Channel 19 – July 2009

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Putting a loved one’s ash in gear
These urns, resembling scaled-down versions of external air cleaners, are sealed to protect your dearly departed’s cremated remains from the elements as you “keep their memory alive and in the wind,” says biker and Final Ride Urns proprietor Steve Radz. He says these urns “can be mounted to any vehicle…. The pilot can forever fly.” And, presumably, truckers can stay close to the road.


Of other final rides
Retired owner-operator Howard Brinson, who worked beyond his 80th birthday, turned his vintage 1984 Peterbilt 359 into a motor home with the help of a friend. Yes, that’s a 1976 Airstream travel trailer mounted behind the sleeper. Brinson’s daughter, Mary Lee Stets, says her dad is “hoping to take one more trip this summer before selling it” – one grand final ride, indeed.


Catching the travel bug
The practice of using GPS coordinates to locate a cache, typically hidden in a public place, has grown in popularity. A twist on the hobby – well-suited to truckers – is spotting a travel bug. This one is on the Werner Freightliner driven by Wisconsin-based D.J. Christie and Frank Williams, geocachers featured in our June issue. When geocachers find a mobile, attached travel bug like this one, they log its location and leave a note for the owners at Geocaching.com. Christie and Williams, the proprietors of Geotruckers.com, have bookmarked upwards of 2,500 cache sites accessible by big rigs and other large vehicles.

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