And a political comment because I just can't restrain myself: 

So many trucks! Those who complain about Big Government should watch this video to see just how extensively commerce depends on that massive, deficit-financed project.

"America doesn't build such highways because she is rich, she is rich because she builds such highways." 

Don't who said that, but they did, somewhere.

[JohnBrew]

Michael, congratulations on another successful journey to Mexico and thanks for the video. I'm a native Texan - growing up in West Texas where a gun rack is the norm rather than the exception I think you are a bit over-worried. I never saw anyone pull a gun from a gun rack except out in pastures to kill a varmint or during hunting season. I understand it might be disconcerting to pull up next to someone with an arsenal framed by the back window, but since I grew up with this I'm used to it.  You have much more to fear from those carrying concealed weapons.  
Disclaimer: I own a ranch in central Texas but we mainly use weapons for rattlesnakes and feral pigs. I am not a hunter.

[michael]

The vehicle is a Jeep Grand Cherokee. A medium sized SUV.

The micro-SD cards that the camera uses hold 32GB, which is 6-7 hours of continuous recording. I have two cards and changed them at mid-day. Then in the evening I copied the cards to an outboard drive on my laptop.

The files were loaded into Final Cut Pro X in day-long lengths than saved as .MOV files. The five MOV files were combined and then speeded up 20X and then again 2X.

This is the third year that we have done this drive and we have it down to a routine, so there isn't much I'd do differently. We stay in hotel chains that allow dogs, (like Drury and La Quinta) which makes our overnight stop choice a bit more limited than most peoples.

I have XM satellite radio in the Jeep and so we have over 150 radio channels to listen to. Our taste ranges from Jazz, to Blues to Classical, and Rock and Roll. Also the BBC news once or twice a day. The time passes quickly.

Michael

[kaelaria]

That's awesome!!

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

... In some places when flashing lights to request that the person pull into the slower lane one has to hope that they don't have a gun in the car, and are in a bad mood. (Just kidding, of course....)

Kidding!? In any case, next time you drive through Kentucky, watch out for this guy (though, hopefully, he shall be in jail by that time):

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2440906/Doctor-shoots-gun-motorist-extreme-road-rage-incident.html