Steve and Judy's Travels!

The Bounder. And the hog barn. Happily there haven’t been any recent
residents there…. except for us, anyway.

Thursday. This is it. Last day in town before we head out to the wedding in Fort
Morgan. We were lucky enough to live across the street from Archie for thirty years.
Great old guy. He was always old, even thirty years ago, because he was
always older than us. Young at heart, active, interesting: that was Archie.
We crossed the street and talked to him over the fence for thirty years.
Ultimately, he actually did get old and die. But before he died, his
daughter Lolly, and her husband Larry, and their daughter Jodee, moved down
from Fort Morgan to help take care of him. And stayed. Now we’re lucky
enough to live across the street from Larry and Lolly. Daughter Jodee is
getting married, back at their old stomping grounds in Fort Morgan, so off
we go to hang out with them for a couple days, and see if we can help more
than get in the way. Larry tells me we have a nice flat space to park the
motorhome right next to the barn. The hog barn. I’ve got my Honda legs back under me, and it’s a nice car again. I
particularly like the climate control. What a logical thing to do. Instead
of chasing the changing conditions with the heater controls, trying to find
the temperature you want to be, just pick the temperature you want to be,
and let the mechanism take care of all the details. I wonder why they don’t
offer that on the dashboard of motorhomes. Guess there is too much climate
to control from there. I have to confess. I’ve discovered I’m an elitist. Driving to work
yesterday, to a new client’s office, I wasn’t looking forward to driving
through the middle of Denver to get from our house on the northwest side, to
the client’s office way out east. That’s a lot of driving, and a lot of
traffic all the way. I had allowed an hour for this exercise. Leaving
Louisville, at the top of Murphy’s hill, I realized that the new beltway
would loop all the way around to the north, then east, past the airport, and
south to the neighborhood I was headed for. And the best part is: it’s a
toll road, so there was hardly anyone else on it. My own private road! I
can pay extra and have my own road with no traffic! I’ll take it. We have a transponder in the glove box of every car, so it is painless to
pay. Just throw it up onto the dashboard, the machine reads it as you pass
through, with no slowing down for tollbooths. It was good. And, it only
took half an hour to get there.

Wednesday. It’s a good return to work. A quiet day yesterday. I had decided to leave
at four to get an early start on racquetball. Just before four, the phone
calls started, and didn’t let up until five. No problem. Just lots of
things that needed to be talked about. Today, I did a review for a new client, so I got to go work at their office
all day. Environmental Learning for Kids. They take inner-city kids out
camping and fishing, and teach them some wilderness ethics. The ground is warming. I can tell. I can tell from the ceramic faucets in
the bathroom. They’re the old style, four lobed faucets. It’s easy to
recognize exact positions for water temperature. All winter long, I have
been setting them in one particular configuration. Now, on our return from
a month and a half away, that setting results in a scalding hot shower. The
temperature of the water coming out of the hot water heater hasn’t changed.
The cold water mixing with it has to be warmer. The instant ice water from
our cold water faucet is warming. We like the layout of the motorhome. With one sliding door in the middle,
it’s clearly divided between front and back. We can hang around in the
front in the evening without having to close it all up. When we start
settling down for the night, taking showers and such, we can close the
middle door for privacy and to keep the shower heat back there. We slide
the door back open, last thing, and when we wake up in the morning, we have
a nice bright room out there waiting for us.

Tuesday. It’s all a matter of perspective. This is the first day I’ve driven the
Accord. I moved up to a bigger car from the RX-7, to a nice substantial
Honda sedan. After driving only the motorhome and the Jeep for all this
time, the Honda feels silly. It’s just a little roller skate. It feels
like we let it down off its air suspension and we need to lift it back up
again, except it doesn’t have air suspension. We could use better internet access on our trips. Sometimes the cellphone
hookup worked, but there were a lot of areas that didn’t have cellphone
coverage. The Alpen Rose Park had WiFi. A local wireless internet access.
It was fast when it worked, but it was unreliable. It went out of service a
lot. Clients would let me hook up to their landline phones, but that didn’t
work well either. If their phones had multiple lines coming in, I couldn’t
get past that barrier. We talked to other motorhomers with giant internet
dishes pointed at the sky. They had reliable access, but they were also
planted in one spot. Those dishes didn’t look portable. I expect internet
access to get easier and faster every year. We still need it to be a little
of each. If anyone knows something we should be doing to get better internet service
on the road, we’d appreciate any help.

Monday. We see this stopover in Louisville as just that: a stopover. The trip goes
on. We did settle back into the house a little bit, though. We even spent the
night in it last night. We didn’t have anything at home that needed immediate attention on our
return. Our neighbor Bob did such a good job with the house and yard; we
could come home and just relax. And open the dining room windows. They
haven’t opened in thirty years. No telling how long they had been painted
shut before that. I didn’t get what I expected on this trip. Judy didn’t get what she
expected. She expected more leisure time, more days to fill. It turned out
to be a very busy trip for her. I thought we would have some breaks between
jobs, a more leisurely schedule, more time for contemplation, but it turned
out we needed every day for the jobs we scheduled. It was a busy trip for
me as well. I’ll hope for a little more scheduling cushion next trip.
Actually, I think if we schedule the same, the fact that they’re repeat jobs
will help a lot. It surprised me that we had to restate prior auditors work as much as we
did. Normally, even if you would have done something differently, you can
use the prior auditor’s work as a starting point and just move forward. I
like it better that way.