Steve and Judy's Travels!

Our yard is so birdy. This time of year, the nesting work is done, birds
give up their territorial nature, and are more social as they gather into
flocks. Nobody has begun the long trip south. We wake up to a hundred
birds in our yard every morning. It is a joyful noise. But off we go to deliver the family bassinette to Jacob and Yousun. Becky
reluctantly parted with it, and put Conner to sleep in the crib. This will
be the 24th baby to sleep in the bassinette since 1937. We can take our
time. The baby is not due for another month. We started the trip Friday
afternoon with a one hundred fifty mile drive to Wheatland Wyoming. An
afternoon and evening visit with Bill and Marge. They have since escaped to
Wyoming, but they are our first Colorado friends, the first people to come
see Becky when she was born. Longtime friends. While we are there, we get
our farm fix. Warm windy Wyoming weather. Cattle pens. Chickens. A
guinea fowl. Blue sky and cumulus. We reacquaint with Shania, the farm
dog. Bill has a calf to bottle feed. The dog waits. I can’t say the dog
waits patiently. The dog is a border collie, australian shepherd cross.
Patience is not a part of this bloodline. The dog waits obediently, though,
until Bill finally relents and says “Okay Shania, go get the sheep.” The
dog is gone in a flash. One full speed swoop around to the back of the pack
of sheep in a nearby pasture, and in comes the entire flock of twenty
through the gate, down the alley, into the pen, and milling around in the
back with the dog lying dead center in the opening until Bill comes to shut
the gate. No sheep are going to leave this pen. One swoop. Twenty seconds
at most. No stragglers. After, the dog patrols the fence and a few sheep
come up to the other side to get their faces licked. They’re all just doing
their job. They haven’t had any rain. Wells have gone dry. They haven’t had any rain
all summer, so we brought some with us from Colorado. While we were
there, it started raining after dinner and rained off and on all night. The
next morning, they had six tenths by the time we left. It was still
raining. We left the rain with them, and headed west. We have a lot of ground to cover. Back to Cheyenne and Interstate 80. Past
the rocky outcroppings at Chugwater. Chugwater chili. They make it there.
We’ve never stopped to try it, but we’d like to. Railroad tracks. River
bottom. Scrub forest just starting to show some color. Fall is on the way.
Rivers of the old west. The Laramie. The North Platte. The Medicine Bow.
We crossed the southern edge of the state to Evanston. The freeway has concrete joiners. New concrete freeways can be pretty good.
Not smooth and quiet like an asphalt freeway, but pretty good. But old
concrete freeways… well, Nevermind. I’ve already ranted enough about how
rough old concrete freeways are. Old concrete freeways are bad, until they
retrofit them with those concrete joiners. Every joint gets several
joiners. But what does a joiner do, really? What can you do with giant
slabs of concrete? If they’ve warped, you can’t bend them back into shape,
can you? If they’ve shrunk and separated, you can’t pull them back together
without making an even bigger gap in the next joint. Old concrete freeways
with joiners are definitely smoother than old freeways without them. Why is
that? What do they do, really?

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.