Nice to have a change of scene. Even though we are only about 60 miles from our last spot, and the view is still mountains and desert, it looks and feels completely different. Our spot today is situated on a rise of land overlooking Tombstone (“the town too tough to die”), 10 miles away, and the Dragoon Mountains to the northeast.

We’re told that the Dragoon Mountains turn gold in the sunset, which is about to occur as I type this. In a minute I’ll head out and see if there are some good photos to be taken. Earlier, Emma and I went for a walk around the campground and practiced taking photos of the hummingbirds.

I have found that I need to use the flash and a high ISO even in daylight, if I want to get a good blur-free image. Today’s shots were not very successful, but I feel prepped for the next few days. We will undoubtedly see a lot of them as we check out Sierra Vista and the surrounding area.

Part of our departure checklist is to clean the trailer’s interior. This means putting everything away, dusting the counters, making the beds, throwing out the junk, sweeping the floor and vacuuming the carpet (if we have an electrical hookup). Since we haven’t moved in a while, we had more cleaning than usual, but because it’s a small space the trailer cleaned up quickly. It’s a nice ritual because it means we pull into our new space with a home that looks neat & new, like we just moved in.

So here we are in a town that is new to us, a view that is new, and the Airstream looking and feeling new again too. It’s a really enjoyable sensation, sort of like going to a nice hotel on vacation. All the detritus is left behind, all the dullness is washed away and it feels like an adventure just to go 60 miles. Every new campsite is a reboot on life. No wonder we like it.

Still, the mundane aspects of life continue. We’ve had a couple of rounds of paperwork related to the house. The roof needs replacement and that meant plenty of documents with signatures and counter-signatures getting faxed back and forth between us and the seller. The seller has agreed to split the cost of a new roof.

In case you are wondering how we handle the paperwork without a fax machine or a regular telephone line … We carry a laser printer with us, and a flat-bed scanner that is USB-powered. We receive all of our faxes through eFax, which means they arrive in my email box as PDF documents. For documents for our records, I simply save them in a folder and they get included in the next regular disk backup.

If a signature is required, we print it out, sign, then scan as a PDF and email it back, or send it out as a fax through eFax. I also keep a copy of all the documents we’ve signed on my computer. In the end, nothing stays in paper format — it’s all digital, which is much more convenient, searchable, and safe. We are able to store the equivalent of several file cabinets worth of paper in virtually no space at all. As I’ve been reminded, buying a house generates a lot of paper!

At this point the house seems to be under control, so we can leave that job behind for the next week. We’ll do some adventuring. I’ve got a little break before the crunch comes for the next magazine, and I plan to use it as well as I can.