Chatfield

Balloons in the mornings. Continuing the slow recovery from the bug; we’re both about 90% better. Once in a while we’ll start to think we might be 100% but then reality jerks us back. Patience. On a television program, some guys were giving a Japanese guy a hard time; helping him study for his U.S. citizenship test, and asked him “In what year did America discover Japan?” I thought that was pretty funny; a poke at the U.S. really, as if the rest of the world could be measured by the United States calendar. After all, Japan had its own people, own customs, own civilization long before any Anglos stumbled onto it. It’s not like, say, Columbus discovering America in 1492 is it……..? An old guy about our age, maybe a little older, wandered by our camp and struck up a conversation. We chatted for a while, but the more we talked the older he got. He was stationed at the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station right after I was born. He’s twenty years older than us and still vibrant. I want to be like him when I grow up. Spaghetti for dinner tonight. Yum.

Taco Bell

From our camp at St Vrain we could see the Taco Bell in the distance on Highway 119. Judy was looking at birds through the binoculars and spotted some gray smoke rising from the Taco Bell roof. I put the telephoto camera on it. The smoke didn’t go away right away, so Judy called 911. Fire trucks rolled. Fire trucks from Longmont, Frederick, and even Loveland by the end of it. It was never flashy. We never saw flames. But we watched it smolder for half an hour. They waved a snorkel over it, but we never saw them put water on it either. Maybe it was a grease fire and they handled it from inside. Now there’s a fence around it.