My wife and I went on a Mississippi riverboat cruise earlier this summer. The riverboat, the Twilight, can carry up to 130 passengers, actually a few more in a pinch, but they like a maximum of 130. Ours was the first tour of the season and had around 70 passengers. Apparently, the boat usually fills up to the 130 level. It starts its runs in late May and runs for five months, doing two-day cruises with the first day taking passengers from LeClair to Dubuque Iowa and the second day taking them back, after an overnight stay in a hotel in Dubuque. It’s an 83-mile trip each way. Upriver, the riverboat averages ten miles/hour. On the way back down, with the current helping, the Twilight makes a blistering thirteen miles/hour. I decided that the Twilight, suitably fictionalized, would be a great candidate for ISOTing.
Passengers are mostly retirees, most of them still in good shape, with a high percentage of readers. On our cruise, they were predominantly Anglo, with one wheelchair-bound African American lady and her young male Anglo assistant. That combination would make for interesting times anytime before maybe the 1960s. The crew is mostly college-aged or a little older, though most of them are not college students. They work the tours five months/year and make enough to live a modest life year-round. The company maintains a dormitory for their workers near the river.
On the river, we passed a crap ton of tugboats, each with a huge “train” of barges, typically three abreast and three or four barges long. These barges are big enough that they measure their cargo in acres of corn or soybeans.
Okay. Let’s start with a modern river boat and maybe a tugboat with associated barges, a mix of corn and ethanol, headed downriver. They are going into a storm that will ISOT them to some other time on the same river, the Mississippi, most likely into the past. So where should we plop the fricking thing and what would the results be?
Constraints: Go back very far and the course of the river and especially the channels will have shifted. The riverboat may find itself in an oxbow lake where the river used to run or even a dry former riverbed, with just the water from the section of the river that got ISOTed around them. The river itself probably didn't exist in recognizable form past around 70 million years ago.
I came up with around 14 different time periods where our riverboat and barges could have "interesting times" ending up, but before I post them, I want to see what the group mind comes up with as good ISOT periods. I'll post my list unaltered after people have a chance to chew on the concept and toss out ideas.
Passengers are mostly retirees, most of them still in good shape, with a high percentage of readers. On our cruise, they were predominantly Anglo, with one wheelchair-bound African American lady and her young male Anglo assistant. That combination would make for interesting times anytime before maybe the 1960s. The crew is mostly college-aged or a little older, though most of them are not college students. They work the tours five months/year and make enough to live a modest life year-round. The company maintains a dormitory for their workers near the river.
On the river, we passed a crap ton of tugboats, each with a huge “train” of barges, typically three abreast and three or four barges long. These barges are big enough that they measure their cargo in acres of corn or soybeans.
Okay. Let’s start with a modern river boat and maybe a tugboat with associated barges, a mix of corn and ethanol, headed downriver. They are going into a storm that will ISOT them to some other time on the same river, the Mississippi, most likely into the past. So where should we plop the fricking thing and what would the results be?
Constraints: Go back very far and the course of the river and especially the channels will have shifted. The riverboat may find itself in an oxbow lake where the river used to run or even a dry former riverbed, with just the water from the section of the river that got ISOTed around them. The river itself probably didn't exist in recognizable form past around 70 million years ago.
I came up with around 14 different time periods where our riverboat and barges could have "interesting times" ending up, but before I post them, I want to see what the group mind comes up with as good ISOT periods. I'll post my list unaltered after people have a chance to chew on the concept and toss out ideas.