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Taos

Taos; a beautiful place to be. From Lathrop State Park, we drove over LaVeta Pass to Fort Garland and turned left. We were going to drive to Alamosa before we turned left on Highway 285, but at Fort Garland we saw a sign that said Taos 74 miles. We turned left. New road! That doesn’t happen much in Colorado now, driving on a new road. It was a great discovery; much less traveled, and the surface much smoother than the road south out of Alamosa. It’s a new favorite. So here we are, settled in the Taos Valley RV Park, surrounded by sage. All the RV sites here have names. We’re in the Jeremiah Johnson space. Being fans of old guys who used to be young, like Robert Redford, that’s a good space for us. I’m really looking forward to going back to work. After a week of house packing, a week of work will feel like vacation. Watching the afternoon thunderstorm approach, the rule of thumb about how far away the lightning is comes up. You count the seconds. When we were kids, the rule of thumb was one second per mile. I believed it then, but now it doesn’t sound right. A few years back, during a backpacking trip in the Black Hills in South Dakota, Brother Bill and I were trapped in a tent by a lightning storm and the question came up then too. We tried to work out the math in our heads, but it never came out the same way twice, and we couldn’t remember the speed of sound anyway, so we fell asleep instead. Using round numbers, if sound traveled at 600 miles per hour, we’d express that as one hour represents 600 miles. Then we’d multiply that one hour by 60 minutes, then multiply again by 60 seconds to get a total of 3,600 seconds, then divide that result by 600 miles to get seconds per mile. The result of this calculation is 6 seconds per mile; a result drastically different from the old rule of thumb of 1 second equals one mile. The speed of sound varies, depending on atmospheric conditions. It isn’t really 600 miles per hour, it’s higher, maybe more like 760 miles per hour, so the actual count may be more like 5 seconds per mile instead of six, but the point is still the same. It is not one second per mile. Comments?
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House

Give a way or throw away. Anything big or important went to the kids or to friends. After that, we fed the free pile out by the fence every day. Once the pile got established, it never got any bigger. By the time we finished today, there was hardly anything left. The biggest project was the attic full of holiday decorations. Most of it went in seven SUV and minivan loads. The rest got put by the fence. Our holiday lights will light again, but over a much wider area than before. After we had thrown away and given away, there was not much left to put in the 8x8x16 foot storage pod. I got the first part all packed in and tied down in the back, but the rest of it is only about knee deep. It was good to be there for a week. We reconnected with the neighbors. We got to talk again to all the people that walk past the yard. Before we left three years ago, we couldn’t tell everyone walking past that we were going away. Many of them were still wondering what had happened to us. Now, everyone that was wondering got a chance to stop and ask. We got lots of opportunities to tell our story about life on the road. It was good to be there. We got to touch everything in the house and yard. So familiar. It was bittersweet. We love our life on the road, but the goodbye was more difficult this time than it was last time we left. Really moving out is so much more final than just leaving everything there while we travel. Thirty-five years. We raised the family there. Love the town of Louisville. Loved that house. It was a great house for its time, but the time has passed. We’re only the third family to have lived there in a hundred years (plus Dan, who took such great care of it in our absence.). Now its time for the next family. Less is more. Simpler is better.
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House

We got furniture moved to Matt’s and Puff moved to Becky’s. As you know, Puff (the magic dragon, the red nosed dragon, St Puff, Puff in bunny ears for Easter) is a six hundred pound sea monster. After all those years in the yard, there was an escape attempt three days ago. The two hundred pound head section made it over the chain link fence to the driveway, but no further. We’re guessing he had an accomplice. We’re also guessing somewhere in the neighborhood, there is a high school kid with a hernia. All of Puff’s parts have been reunited to roam the back yard of Becky’s house. When we started packing up the house, we were faced with four choices for every item. Sell, store, give away, throw away. It didn’t take us long to eliminate one of the options. We decided not to sell anything, just give away or throw away anything we don’t need to keep. It doesn’t seem like we’re going to need to keep very much. Simpler is better.
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St vrain state park

It was nice to summer at altitude, but we arrived in Basalt in late June. Grass had started to grow under our wheels. Time to get them rolling again. Left this morning for a drive through Glenwood Canyon, over Vail Pass, and through the Eisenhower tunnel to the front range. Our first tank of fuel in almost two months. We were set-up at St Vrain State Park by noon. We’re here to work on the house; our house of thirty-five years. We raised the family here. It served us well, but it’s time to move on. We don’t know where we’re moving on to. We started three years ago, and we’re still just moving on. We’ll spend a week selling, storing, giving away, and throwing away. Judy has a storage POD in the driveway, and a truck and a crew lined up for tomorrow. We’ll use the crew to get all our stuff from the second floor and the basement moved to the first floor. We want everything out of the way so the house can go on the market by the end of the week. Less is more. Simpler is better.