August 5, 2006 at 9:28 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
We moved the Airstream from the Wal-Mart lot over to a space next to Roger & Brenda’s house. Even though it’s only a hundred feet on the other side of the fence, it seems so much nicer here. We still haven’t plugged in, since I wanted to see how the solar system performs on cloudy days. (With mixed sunshine and clouds, we easily were re-charged in a few hours.)
We spent most of the day in the historic downtown of Salida. The commercial section is only about three blocks wide and five blocks deep, but it’s filled with interesting shops, parks, and restaurants. One of the interesting little features of Salida is the commercial art painted on the sides of the brick buildings. The more you look for it, the more you’ll notice. I shot pictures of at least a dozen good examples.
Wandering around, we found a 1966 Airstream Safari parked right in front of what used to be a Firestone tire shop. The owners are artists who use the building for workspace on the weekends. We told them about the upcoming Vintage Rally in Creede and they are thinking about dropping in for a day.
Kayaking along the river, downtown Salida (click for larger).
The foot of downtown is defined by the river. It’s ideal for practicing whitewater kayaking, with long gentle sections of quickwater punctuated by small drops and standing waves. I was able to get in close to the kayakers practicing flips and get some great action shots.
I’ve uploaded a bunch of photos from Salida to the Flickr photo album.
An intentional forward flip. Click for larger.
Salida is a neat place with a unique climate. Despite being at 7000 ft, it gets very little snow. The valley is surrounded on three sides by 14,000 ft mountains, which squeeze the moisture out of the air. As a result, most winters experience only a couple of good snowfalls which disappear quickly. They get less snow here than Denver or Colorado Springs, and 315 sunny days a year.
But not this week. It has been unusually wet this summer, and has been raining regularly each afternoon, like Colorado Springs was doing to us last week. We don’t mind the rain, having seen very little of it, but all the same it is hard to believe the locals’ claims that the place is normally parched, when everything here is so very green and lush now.
August 4, 2006 at 4:08 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
We’re moving again, and as always it’s an interesting challenge. Our drive from Colorado Springs southwest to Canon City was sunny and uneventful. We took a four-mile detour off US-50 to go see the Royal Gorge Bridge, but I was disappointed to find that you can’t even walk on the bridge without buying an expensive admission ticket to the “Park” that goes with it.
We were only there for a quick look, so instead of going in, we parked up in Lot B (overflow area) with a few other RV’ers and had lunch with a gorgeous 360-degree view of the mountains. From our lofty spot I was able to receive Sprint and get online to do a few last-minutes pieces of business during lunch, which was a bonus.
If you go to the Royal Gorge Bridge area, you will find no end of places to spend money. There’s a Royal Gorge Route train that goes through the canyon below the bridge ($39 adults, more for 1st Class or meal service), a narrow-gauge railway that goes near the bridget ($9), a bunch of “western” towns with shoot-em-up shows, the Royal Gorge Bridge and Park itself, gift shops galore, and numerous other attractions. One could be forgiven for thinking that the bulk of Canon City’s economy is based on the bridge.
Another place that did not get our tourist dollars today
Our plan today was to drive up to Salida to meet with Roger and Brenda Roelfson. We met them last October in Denver and I interviewed them for the magazine. They used to live in Mississippi. You can read their story of fleeing Hurricane Katrina in the Spring 2006 issue of Airstream Life magazine (look for the article “Silver Survival Pod”).
About nine miles east of Salida we found the last public-lands campground before town, along US 50 bordering the Arkansas River. Rincon Campground is in the Arkansas Headwater Recreation Area, which intermittently follows the road. It’s a pleasant enough spot and a great starting point for fishing or rafting, but close to the highway.
We called Roger from Rincon, thinking we’d spend the night, but it turned out that the house is next to a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Salida. Hmmmm…. pay $14 for a campsite by the highway with no services and have to drive 9 miles back and forth to the Roelfson’s house, or pay $0 at Wal-Mart for a parking space by the highway with no services and walk next door to dinner?
So we drove into Salida and here we are parked only a hundred feet from our hosts, on asphalt provided by Wal-Mart. Eleanor went into the store and stocked up on groceries for the next two weeks, thus assuring that Wal-Mart is happy with our presence. And I am communicating with you courtesy of Roger’s wi-fi, which I can receive in the trailer using my little Linksys repeater. Not bad.
August 3, 2006 at 11:55 pm · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
A few days ago when were browsing around Colorado Springs I spotted an interesting looking restaurant called “The Edelweiss” (shouldn’t it be “Der Edelweiss”?). Tonight, Arthur and Allison proposed taking us there. They spent a few years in Germany and gained an appreciation for German food. Plus I could not recall ever having been to a German restaurant so it was worth going just to try.
The food was indeed good, and it was a nice way to wrap a nice week of visiting. Of course, I didn’t do much this week other than work on the dining room table, but Eleanor and Emma got to see a fair bit of Colorado Springs. There’s still more to check out, but we plan to be through here again next spring and hopefully I’ll be less busy with work.
Emma, Allison, and Hannah at the zoo
I think part of what made this week so pleasant is having the Airstream as our home base. Visiting people can be so stressful when you are under their roof. Their household rules apply, not yours. It’s easy to feel like an imposition, taking up a bedroom or the couch in the den, eating your host’s food, taking up space. With the Airstream we were free to come and go as we pleased, sleep in if we felt like it, have breakfast in our home, and generally stay out of the way. So at the end of a week of visiting, nobody felt tense from “too much togetherness”. I doubt we would have stayed a week otherwise.
Tomorrow we are heading up into the mountains. “Up” is relative, since we are already between 6000 and 7000 feet, but for the next two weeks we will be even higher, in the cooler air. This will be our last move west for a while…
August 2, 2006 at 6:46 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Sorry I’ve been offline. The in-laws offered to take Emma for an overnight with her cousin, and Eleanor and I took the evening off to go out on a date. I figured if I’m taking an evening off from being a parent, I can take an evening off from being a blogger, too.
With a dining room table and high-speed Internet available to me, I decided to get back to Operation Kill Paper, which was last conducted in December back in San Diego. The plan is to reduce this:
… to this:
I found that most of the paper can be trashed immediately. It’s amazing how much paper we had in the files that we really didn’t need. I spent much of yesterday and today scanning the rest, and earmarking things to be dropped off in storage when we get back to Vermont.
Getting rid of the paper is a job, too. It’s all sensitive data, filled with account numbers, tax ID #s, SS #s, etc. Shredding it all is out of the question — I have enough to overheat any shredder, and shredding takes too long anyway. We’ll burn it tomorrow night in the campfire ring.
People often say how “brave” we are for tossing the paper in favor of scanned images. But really, this is much safer. A fire or water leak in the trailer would probably result in total loss of our paper files. Once scanned, however, I have multiple copies and can re-print any document in seconds. One copy of everything will be on my laptop, another on Eleanor’s laptop, a third on my backup hard drive, and a fourth copy will be burned to CD and mailed offsite for ultimate security.
Moreover, I don’t have to worry about someone coming in the trailer and stealing documents for purposes of identify theft (not that I was really concerned in the first place). I can easily encrypt the entire folder of “scanned documents” so that nobody but Eleanor and I can view them — better than a safe!
The only downside of this is the initial job of scanning a few years worth of documents. We brought documents (mostly tax records) going back to 2003. I have invested several days, counting the time back in San Diego, getting all that paper reduced to electrons. Going forward it should be much easier, since I scan new incoming documents every couple of weeks, and also because we are receiving much less paper these days than before we started full-timing.
July 31, 2006 at 9:17 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I am fortunate to have in-laws who are nice people, with nice kids. Emma spent the entire day with her cousin Hannah, and Eleanor spent the day with her sister-in-law Alison. They all had fun at the swimming pool. I spent the day working on their dining room table. Oh well.
One of the fun things about visiting Emma’s cousins is that there are so many of them. There are five kids from 18 to 5 years old in this family, all great. The two oldest girls and their boyfriends joined us for dinner. Eleanor made an Italian entree that I can’t spell (but it was really good), and she seasoned the cauliflower in such a way that everyone liked it (which I would have thought impossible).
Eleanor’s grandfather was the Head Chef of the Locke-Ober Restaurant in Boston for twenty years. That’s where Eleanor got her cooking talent. Her brother Arthur also inherited the cooking gene, so when the two of them get together it’s time to build up your appetite. Tonight Arthur was busy at a baseball game, so he only showed up for the eating segment of the evening, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they team up in the kitchen later this week.
I uploaded pictures from Garden of the Gods city park today. See the Flickr photo album. We also worked out some tentative plans for the weekend and next week. We’re going to head west into the Rockies to Salida and Gunnison. This will be our last chance at Colorado for a long time, and we would like to enjoy it as much as possible.
July 30, 2006 at 10:21 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
… and then, nothing happened.
We had to move the rig this morning from the dull & noisy campground we had in Colorado Springs to a spot about 15 miles south of town. So we spent the morning doing Sunday morning stuff, and then stopped off for groceries, and by the time we got to our new site it was nearly 2 pm and 96 degrees outside.
I had all these ideas about driving out to some little towns in the mountains, seeing the Royal Gorge Bridge, etc., but somehow they all evaporated in the heat of the day. Besides, I found out a bit too late that cell phones don’t work here, even though they work just about 2/10ths of a mile down the street. So I spent an hour of the afternoon trying to get my Vonage box to work on the campground’s wireless network, and then Eleanor and I languished while Emma griped about our lack of activity.
Well, once in a while you’ve got to take a day off from everything. I guess today was it. Tomorrow we will resume our usual schedule of frenetic activity. Since I can’t make calls from here, I will tag along as Eleanor and Emma head up to Colorado Springs, and park myself either in the in-laws’ house or Panera Bread for the day. I could do worse than having an office in Panera Bread …
But despite the lack of activity today, I did find a great place to go for good times with family:
Sign of the week!
July 29, 2006 at 3:21 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
The weather continues hot here in Colorado, but we decided to hike around Garden of the Gods city park anyway. This place is too beautiful to miss.
It’s also rather busy, especially on a sunny summer weekend like this, with rock climbers and browsers of all descriptions. There are a few short trails off the beaten path, if you need to escape the crowds.
There’s a good Visitor Center with various added-value attractions: a movie ($2), gift shops, cafe, a bus tour ($5), etc. But the park itself is free and the view is spectacular.
After some hot hiking, we decided to visit our local Thai restaurant for lunch. A blog reader and fellow traveler, Brad A, mentioned that he has not seen any good Pad Thai lately. Brad, this one’s for you!
Now we’re taking a break before meeting the in-laws for a barbecue nearby.
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