A Week at Camp Airstream – Yellowstone
Despite being well into our 3rd year in our Airstream, we’d never been to a rally or organized Airstream event until this summer. Color us chagrined perhaps, but the first two years simply exploring beautiful Colorado was its own reward. We sure made up for it with Camp Airstream — Yellowstone though! The best part […]
Birthday Surprise: The Derailers at Albert Dance Hall
Annie always seems to come up with the best birthday surprises for me. I’d initially indicated a preference for a bottle of tasty single-malt Scotch as a birthday gift since space in an Airstream is limited and it was a consumable gift. But she offered me a choice: whisky or an heretofore unknown experience. Thank […]
Test your gear before you need it
Our first season with Ellie we camped in a gorgeous, tree-filled spot in Gore Creek in the White River National Forest near Vail, Colorado in early September, just as the mornings were getting brisk and the trees thinking about their winter break. At this point we’d had some practice boondocking, but this was the first […]
The breakneck pace of the Tour de Fat
As you can see below, racers donned their speediest outfits and circled, round and round, about downtown Fort Collins this summer. They celebrated bicycles and beer, the official symbols of the great state of Colorado. It’s a high-profile race, and the costumes aided in their quest for endless circling amid friends—both new and old—to work […]
Coffeeshop Wisdom
Sometimes it’s just nice to get out of the rig and work in a coffee shop (or brewery or distillery!) for a change of scenery. One of our favorite Breckenridge coffee shops is Mountain View Coffee and in their restroom is this painted sign with a wise saying on it: Your mind is the garden,your […]
Quiet Louisiana Mornings
White heron waitingmorning fog blinds the impatienta fish captured, snatch!
Broken Hearts in the Crescent City
We awoke this New Year’s morning, having slept in from reassuring two stressed-from-the-fireworks cats at midnight, to a text from a dear friend. Are you two ok? Just seeing the news It took only a second to see why on nola.com with a story with weight far larger than my phone’s small screen size could […]
Photo locations in this year’s holiday card
Without further ado, note that for a couple of these letters (at least when this post was written), the posts associated with that photo are still getting drafted. But stay tuned! They will be published soon. C – Tour de Fat bike parade in Ft. Collins O – Aspens in the fall hiking up Marshall […]
Aspens at Marshall Pass in the fall
Last year it seemed like we nailed autumn in Colorado, hanging in the SW part of the state just as aspens around the San Juan mountains peaked. This year sadly it seems like we’re a couple of weeks late. We hung out at Sylvan Lake for a week before heading south to O’Haver Lake, about […]
Everyone’s Trying to Hold on for 8 Seconds
Professional photographers know one (among many) adage: Half of getting access is looking like you belong there. That’s the tack I took to photographing the Manassa Pioneer Days rodeo this summer. Grandstand seats along with everyone else are rarely the best spots for making good photos. Another adage is: If your photos aren’t good enough, […]
That’s *One* Way to Travel
We had a triple-threat of sorts in a recent camping trip to Chatfield State Park: Originally we booked it so we could see Gregory Alan Isakov at Red Rocks (Sunday & Monday nights!), but the timing also worked out well to finish packing up and prep our condo for sale and, while we were there, […]
The Wrong Kind of Excitement
We had a bit of a scare this spring. Anytime we ran a significant electrical load (like the microwave), we’d get wafts of that nasty electrical wiring burnt smell in the rig. When you’re in a confined space, like a boat or an RV, an electrical fire is exceedingly dangerous. On top of that, it […]
What’s a little snow to kick off full-time RV living?
Well, it’s official. We moved out of our LoHi digs for the last time and reached out for, well…this. Within days of the transition, we plowed right through three 30# tanks of propane while worrying about frozen pipes and huddling next to Ellie’s furnace (which seriously puts out). Cherry Creek State Park ultimately got 17″ […]
Finding contentment in unlikely places†
I awoke about 6:30 as the morning light careened across the kitchen island, reflecting into the bedroom. Developing discipline is hard for some—it’s hard for me—so I was trying to get back into my normal morning routine. Too often while living in Ellie I’d just head straight to the coffee, and the litter box might […]
My tripod, the walking stick
Winging it works pretty well a lot of the time. I held that attitude boarding the Zion NP Canyon bus at the midnight-dark visitors center. The full(!) busses seated hikers sporting walking sticks and waders, while other adventurers just wrapped themselves in layers of dri-fit that’d make any Coloradan proud. I was part of the […]
Art imitates life
We had just arrived in Navaho Nation’s Monument Valley in Arizona when we spied this Cruise America rental parked off to the side of the KOA office. My only wish was for it to have occurred just after sunrise to match the light. Alas.
What “high-clearance required” really means
The morning after the eclipse, we talked with a ranger inside Canyonlands’ bustling visitor’s center. We were looking for some place without the crowds we could do in an afternoon. They had just the ticket. A nearby road simply marked “HIGH CLEARANCE REQUIRED” (highlighted map below) led through 7 miles of Oh. My. God. four-wheeling […]
Will the generator finally start?
Following the eclipse, while everyone else departed after lunch for the spires and buttes of Canyonlands, I unpacked the generator’s new controller, dragged the work bench (ne, picnic table) across the sand into Ellie’s shadow, and draped a large towel across to keep things as clean as possible. I had a mixture of dread and […]
Eclipses always leave you wanting more
Eclipse day at Canyonlands National Park! The run up to totality is an odd mixture of anticipation and boredom as celestial bodies prefer their slow, considered movements across our celestial view. The light starts to turn…weird. It’s hard to describe. Almost like Ra patiently held out a gray camera lens filter between us and the […]
Fall foliage in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains
Honestly, there’s not much more to say about this, so we’ll let the pictures do the talking. Gorgeous scenery, and feeling lucky to be able to spend so much time in this part of the state for fall.
(Windy) Lakeside at Eleven Mile State Park
When the season’s wound down and hardly anyone (but more than you’d expect!) is out camping, it’s a fine time to go book those spots you really wanted to stay at last time but holy cow look at that the whole calendar’s full! Such was the case with Eleven Mile State Park, housing…you guessed it…Eleven […]
Tie that shit down
If you’ve spent any time at all on a boat, like if you spent 12 years in the navy, you well know to tie shit down, lest it be launched toward you in the most unfortunate way. Normally ahead of moving campsites we’d have taken the litter box (literally, a wooden box with a cat […]
Squirrel!
Who knows what got these two to wake up and sit side-by-side looking at the window at…something. Did they want to chase it? Eat it? Let it inside? Only they know. And they’re not telling.
Was that an alarm clock? Sucks to be you!
Nothing really to narrate here. You can fill in the gaps yourself.