Boise!

After a false start out of Heber City, one jack wouldn't come up, but no more mice, we finally left about 10:30 instead of 9:00.  Oh well, who cares, I'm retired now :)
A bit about leveling and jacks.  Our motorhome has two systems for leveling, air using the suspension bags, and hydraulic using jacks.  Primarily we use the air system, that way the motorhome sits on its tires, and in soft ground that is a huge advantage over the jacks which sometimes dig into the ground.  After all we are about 46,000 pounds!  In Deer Valley, the site was paved, but they had installed concrete curbs across the rear of the site.  We were so long that we had to pull over the curb in the back of the motorhome.  At ride height we were above the curbs, so no problem, but when we leveled we came down a bit.  The air and hydraulic system when in automatic, checks every hour or so for level and readjusts if necessary, pretty cool actually.  But in this case we didn't want the possibility of it moving the coach into the curb, so we leveled with the air, then extended the jacks manually to just raise the coach a tiny bit, then shut off the system so it would not readjust, that way we could be certain we wouldn't hit the curb.  We use the jacks so infrequently, the one was reluctant to retract when we left.  After some lubrication and a little persuasion it came up.
We had a nice drive, weather perfect, and with our late start we stopped in Declo, ID at a nice campground.  After another very leisurely start with another small issue, we got off after lunch for Boise.  Drove through a lot of smoke from some fires just to the east of Boise, got all fueled up for our upcoming travels with Karen, and got situated in our site at about dinner time.
We are looking forward to a great visit with Jan's cousin, Kris and her family over the Labor Day weekend.  Karen is bringing her motorhome in on Saturday, so will be a great reunion.  We haven't seen Kris and Sandy and their family in over a year!  Good times.

OMG MICE!!!

We have been invaded!  Never before in 15 years of motorhoming have we EVER had any mice in the coach.  I mentioned about a month ago, Bert, our cat, found a mouse in the middle of the night, and how I ran right out and bought a ton of traps.  About a week went by before we caught one mouse in a trap.  Thought the problem was solved, although we did leave the traps set just in case.  At least 3 weeks have gone by, and we caught another mouse two nights ago, hmmmmmm.  

Well, last night as Jan and I are watching TV, Bert goes crazy and runs by us into the bedroom with a MOUSE in his mouth.  Of course he doesn't kill it, brings it back in the living area, releases it beside one of the couches to play with it, and the mouse disappears under the couch.  We poke and prod and look and look and set 2 more traps in under the couch, and wonder what is going on?  This morning we have 2! mice caught in the traps in the basement.  ACCKKKKK!

We have no idea where they are coming from, do we have a whole colony living with us, how do we keep them out, can we repel them, etc, etc?????????

Any ideas, anybody???????

Lots of stuff for us, and Catch-22 for Mom?

First of all, Mom has been doing great!  She has seen two of her doctors, and gotten good reports.  She is learning, slowly, that she has to slow down and take things easy, and it sounds like she is, finally :-)  She is in excellent spirits, and doing well.  But now after this setback, it looks like Isaac is going to give her and lots of other folks a run for the money.  It appears now that Isaac will track to the west of the Tampa-Sarasota area and take aim for Pensacola, and might be a Class 2 storm when it makes landfall.  It's still early so it's anyone''s guess right now.  She has arranged evacuation plans if it comes to that.  We'll keep our fingers crossed for everyone.

Meanwhile we haven't been sitting still.  We have a favorite drive that goes up over the mountain from Midway to Park City that we wanted to do again, we decided to mix it up and do it from Park City back, something we had never done before.  It was actually more than 10 years ago since we last drove it!  Time flies.  First we drove to Park City and had, finally some excellent Chinese food, told you about our jones for it, that solved, and seeing the incredible growth the area has experienced since our visit, we walked around town for awhile.  Very, very quiet.  We are going to assume it's between seasons for them, lots of kids back in school and no snow yet.  But, wow it was slow.  Anyway up and over we went.  You drive up to the top of one of the ski hills and then cut back down the back side of the mountain, funny, now the deserted dirt road we were expecting is all paved.  Here's a couple shots along the way.

Park City Condos

Top of the mountain

A few ski runs

I should also mention the temps are beginning to fall, 47 degrees this morning again, and there are more and more signs of fall coming to the mountains.

Jack Frost is coming!

On the way back, we saw another dirt road we wanted to drive, called Snake Creek road.  It looked like it would climb up high and reconnect with the Alpine Scenic Highway through Sundance, but since it was already almost 4pm we decided to do it the next day.  Good thing we did.  The next morning we left about 10am to drive that road, figuring we would go around the circle and be back to the motorhome for lunch.  We use a GPS in the Jeep, but also use a topo map that Jan is incredible navigating with.  We have been doing this for years and rarely have a problem, so off we went.  Higher and higher we climb, hit a couple forks in the road, choose and keep going and going and going.  Why the hell aren't we coming out on 92, the Alpine Scenic Highway??  After several more miles we come to another fork with a sign showing Cascade is behind us??  That is where we were supposed to turn and come back into 92, what?  So we look hard at the map and the GPS and find out we are miles north of where we are supposed to be and other than turning around there is one way out down along a small creek on a rough very narrow single lane road.  Even so, it was a great ride, scenery was super, even if we had to back up a couple times to allow another jeep to go by.

Beautiful views

Rough road

But finally we came out at a pretty little lake, Tibble Reservoir, and got back to the motorhome for a late lunch at 1:30!

Tibble Lake

Now today, we wanted to do a little hike we had read about to Grotto Falls.  We had to drive south about 25 miles to find the Nebo Loop Road.  It is a scenic byway from Payson to Nephi, 37 miles long, climbing up to over 9300' with excellent scenery.  The road itself is excellent, wide, paved, reminds us of the Cherohola Skyway in Tennesee but much higher.  We found our trailhead, and although only a 3/4 mile hike, it was worth it when we found this pretty little falls.

Grotto Falls

As we stopped for our mid morning coffee at an overlook we glimpsed these elk moving up the hill.  They seemed very wary as they made their way, and we found out later archery season opened today!

Looking out

A few more photos along the way.

Pretty day!

We had an interesting encounter on the way with a bicyclist at an overlook of Mt. Nebo, an 11,929' peak that actually has a trail to the summit.  With binoculars, we could see 10-15 people up on the summit!

Mt. Nebo

The bicyclist we met was biking with two other guys who are training to do a race held up in Logan that is 209 miles long, in one day, and has a 16,000' elevation gain!  Are they nuts??  Anyway, to say they were big cyclists is an understatement, so with Lance Armstrong so much in the news lately I asked him what he thought.  Interestingly, he perked up with my question, said he was a French professor and followed bicycle racing in depth, especially the Tour de France, and had studied the doping issues in not only US studies, but in french ones that have never been translated, and basically said, all of the riders dope and have for some time!  Armstrong, even though he had never been caught, too clever, had over 50 depositions from others who knew or saw him dope.  This guy felt the biggest crime was the fact they were stripping Armstrong of his winnings and giving it to the next guy also guilty of doping.  I have no idea whether this info was true, but we found it very interesting.  Never know who you might run into?  These guys were serious bikers, they were on a 115 mile ride today that climbed over 3900' to the summit of this road!  
Anyway we continued our drive, stopped by the Devil's Kitchen, and interesting formation that looked a lot like a "mini" Byrce Canyon.

Devil's Kitchen

Another excellent day!  Only one more here in Utah before we head west into Idaho.

Fairly quiet

It's been kind of quiet the last day or so.  Been in contact with my mom trying to monitor what's going on in Florida, and whether there is any indication that we need to bail and get back there.  She is under hospice's care now.  What an organization!  I am so impressed with what they do for people approaching the ends of their lives.  It gives them dignity and support that they need so badly.  My hat is off to the hospice folks.  Our very good friend Ray is a hospice volunteer, and we know he brings joy and comfort to his charges.

We have really enjoyed being here at Deer Creek.  We are reveling in the room, privacy, views, etc.

If you look real hard near the left side of the photo, you can see the smoke from the fire I described.  It was only there one day so we are sure they put it out. 

We decided to take a bike ride yesterday morning, only about 5 miles, but pleasant along the Provo River.  It was green and cool and lovely.

The path

Near where we turned around was Bridal Veil Falls.  It's funny, cause there must be hundreds of Bridal Veil falls in the country, anyway, this one is near Orem, UT.  About 400' high!

The rest of our day was quiet, checking in with mom, and kids.  It had been quite humid here and pretty hazy, but a few thunderstorms moved through, took out the haze and left us with this to say good-night.

48 degrees this morning!

We woke to to a beautiful morning with a crisp temp of 48!  Fantastic, I guess fall is starting to seep in out here in the west.  We ran down into Orem, UT yesterday for a PF Chang fix.  We've been looking for some good chinese with no luck so we had a great lunch there.  It's funny driving around in all the traffic and hustle and bustle.  We've been out in the country and only in small towns so long it was quite exciting.  Got a couple errands done, then drove up and around a road called the Alpine Loop.  It goes northeast out of Orem up over a pass and down past Sundance on the way back to Heber City.  Very beautiful.  We drove past a raging wildfire that they were fighting.  Helicopter going back and forth dumping water on it, and this morning we can't see any smoke so maybe they were successful.  

When you move out of a house into an RV, or just downsize for that matter, one of the major challenges you face is stuff, what to do with the stuff??  When you live in a fairly large house you normally just accumulate stuff.  You buy knick-knacks, artwork, pictures, and this and that and always find a place for them.  But when you live in a motorhome you have to stop yourself from accumulating stuff.  Our rule is, if you buy something, then something has to go.  Even with that, at least once a year we need to reevaluate and toss out or sell stuff we don't use.  Room is precious.  And then there is the issue of toys. Toys are a challenge as well.  You obviously can't carry all the toys you would like, so what do you do?  We decided to get rid of the motorcycle, and now carry two bicycles.  We left our kayaks behind in Florida, and have been keeping track of where we would have used them, balancing that against the hassle of carrying them on the Jeep.  We have nice racks for them, but the hatch won't open up very far with the kayaks mounted, so it can be a real pain anytime you need to get in the back of the Jeep.  We have been kicking around the idea of getting a folding boat, a Portabote, along with or instead of the kayaks.  But then that adds the question, do you get a motor, gas or electric, or just row it, then what do you do with the motor, especially if it's gas?  All toys come with a certain amount of hassle factor, but living in a motorhome multiplies it ten fold.  We have seen all kinds of examples of people doing extraordinary things to accommodate their toys.  We've seen double trailers where there is a full sized power boat carried ABOVE a vehicle, motorcycles carried on a rack front and back on motorhomes, we've seeen ATV's in the backs of pickups towed by a motorhome, and even mounted on a rack behind a motorhome, we've seen racks on pickup trucks that have a canoe, two kayaks, and two bikes mounted!  All kind of things, some people look like the Clampetts going down the road, and we don't want to get that bad.  So the contemplation goes on.

Deer Creek!

Just a short post.  We had a great drive today from Montrose to Heber City, UT.  Weather was wonderful, scenery superb.  A poor start getting fuel in Montrose, overpriced, and tried to make me pay with cash instead of a credit card, said I must have pushed the wrong button on the pump!  Oh well, all done and on our way.  A long day, 346 miles:) I got to looking at our log and this is the longest day we've had since May!  We love this campground at Deer Creek State Park, huge, private sites and an incredible view of the lake.  After the VERY tight quarters at the last campground we are just smiling, smiling!  Here for a week, I'll keep you posted.

Last day in Montrose

We got up and washed the big chunks of dirt off the motorhome before the campground got up and around.  We got permission kinda from the campground owner Rick to wash, but with much reservation.  Washing an RV on the road is often quite a challenge, especially out west where water is pretty scarce.  We try to wash it whenever we get an opportunity.  Then fluid check and tire pressures.  But we needed to go on a picnic down deep in the Black Canyon along the Gunnison River.  

There is a lot humidity in the air the last week, now for those of you in the south and the east, this must sound like a joke cause the humidity is all of maybe 50%.  But the folks from here are really complaining.  We try to keep our smiles hidden.

There is a very steep road that leads down to the East Portal on the Gunnison River in the park.  I mean steep, in excess of 16% grade all the way down over 2000' to the river.  This road was cut in the canyon wall back in 1904-1905 to get the workers down into the canyon to dig the Gunnison Tunnel to bring irrigation water from the river to the Umcompahgre valley.  It was an amazing undertaking.  It took 5 years of digging 6 miles through hard rock, clay, sand, and shale.  26 men died in the construction.  The digging went on 24 hrs a day, and although the pay was very good, the average time a worker stayed on the job was 2 weeks.  The tunnel is 11' X 13' and is still working the same way today.  Two teams dug to meet in the middle and they only missed by 18 inches!!  Amazing.

The terrain as I showed you is very rugged.

On the way down

The river is beautiful as it winds through the canyon.

In the next picture look carefully near the top of the photo and you can see the road way way up there.

The road down

They built a dam across the the river to divert the water into the tunnel.  That way they can control how much water goes into the tunnel.  In fact, in the winter they lower the dam so no water goes into the tunnel, no growing going on, and it gives them a chance to perform maintenance at the same time. 

This is the diversion dam, the tunnel is actually off to the right, the way it is situated you can't see it

We had a pleasant picnic by the rushing river and learned quite a bit at the same time!

Good news!

My mom came home today!  Hopefully she will bounce back for awhile.  She is so much more comfortable at home.  Joyce is with her tonight to make sure all is well.  We'll have to monitor and see how it goes.  It's real good now!

I have spent most of today working on changing our address, and dealing with insurance etc.  Boring stuff, but necessary.  

It's gotten quite warm here, into the 90's today, but still cool at night.  Karen is planning her morning launch to get her motorhome out to Denver in the next two days, so it will be in place for our trip together over Labor Day.  Hope she has no problems.

Second post in one day!

The quest for mail forwarding and possible residence change is complete!  We analyzed Texas, South Dakota, and Florida.  And we are going to stay with Florida.  We found out that although insurance costs were a little bit lower in Texas and SD than Florida, registration cost were quite a bit higher than Florida.  Texas has the disadvantage of vehicle inspections, and the need for a driving test for the motorhome.  We would have been able to use our daughter for our mail forwarder, nice of her to offer, thanks, Kelly, but the rest took it out of the equation.  Also Texas has the highest sales tax.  SD has low sales tax, but you have to go there to initiate the change, and what do you do if you get a jury duty summons in mid February?

We found a mail forwarding outfit that was recommended by our good friends, Dick and Ann, so we should be signed up pretty soon.  The nice thing is, it is in Sarasota, the same county as we are in now, so licenses, registrations, etc will only require an address change, not new ones.  If someone happened to have a concealed carry permit in FL already.... nothing would change.  Our voting will be the same as well.

It makes the most sense to us right now, we even will have our motorhome insurance go down a couple hundred dollars!

Didn't go to Telluride after all

We were going to Telluride, but ended up bypassing it.  Although it is a pretty cool town, we aren't big fans, too hoity-toity for us, and we've been there a bunch over the years.  Instead we saw a road into the ghost town of Alta and Alta Lakes.  It is several miles south of Telluride at 11,800'.  The town was active from about 1877 until 1946-1947.  It had the distinction of being the first mine to use AC current.  George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla helped make it possible.  It was a cool drive up off the main highway, but not too much remains of the town anymore.  The ruins of the mine area and the boarding house and just a few others.

Mine ruins

Boarding house on left

In amongst the ruins, we saw two overseers of the manor:)

We had lunch perched up with an incredible view only blocked by all the rain in the area.

Lunch view between the raindrops

The little road continues up to Alta Lakes, an absolutely pristine spot scattered with campsites.  The water as you can see in the pictures is so clear, it's like it's not even there!

We even did a quick Jeep commercial while we were there!  Can you hear us Jeep?

We tried to take another road back out into the back of Telluride's ski resort, but unfortunately we ended up at a locked gate.  So back around we went towards Telluride and up beside the airport and onto a road called Last Dollar Road.  The airport is perched at about 9000' with an absolute straight down drop off at the eastern end of the runway.  For those of you that fly, this would be quite a spot to land and take off from.  High terrain in all quadrants, and I'm sure very interesting wind and weather to contend with. Let me at it, oh yeah, I retired.  In the next picture I tried to show the end of the runway from far away and above, but it is pretty cloudy.

Runway in the distance

This road climbs high up above Telluride with views that are priceless, and I'm sure property values to match!  Some pretty nice places to say the least.

Nice digs!

What a view!

Some of these houses are perched out over cliffs, it makes you wonder how they were built.  Well, we got a good idea from this.

Building away

And a little perspective of where it is situated.  And the view from our coffee break spot!

The road got narrower and went up and over a pass.  It wound around and went through a beautiful Aspen grove.

We worked our way back to Montrose.  We're anxious to get moving again, but we are sure going to miss Colorado!

More ramblings

My mom is in the hospital.  We are going through all those decisions everyone goes through when a loved one is taken ill.  Do we alter our plans and head back, do we keep going and wait for developments, do we stay the course and hope for the best????  On the good side she is still in good spirits, and the docs haven't raised alarms, more testing they say.  But on the poor side, she is more tired than she has ever been.  She's pretty frustrated.  Fighting cancer is tough.  We are staying in constant contact and waiting for developments.  She has wavered before and sprung right back up.  We're praying that is what will happen this time as well.

There are many plans that are starting to be implemented.  Karen is about to launch from Louisville with her new motorhome to get it in place in Denver, so she can fly back out and drive to meet us in Boise over Labor Day.  We have reservations on a jet boat trip up the Snake River in early September, and then will travel together to Missoula and Yellowstone.  We then will head south into Utah to meet Nancy and CT at Zion to hopefully do the Narrows hike up the river, then to Bryce, Capitol Reef, and Moab before N&CT have to return to Albuquerque.  We plan to go through Durango and then meet up in Albuquerque to see them, Jan's mom, and maybe Karen, before heading east in late October.

As I said before sitting here in Montrose is the longest we've sat other than working and Florida.  It's been 3 1/2 weeks and man are we antsy to get moving!  Funny, as we came into town we found that a truck stop, which is always a little high on its diesel price, was $3.89/gal.  So we decided we would fuel on our way out of town since diesel was trending downward.  Ha!  Last week their price went to $3.99/gal and yesterday was $4.29/gal!  Great timing, huh?  We're heading to Salt Lake City from here and there is nowhere to fuel along the way.  Gladly we only need about half a tank, but that's about 80 gallons:)

We started on the grout project.  Since the new grout was the wrong color we had planned to remove all the grout in the shower, all three walls and regrout so everything would be one color.  As we tackled removing the grout, we found several tiles loose and ready to fall out.  Then we get the idea, since we really aren't in love with the tile accents in the shower at all, we would completely replace ALL the tile with something we both like.  Yeah, I know, another huge project.  Hey, ya gotta have something to do in retirement, right?  We did decide rather than do it now we would wait until we are in Florida for 4 months this winter.

We discovered one glitch with the AC project.  Seems the footprint and cover on the new AC is slightly larger than the old unit.  Our automatic satellite antenna when it raises and lowers hits the the new unit.  Maybe we mounted it just ahead of where the old unit was?  But there is no moving it now unless we completely remove it and get new gaskets, also we found there is hardly any wiggle room anyway.  I guess we are going to live with it and see how it fares.  It is plastic on plastic so hopefully nothing will break, cause if it does it will be the antenna that will lose.

Off to Telluride!

A couple hikes and a small project

We decided we had been sitting on our butts long enough and went out yesterday morning for not one but two hikes.  We are very close to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.  For someone afraid of heights, this park scares me more than any other, including the Grand Canyon.  The Grand Canyon is deeper, but it is so huge I don't think your brain can get itself to believe it's real, therefore for me, it's not as bad as the Black Canyon.  The Black Canyon has very steep walls, so it's straight down over 2000'!  Too much for Billy boy.  We had visited the Park many years ago, and haven't been back.  Even last year when we were in the area, Jan and I took a ride over to the other, eastern side of the park, but not in the official area.  
Our first hike was out to Warner Point.  The entrance road climbs up pretty steeply onto the mesa that was uplifted before the canyon was cut by the fast moving river.  A couple views on the way up.

Pretty morning

Adobe hills

The trail is all the way at the rear of the park, about 11 miles in.  It's just a 3/4 mile one way hike on top of the canyon that terminates in a viewpoint at the deepest part of the canyon, 2772'!  We were encouraged by the "three amigos" on our way.

The three amigos

It was a pleasant hike, although up and down pretty much the whole way, but quiet and serene, very peaceful and no one else around!  Doing this stuff in the morning has its pluses.  We were rewarded with quite a view, the Black Canyon in the foreground and Grand Mesa in the distance.

The path was in a juniper and piñon pine forest.

As we drove back out of the park after our hike, we stopped so Jan could take a few more pictures.  This is "Painted Wall", the highest shear cliff in Colorado at 2250'.

Painted Wall with the river below

Another shot along the way.  A long, long way down!

Then we drove out of the park and then east into Cimarron to the bottom of the Morrow Point Dam for another hike, this time down along the Gunnison River.

Morrow Point Dam

This trail was in stark contrast to our first hike, instead of high on top of a ridge, we were right down along the river.  It was very nice.

Along the river

Moving along, very much enjoying the fact I'm not hanging over an edge:)

Motating along

A couple more shots on the way back out.

Gorgeous day 80 degrees

Almost out

We had a wonderful time, 2 mind you, hikes in one morning.  I know only 3 miles total, but we sure enjoyed it!  Nice to get out and about.  Had enough time left to do one more project that we've been wanting to accomplish for quite awhile.  We have a cabinet underneath the dining table that really needed a shelf to increase its usability.  I had been putting it off for some time, so decided now is the time!
Only took a few minutes, actually more time to allow the stain to dry than the actual construction.

I have no idea how all that wine got there!!!