Any walk around the ponds is to the sights and sounds of killdeer and spotted sandpipers. It’s not uncommon to be surrounded by killdeer, but we’ve never seen so many spotted sandpipers anywhere else.
St Vrain State Park
A great summertime dinner last night: grilled brats smothered in sautéed peppers and onions, with corn on the cob and mass quantities of watermelon for dessert. Saw Jupiter. It’s huge right now. It rises in the southeast and sets in the southwest. It’s worth a look. Morning coffee then a drive back to St Vrain today. We’re hooked up in a different site this time. We’re on a pond, but this one has been drained. They’ll do a little maintenance on the bottom then refill it…. Sometime. Hot. A hundred degrees. No problem. I sit inside in the air conditioning and work. Tonight, chicken and shrimp fajitas at Becky’s. Trampoline with the grandkids. It’s nice being in town.
Boyd Lake State Park
No, we weren’t the motorhome that dropped the tow car, and that wasn’t our motorhome that the runaway tow car hit. We were just there. We were just reporting. We got the DVR satellite box installed. A hard drive that’s always spinning. We had the installer plug it into a switched outlet so when we turn on the ignition key the power goes off, just like with the television. That way the hard drive will be turned off when we drive. Now we don’t have to remember to turn it off (which means we would forget to turn it off). Hot here. Sometimes 90s. Birdy. Only 22 kinds, but there is always something flying around. Got two kinds of orioles: bullocks and orchard. Meadowlarks. Kingbirds. The cottonwood tree behind us has an oriole nest and a kingbird nest, at least. Good progress on the new website and blog. More features on the new website. It will be interactive. There will be a portal to exchange information with clients securely instead of by email. The website will include a link to the travel blog. They will be ready for primetime soon. Tomorrow, back to St Vrain. More kids. More birthdays.
Things not to do while motorhoming
And can you imagine how much it would suck to go off for a nice day hike in Rocky Mountain National Park, only to come home and find that someone’s driverless tow car from about 250 feet uphill had tried to drive through your coach? I was walking nearby when it happened. It was a very heavy “thump”. The good news is that, other than some physical damage to the perpetrator, the remainder was all property damage. No other humans, kids, or pets involved. Life on the road.
Things not to do while motorhoming
There are lots of connections between a motorhome and tow car. There are a couple of extraneous hookups: electrical and brakes. Then there are the critical ones: two points where the tow bar connects with the front of the tow car, and two safety cables. It’s okay to disconnect the extraneous hookups before you do anything else; the anything else being “put the car in gear”. When you’re towing, you want the tow car to freewheel, so by various means, depending on the make and model, you put the towcar in neutral or otherwise disconnect the transmission from the drive train. Back to disconnecting the tow car. If you’re on level ground, it’s even okay to disconnect one side of the tow gear before you walk around to the other side of the car, get in, and put the car in gear. That is what I often do. It’s an efficiency of movement. It’s never a good idea to disconnect the tow car on a hill though. At best, the tow gear will bind up under the stress and be difficult to work with. At worst… You never never want to disconnect both sides of the tow car before you put the car in gear. Of course, every once in a while, someone will demonstrate why you don’t want to disconnect the tow car before you have control of it. It’s like when you’re sailboating, towing a dinghy. You never want to get into the dinghy, set it free of the mothership, then give the outboard a pull to see if it starts. Starting the outboard is something that should be done at your leisure, while you’re still attached to the sailboat, not while the people on the other sailboat you’re about to be blown into are screaming at you from the deck. When we were at the Estes Park campground, a person demonstrated how not to disconnect a tow car on a hill. The RV sites there are lined up on a hillside. He pulled his coach into one of the higher sites before disconnecting. He didn’t put the tow car in park before disconnecting it. Can you imagine how much it sucked to be that guy, chasing that car down the hill, trying to get into it to stop it before it hit something, and getting his foot run over in the process?