3200 miles and It’s a Wrap

I am sitting in the office at home in Rocky Point watching the midges, mosquitoes, and moths slapping against the dark windows.  We have been home for several days now and I am still not all caught up.  It is hot here, in the mid 90’s today, and smoky.  The Barry Point Fire near Lakeview and the Holloway Fire farther east in Oregon and Nevada have been raging since the 6th of August.

The heat is incredibly hard on the firefighters, with exhaustion setting in for the crews.  I have been following along on Inciweb in addition to a nice blog and Facebook posts that someone from the Barry Fire is doing.

The heat is good for the tomatoes, though, and the vines are getting heavy with nice little green things that hopefully will turn red in the next two weeks or so, at least maybe before the Labor Day frost.  The heat also is bringing out the frogs and every time I lift the top of the hot tub a little frog or two jumps out.  So far no floaters at least.

Mo came into the office today smiling at me saying, “What’s the temperature at the beach right now?” Brother Dan and his wife Chere are over there and with temperatures here in the high 90’s and smoky skies ever since we got home, those cool, foggy days on the coast sound pretty nice.

Seems as though the beach is calling Mo and she brought the motorhome back up the driveway this evening.  I have been working this week in addition to catching up on gardening chores and got the MoHo all spic and span on the inside and Mo shined her up on the outside.  Finally finished that job yesterday…and now it’s time to load up again?  But wait…I still haven’t written about half of the last trip we were on!  Still, I have been missing the ocean too.  Guess we will be pulling out of the driveway tomorrow morning early, sans Tracker.  This time we are just going to hang at the beach, and Mo put the bikes directly on the back of the MoHo so we can enjoy those great bike trails around the South Beach State Park near Newport, Oregon.

Our Colorado Reunion Trip was a total of 3,212 miles, through Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, SOUTH DAKOTA, back into Wyoming, Idaho, and back home to Oregon.  Yes, we finally got to put that dang South Dakota sticker on the decal on the back of the MoHo. I think people like to see the numbers, so here they are: 21 Days:  fuel including about 500 extra miles of Tracker travel $1747.32, camping $280.12. We spent over 300 in groceries and 145 eating out which is unusual for us.  Must have been all that family time and fun cookouts.

I managed to process most of the photos while we were traveling, and spent a couple of days after work here at home cleaning them up and getting them uploaded to Picasa.  That Picasa/Google thing makes me just crazy.  I hate that when I share photos directly from Picasa now, even using the actual copy/paste of the URL, when folks go look at them, they still get the Google thing.  Yeah, sure, Google is nice enough, but the photos are so dang BIG and you can’t see nice little thumbnails the way I can on Picasa Web Albums directly.  Ah well, progress I guess.  Like that crazy looking Windows 8 thing that Rick keeps talking about.

I last wrote when we were all relaxed in the beautiful Shoshone National Forest at Falls Campground in Wyoming.  I haven’t been that relaxed since, and our trip home was a blur of smoky highways and interstates, punctuated by the magnificent Shoshone Falls in Twin Falls, Idaho, and finished off with the long trek home through the deserts of Eastern Oregon.  Even with the bronzy skies and red setting sun it was great to be home.  The house was clean and cool and roomy, and my bed even more so. 

Jeremy wandered around meowing at all the space, wondering where we went if we left the room.  He loves the motorhome because we are close by and it takes him awhile to adjust to all the rooms in the house where he can’t keep track of his people. Aren’t cats supposed to be independent?  Not this one!  Ever since he was a bottle fed baby of three weeks old he has wanted to be as close to me as he can, most of the time. Now, of course, Mo’s lap is as good or better than mine.  He adores her, even though she has only been around the last ten years or so.  Ha!

Yes, yes, I will write about the rest of our journey, but it will be predated for the actual dates that we were doing whatever we were doing, and as a result probably won’t show up in the blog rolls.  You will have to be a truly dedicated reader to find the posts when they go up.  Ha! I have the list…Bear Lake Regional Park, Carhenge (you won’t believe this one!), Wounded Knee, The Battlefield at Little Bighorn, the magical, mythical Bighorn Mountains and the Hot Springs at Thermopolis, the Niagara of the West at Twin Falls, and the sweetest little desert hot spring around in the middle of nowhere in Oregon.  Stay tuned…and to the people who read this blog and follow along and make comments…thank you.  For being patient with me and for still reading.