Author: Steve

The lunch stop.

Judy has been visiting with our nearest neighbor. They love their Monaco.
They’ve had trailers, fifth wheels, Class Cs, Class As, gassers, diesels.
They’ve tried it all. This one is just right. Speaking of “just right”,
I’m always on the lookout for the perfect motorhome for brother David. No.
He never asked me to find the perfect motorhome for him. This is totally
unsolicited assistance. Brother David doesn’t just drive on roads. He wants to be able to go
anywhere. A year ago, we discovered the EarthRoamer Class C factory in
Broomfield. The EarthRoamer. It is a thing of beauty. It is not too big.
They call it a Class C, but it is a big shell stuck on a diesel pickup
chassis. It is made to go anywhere, but they are made one at a time, so it
is custom built, it is in a constant state of redesign, and it costs way too
much. I think the solution has to be mass produced and well established.
Something like the Bigfoot, maybe. I haven’t looked inside one, but every
now and then I see a Bigfoot camper on the back of a hefty diesel pickup. I
think that’s the solution. A big old high clearance, four wheel drive
pickup, with a Bigfoot on the back. http://www.bigfootrv.com/campers/3000.html
Finished up the job and left for home on Thursday. Found the other
high-altitude-puff. Running at our lunch stop at 11,000 feet. Speaking of
running at high altitude, I checked in with Stephanie to see if she is
running the Leadville 100 this year. No deal. She decided not to run for
an entire day and night, a hundred miles, starting at 10,000 feet, on trails
back and forth over the Continental Divide. How do you not want to do that?
After the first fifty miles, you’re allowed a pacer to run with you and help
you through it. This year, Stephanie is going to pace a friend for six
hours. That will be about 26 miles. A run just for fun.
A drive north from Buena Vista, through Leadville, through Copper, through
the big tunnel. Back to Denver until the next trip. It won’t be long.
We’re off again in a week.

A river park along the Arkansas.

It is usually so dry here. This is a wonderfully wet year. No water
shortages: plenty of rain. The rivers have water in them. The lakes have
water in them. It got us to thinking about water and the planet. Is water
created and lost from year to year, or is it a closed system? Is there a
certain amount of water on the planet, and all the snow, ice, rain, rivers,
lakes and oceans will always total to the same amount? Floods and droughts
are only about the distribution of water on the planet? One area’s dry year
is another’s flood? Just curious. The “high altitude puff”. As altitude increases, everything in sealed
containers expands. Well, the air in the sealed containers expands, anyway.
Bags of salad puff up as inflated balloons. Potato chips poise for their
opportunity to explode. Squirt bottles of ketchup and mustard.
Deodorant….. Yeah. Roll-on deodorant. That can take a while to dry. Guys and gadgets. We love gadgets don’t we? One of my favorites has been
the indoor/outdoor thermometer with wireless remotes. When you buy it, you
get the home base and one remote. The home base will handle three remotes,
so you have to buy two more. Then, after a long time, one of the remote
units quit working, so I had to buy another. That was a problem. The new
remote was better than the old ones. The new remote had its own digital
display. So I had to replace the old remotes with better new remotes. That
was a problem. I had remotes units at home. I had them in the motorhome.
Over the course of several years, I lost track of all the remotes. You can
pick the channel you want the remote set to, but there are only three
choices. If you have more than one remote broadcasting on a channel, it
confuses the system. My system got confused. Nothing worked. To solve the newest problem I’ve managed to create, all I had to do is
locate all the remote units I had acquired over the last several years, and
take the batteries out to turn them off. Then I can turn them back on, one
at a time. Problem. The home base is working. All the remote units I can
find have been disabled. The home base is still receiving a signal from
remote unit one. We can’t use that channel until we can locate and disable
remote unit one. We searched the motorhome. We searched every drawer and cabinet in the
house. Nothing. How do we find a remote sending unit? We know it’s there.
Somewhere. I took the home base unit out to the motorhome. It stopped receiving a
signal from unit one. It was out of range. That told us the missing unit
was in the house, not in the motorhome. I tried to work it out by
temperature. The temperature signal for unit one was close to the
temperature of the home base. That meant it was in the house and not
outside. I couldn’t figure out how to narrow it down to a single room in
the house to search again, though. Finally, we had to give up. We waited.
We waited and watched. Remote unit one kept sending. How long would we
have to wait for remote one to just wear out and quit sending? A year?
More? It only took a week. Judy found it in a cabinet in the bedroom. We
disabled it and the reading for remote one disappeared from the home unit.
One at a time, we turned the remote units back on. It’s back. All systems
go. It’s currently 70 degrees inside, 59 degrees outside, 36 degrees in the
refrigerator, and 2 degrees in the freezer.

Yeaa Richard the RV guy! It’s cold at night here. Forty degrees. Cold
enough to use the furnace. We’ve messed around and messed around with the
rear furnace, trying to get it to work as well as the front furnace does.
Between these last two trips, Richard fixed it. He changed a limit switch,
but more importantly found a vent that wasn’t set up properly, so the rear
furnace was overheating itself and shutting off before it could heat the
back half of the motorhome properly. Now we get any temperature we want in
the back too. The front furnace continues to work flawlessly. Work during the day. Explore in the Jeep after work. Lots of birds around
the office. Starlings, finches, and sparrows. A flock of Cedar Waxwings
demolishing the ripe apples on the tree outside. Western Scrub Jays in the
campground in the morning. A wandering gang of Pinyon Jays at lunch. Black
capped and mountain chickadees. Back roads to explore. Wilson’s warbler.
Townsend’s warbler. Hermit thrush. Close-up with a Cooper’s hawk in an
empty campground up Cottonwood Pass. Gulls in the high country. Ducks.
Ring billed duck. Cassin’s finch. There don’t seem to be nearly as many bears here as there were at Ruedi
Reservoir on our last trip. We got there and set up right at dark. There
were bear warnings posted all over. By the time I went for my run, it was
totally dark. There was no moon to light the way. There were plenty of
stars. The Milky Way was brilliant, but that didn’t translate to a lighted
path for me. I couldn’t see any star shadows, so I had to run with a
flashlight. I never want to run with a flashlight. I’d rather make do with
available light, but without it, I couldn’t find the trail. Off I went, out of the campground and down the road, through the uninhabited
forest. The forest was uninhabited, except for the bears. I heard noises.
Not exactly bear noises. Not growling or anything like that. Just noises.
Leaves. Branches. Noises in the night. I could hear the bears all around
me. Surprisingly, I never saw any. I used the flashlight to look for them.
Nothing. I’d shine the light right at my feet while I ran, then spray the
forest with light to surprise them. It never worked. I never saw them. It
was not a comfortable run. I am happy to report that I’ve run at night
here, and never heard a single bear.