Steve and Judy's Travels!

Sometimes, life is just not fair. Back in March, I prepared the vegetable
gardens the best ever. The ground thawed. I got any leftover weeds pulled.
I mixed a bale of sphagnum peat moss into each section of Colorado clay.
The seeds and onion starts were on order from Burpee. Everything was
perfect. I just needed the seeds and sets to arrive before we headed out on
our first extended audit trip so I could get everything in the ground. Then reality struck. Judy. She pointed out that even if I got everything
planted before we left, we wouldn’t be there to water and tend the gardens.
It wouldn’t be much of a garden if no one were there to take care of it.
And if it did happen to grow, we were going to continue to travel so much
this summer, we wouldn’t be there to eat it. So no vegetable gardens. Not this year. No garden fresh corn. No tomatoes
right off the vine. No green beans. No onions. But that’s okay. It’s a
trade-off. That’s not the unfair part. The unfair part happened two months
later. We came back from our trip. It rained in Denver almost every day we
were gone. That was unfair. We came home to a bumper crop. Of weeds.
Chest high weeds in the garden. Canadian thistle, milkweed, bindweed,
pigweed, crabgrass, all prepared to burst into glorious bloom and send their
seed forth. We won’t harvest a single vegetable, but I still have to weed
the gardens. It’s just not fair.
We left to snowdrifts in July. We weeded the garden, kissed the grandkids,
and drove up across the Continental Divide. Almost the middle of July,
Copper Mountain still has snowdrifts on the slopes. Good to see. It has
been a good wet year. We could see Dillon Lake was full as we drove past.
We haven’t seen that lately.

We know the brake buddy works. With the big Bounder, I can’t feel the brake
buddy in the tow car when it kicks in, so I hooked up the monitor light.
There is a sending unit in the tow car, and a receiving unit plugged into
the dash of the motorhome. This stuff isn’t required to make the brake
buddy work, it’s just feedback for the driver to see if it’s working, so I
don’t usually plug it all in. In the gas motorhomes, I could feel when the
tow car brakes went on, so I didn’t need it. In the diesel Bounder, we use
the brake buddy mostly for appearance. State law requires tow car brakes. The jake brake and wheel brakes are so good, we don’t need the tow car
brakes too. Except. Except this trip, we discovered why tow car brakes are
a good idea, even on level ground, even when you don’t think you need them.
It was the car on the shoulder up ahead. We’re driving seventy miles an
hour on the freeway. There is a car on the shoulder. I checked the left
mirror to see if I could move over. I figure we create a pretty big whoosh
going by, so I always move over for someone on the shoulder if I can. Not
this time. There was traffic beside me. Up ahead, the left blinker came
on. I had just enough time to say out loud, “just don’t pull out”, before
the car pulled into our lane at about 20 mph. I got on the brakes, the jake
brake, and the air horn, in that order, at full mash. I hoped the car in
front would pull back onto the shoulder, but no luck. It just held its
position, and gradually accelerated up to speed. Ultimately that speed was
about ten miles per hour under the speed limit. I guess it wasn’t really
that close, either. We never got closer than about fifteen feet to it.
Going from seventy to thirty, it seemed like quite a while, though, before
we knew it wasn’t going to be a very bad experience. The next couple hours
included more adrenaline in our systems than we needed. I guess the law to
have tow car brakes is a good idea, even if you don’t think you really need
them. Our first night out, we stayed at River Dance RV Park. We’ve been watching
this park take shape for the last couple years. You can see it from the
highway, just east of Glenwood Canyon. It’s between the highway and the
Eagle River. We stopped there last year just to drive through and check it
out. We ended up talking to Rusty, the owner/operator. He brags that his
property has the best trout fishing on the river. What an ambitious guy.
This is not a large corporate operation. This is a guy that likes to camp
in his RV and wants to build a park just like he would like it. It’s coming
together slowly, but he’s doing a good job. It’s one guy doing it himself.
Our site was level. We had water and 50 amp electricity. It was an easy
walk to the river. He has put free standing lawn swings overlooking the
water. He was right about the fishing. Five rainbows in an hour. All good
size fish. I fished a parachute adams for a while, but even though there
was a caddis hatch on, there wasn’t any activity on the surface. I tied a
pheasant tail nymph on as a dropper and drifted them through some currents.
That worked very well. After a few fish on the nymph, one even came up and
bit the dry fly off the surface. That’s my favorite; a rainbow trout
explosion on my dry fly. All fish survived the experience and the barbless
hooks. Riparian habitat. Kingbirds and orioles in the river valley brush.
Warblers along the water.

Alex, aka “the water rat” joined us for a little fun in the bird bath this
weekend.

A new baby. Conner Thomas Alexander. Born at 6:14 am, Tuesday, July 6th. 6 pounds, 14 ounces. 19 inches long. Mom, Dad, Baby, and family doing fine. It’s all good.

Friday. Simple day. Las Vegas to Mesquite. Passed Highway 93, Brother bill’s
favorite Highway. St. George, Cedar City, Beaver, turn right at Cove Fort.
Cross the steep mountains, up the Sevier Valley, through Richfield and
Salina, cross the badlands (San Rafael Swell), and cruise into Green River.
Stayed at the Shady Acres RV Park this time. Cooling down into the
eighties. Found some more rough cement road. Drove in the left lane for a while.
That helped. Judy was being silly tonight. We went to the edge of a field to show Annie
the cows that were grazing on the other side. Annie loves cows. But they
were on the other side of the field. Judy started calling them. That was the silly part. Cows don’t come when
you call them. Besides, she was making the same noise she makes when she’s
calling horses. She wasn’t calling cows, which don’t come when you call
them, she was calling horses. Just as I was gathering momentum in sorting
this all out for her, there was this random shuffling movement on the other
side of the field. All those cows started moving for no apparent reason.
Our direction. Judy called again, and they broke out into a run. They all
ran straight over to our side of the field, and stood there at the fence
waiting expectantly. Maybe it was feeding time and they mistook us for hay. New Mexico. I don’t really want to work there much. Only during the months
it’s cold in the Colorado high country. After that, given a choice between
more work in Colorado, and new work in New Mexico, I’ll take Colorado.
Maybe it’s not fair to sign up clients there if I only want to be there
during two or three months a year.
A four hundred mile day. Tomorrow, cross the high country.