Archive for September, 2007
September 17, 2007 at 9:34 pm · Filed under Places to go
Last night it rained over most of the Rocky Mountains, and this left a handsome dusting of snow atop the highest peaks. We didn’t notice this until we pulled out of Aurora and began the gradual winding climb up Rt 36 toward Rocky Mountain National Park.
This park is a keeper. We have passed it twice in our travels over the past two years without staying, and this time — even though we have extensive plans in Wyoming and Montana — we decided to stop in for at least one night. I was grumbling about the thirty mile detour for a single night stay, but before we were even in the park I could see it was the right thing to do. The mountains are mesmerizing.
Not only that, but we managed to stumble right into the middle of the elk breeding season. This is a fascinating event, when the elk come down out of the mountains and start appearing in large groups near the roadways, and the bulls jockey for position to mate with as many cows as they can.
The best part of this is the “bugling” done by the bull elk. It sounds like a cross between a humpback whale song and a loon’s cry. Sometimes it sounds like a rusty iron gate being opened. Around sunset you can park along any road and watch the the bulls slowly follow their harems around the meadows. The photo above shows a bull elk with one antler broken off. He’s going to have a rough season, since the cows are looking for a mate with a big healthy rack of antlers.
The down side of this season is that most of the campgrounds have closed. Only one is open this late in September (on this side of the park), and as the ranger told us, “Retirees in RVs pretty much keep this place jumping through October.” It seems pretty strange to close all the other campgrounds, since September is still peak season here. So we ended up in an “RV Resort” just outside the gates at $40 per night. One night won’t break the budget, and this place has the advantage of wi-fi in the campground that actually works.
On any visit to a national park, especially a short one, we find the best thing to do to get to know the place is to attend the Ranger Talks. This evening’s talk was about (of course) elk. Up at this altitude it’s pretty chilly and the temperature drops quickly after sunset, so fleeces were mandatory. My wool poncho from Mexico made a nice lap blanket for all three of us.
Emma paid careful attention to the ranger so she could use the information to complete some of her Junior Ranger program. She should be able to complete most of it this evening and turn it in tomorrow before we head out midday.
I talked to Bert Gildart today about our planned rendezvous. Instead of meeting up at his house near Glacier, we are thinking now that a meeting in Yellowstone might be better for all. The plan is still fluid, but it seems we will spend more time in Wyoming than we thought.
September 16, 2007 at 8:09 am · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
One of the things I like the most about our lifestyle is the endless opportunity to meet interesting people and learn about things I’ve never thought about before. If you read the archives of this blog, you’ll see we’ve been surprised by all kinds of interesting things.
For example, this week one of my photos on Flickr was selected by a group called Cityparrots.org. There’s no fame or fortune to accrue from being selected, but the photo was featured in the group and it assists the research that the group does.
What I find interesting about this is that my little contribution to Flickr paid me back by introducing me to something interesting and new. Once I heard about Cityparrots I had to go check out their website and read the discussion form on Flickr. I learned that parrots thrive in urban environments, and they are in more places than just San Francisco (where this picture was taken). I was surprised to learn that other species of parrots live in New York City, where I would have not expected they could survive the temperatures.
It’s just another example of the broadening effect of what we do, but also it reminds me of the value of sharing what we do with other people. I like having eclectic knowledge and new experiences. Last week I got a chance to try fire-eating. Last winter I got to fly a Bell jet helicopter simulator. Next month we’ll go hike to one of the last remaining glaciers in the US. All of these things resulted not from our own creativity and initiative, but from sharing our experience with people of all stripes, who then shared their perspective on the world with us.
So it comes back to the friends we have made along the way. Meeting people — especially people who are different from us — is the key. There are six billion ways to look at this world, and the only way you’re going to appreciate them is to meet some of the six billion people who inhabit it.
Yesterday we drove down to Colorado Springs to see some relatives. We took a drive up toward the “Seven Falls” area and stopped at Helen Hunt Jackson Falls. The volunteers there had set up a little spot where children could paint watercolors of the falls, which Emma and her cousin did very happily.
Since I’m still reading Dee Brown’s “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee,” I was intrigued to find that Helen Hunt Jackson was also an important documenter of the history of how Native Americans were displaced and systematically destroyed by the US government in the mid-19th century. Her book, “Century of Dishonor” is still available in paperback.
Today we are gearing up to move northward on Monday. It seems odd to leave, because we are so comfortable here. Colorado is a favorite state of ours, and there’s an incredible amount that I want to do still: mountain biking, hiking, touring a gold mine, the Air Force Academy, several museums, more friends, etc. But we are working against the weather. Interesting things await to the north as well, and if we are to see them we will need to get going soon. Colorado will get another visit next summer, I hope.
September 14, 2007 at 10:42 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Tonight we met up with another magazine contributor, Jody Brotherston, and her husband, at her son’s home. Jody writes the “Interiors” section of the magazine and coincidentally happened to be here in the Denver area for a month. We’re working on plans for her next articles, which will cover healthy and environmentally friendly Airstream interior finishes, and also review a series of custom renovations submitted by our readers.
After all the restaurant meals we’ve had lately it was nice to sit down with a family and eat in.
The week has flown by and there are still many things we’d like to do in the area. I wanted to visit a local history museum. There’s a new movie at the Imax theater. We missed visiting some friends in the suburbs. So we have decided to extend our stay in Denver a day or two in order to catch up on more things before heading north to Wyoming. But our extra day will probably be spent on work, laundry, and re-stocking of the trailer, rather than fun stuff. Sometimes that’s how it goes.
September 13, 2007 at 11:20 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Last night Eleanor’s new opal and ironstone pendant broke … apparently there was an invisible fracture in it. This meant another trip downtown to the rock & fossil show, to exchange it for another piece. We met up with Jim again and this time roamed across the street to another venue of the show to check out turquoise and cabochons of all sorts of stones. While we were there, Emma was given a pair of interesting stones for her collection. One was a piece of “snakeskin agate” which is really a piece of ancient coral that fossilized and later became agate. We’d never seen it before. It’s remarkably smooth and feels soft to the touch.
We were already near downtown so we headed to the 16th Street Mall and dropped in on Barnes & Noble. Airstream Life magazine is supposed to be in over three hundred Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Books-A-Million stores, but I’ve yet to find it. Not every store will carry it, and the downtown Denver location seems to be one of those that didn’t stock it.
Have you seen a copy of Airstream Life for sale in a bookstore? If so, drop me a line using the “Contact Us” link, or put a comment on this post. I know some stores have been carrying it because I’ve heard from people who bought it, but I’d sure like to see it for myself.
This is the third time we’ve been to the Denver area while full-timing. Not only is Cherry Creek one of our favorite places to stay, we have a lot of good Airstream friends living here. The Rocky Mountain Airstreamers are very active, especially with vintage trailers. Two of them (Fred and Forrest) are regular contributors to Airstream Life magazine.
We met with Forrest and his wife Patrice for Chinese lunch a few miles from the state park, and then this evening joined some other local vintage Airstream owners out in Edgewater. Shari and Rob hosted. They are restoring their second vintage trailer, a 1955 (?) Airstream Safari. It’s currently lacking an interior but the project seems to be coming along well. I expect it will be done in time for next summer, and I hope we’ll see it at a vintage trailer event somewhere.
It’s amazing how long we can talk about an empty aluminum shell. Like car buffs, everyone has some expertise to contribute to the project, and everyone has a question or an opinion to offer for group discussion. It’s a good thing we stopped at Barnes & Noble to pick up another book for Emma, otherwise she would have been terribly bored.
After an appropriate period of time admiring the project trailer, we headed over to the neighborhood pub for dinner. In the photo you’ll see (from left to right): Emma, Rob, Chris, Jim, Eleanor, Shari, and Fred.
September 12, 2007 at 7:14 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I got up early to get six hours of work in, before we headed out to the Colorado Mineral and Fossil Show. It’s one of the biggest in the country, but we wouldn’t have known about it if not for our friend and fellow Airstream full-timer Jim Breitinger, who flew out here to sell meteorites.
Gem and fossil shows have become a favorite event of ours since we got addicted to the annual Tucson Gem Show a couple of years ago. At this one, I finally bought Emma a little meteorite for her rock collection. It’s a “Campo del Cielo” meteorite, which means it came from Gran Chaco Gualamba, Argentina.
Mostly meteorites are hunks of iron with some nickel and other trace elements. They aren’t much to look at, but I prefer meteorites and fossils to pretty gemstones because they are so inspiring to the imagination. Emma’s little meteorite was flying through space at something like 20,000 miles per hour for an unimaginable amount of time as part of a larger rock, until it fell into the Earth’s atmosphere and landed in South America. Then it sat for five thousand years, got buried several feet underground in a forest, and was finally discovered by one of Jose Guggiari’s people.
Jose is “the source” for Campo del Cielo meteorites. Jim buys a lot of his meteorites from Jose, too. Jose has a staff of a dozen people who spend all year with metal detectors and shovels, finding and uncovering these meteorites. Meteorites sell for anywhere from 20 cents per gram to a $1 per gram, depending on the quality and type. Because they are nearly solid iron, a small specimen can be surprisingly heavy.
I also found a guy selling coprolites, and I insisted on buying one for Emma. Every kid ought to have a piece of fossilized fish poop from the Cretaceous Period, right? Especially for just a buck.
The heart-shaped thing in the photo is the coprolite, and the larger object is the meteorite. Just imagine, 75 million years ago, some big old fish pooped out something and here it is in the palm of your hand. Now that’s cool…
Just this morning I was talking to Eleanor about the need to carry only things we need in the Airstream, and not clutter it up with stuff we want or stuff that might be useful. “Useful isn’t good enough,” I said. “It’s got to be essential or we shouldn’t acquire it.” And now we have a piece of something that even a dinosaur fish didn’t want, and a hunk of iron from outer space.
I got away with this by buying Eleanor something for our 14th Anniversary, which happened a few days ago but hasn’t been properly celebrated yet. She has a very pretty piece of Australian ironstone with opal “tiger stripes” running through it to wear around her neck. So everyone got something fun.
I bet all the women who read this blog are going to say she got the better end of the deal, and that’s exactly what you should think. (But us guys know that a space rock and fish poop are way cooler.)
September 11, 2007 at 9:16 pm · Filed under Places to go
Yesterday’s list included some of our all-time favorite state parks. Those are defined as ones that we would go out of our way to visit again. But there are many others that have been really great. A lot of great parks didn’t make yesterday’s list because of any of these reasons:
- we didn’t stay at them long enough to get to know them
- they are beautiful but a bit too isolated for us to be likely to visit again
- I can’t get online on site, so we can only visit them when I’m officially taking time off work
- they are overshadowed by wonderful National Park sites nearby
- I forgot about them until today!
On this list:
Lewis & Clark Caverns State Park, Three Forks MT
Fish Creek Pond/Rollins Pond State Parks, near Lake Placid NY (canoeing/kayaking)
Hunting Island State Park, Beaufort SC (lighthouse)
Santa Rosa State Park, Santa Rosa NM (right off old Rt 66)
Kanawha State Park, Charleston WV (must be under 25 feet to fit in!)
Picacho Peak State Park, Picacho AZ (off I-10 between Tucson and Phoenix)
Watkins Glen State Park, Watkins Glen NY (waterfalls! This one should have made the first list)
Rockhound State Park, Deming NM
Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM (near White Sands Nat’l Monument)
Jamaica State Park, Jamaica VT (another one that should have made the first list)
First Landing State Park, Virginia Beach, VA
Nickerson State Park, Brewster MA (Cape Cod, excellent bicycling trails)
Jonathan Dickinson State Park, Jupiter FL (sand dunes, natural Florida)
Letchworth State Park, Perry NY (waterfalls)
New Brighton State Beach, Capitola CA
Sometime soon I’ll do another list of our favorite National Park campsites. Some of those are really spectacular.
Tonight we met with Fred Coldwell, who writes for Airstream Life magazine regularly. Fred and I reviewed my edits on his upcoming article for the Winter 2007 issue, and discussed the photography we would use. His article will look fantastic in the magazine, since the topic is Airstream photographer Ardean Miller. Ardean is the guy responsible for all of those fantastic Kodachrome images of Airstreams from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, and the magazine article will be loaded with them.
After business was concluded, we all went out for pizza near Stapleton at this place that makes enormous 18″ pizzas. One pizza easily fed all of us with leftovers for lunch tomorrow, which means tomorrow will be a nice day too…
September 10, 2007 at 10:45 pm · Filed under Places to go
We left Wilson Lake under gray skies and light rain. We had hoped to take a “blue highway” north of I-70 to take in some scenery and small towns, but the weather became so dismal in showery rain that it seemed pointless. With the wet roads, we’d run a small risk of skidding through an intersection somewhere on the back roads, so instead we just took I-70 again and accepted the reality of another day of Interstate highway.
Let me tell you, Kansas is not flat. At the very least, it rolls and pitches like a wavy sea, which makes the Armada roar as it repeatedly downshifts to stay up with the fast-moving trucks. Toward the west, Kansas appears flattish but it is really tilted up, a shallow grade climbing from about 1,500 feet (at Wilson Lake) to about 4,000 feet at the Colorado border.
I hate driving those long shallow grades, especially when the speed limit is 70 (and in Colorado, 75 MPH). The trailer handles fine at higher speeds, but the fuel economy plummets, and with a constant shallow grade, it gets even worse. Add in the rain we had today, and we’ve really got a situation going. Not fun. So I kept it at 60 MPH in the rain, and 65 MPH when the rain finally cleared in Colorado.
Once we pulled into Aurora we got a little tour of the suburbs courtesy of Garminita the GPS. I always feel conspicuous towing the Airstream through crowded streets after a long day on the highway. There are people running their errands, picking up kids from school, coming home from work, and then there’s the giant silver trailer rolling through their neighborhood. I feel like I’m driving the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile, and everyone is staring at me.
But then I realize that people are not paying any attention at all, and my feeling changes. What’s wrong with these people? Don’t they know how cool an Airstream is? Can’t they see the colorful graphics on the side of the trailer (custom designed by Brad Cornelius, by the way)? It’s always a big letdown when we roll in and nobody even looks twice.
Well, at last we are parked in Cherry Creek State Park in Aurora CO. Long-time blog readers will recognize the name; we’ve been here twice before. It’s one of our favorite state parks. Terrific natural setting, great pull-through campsites with lots of space (and pink concrete pads), bike trails, a lake, and convenient to everything.
Coming here reminded me that I should have done a rollup of our favorite state parks a long time ago. There are many good state parks, but only a few are really great. Here’s a quick list of some of our favorites (all have RV camping):
Cherry Creek State Park, Aurora CO: wide open space, bike trails, wildlife
Henderson Beach State Park, Destin FL: beach and natural Florida dunes environment
Anastasia State Park, St Augustine FL: historic city, beach
Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, Borrego Springs CA: hikes, views, off-road drives
Gilbert Ray Campground, Tucson AZ (actually part of a county park): incredible views
Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, near Crescent City CA: centuries-old redwoods
Blue Spring State Park, Orange City FL: snorkeling in the spring, manatees
Charlestown Breachway, Charlestown RI: absolutely no services, no hookups, no picnic tables, nothing but beach.
There are many great state parks in other states, too, and I don’t mean to ignore them. In fact, as we travel northwest this fall and winter, one goal is to discover some new favorite parks in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and California. From here on in, state and national parks will be our destinations as much as possible.
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