Life on the High Plains

After five days of in processing and training we finally got a day and a half off.  Irv left this morning so I'm on my own now. I thought I'd give y'all a tour of my living arrangements.   This is my parking place and the pile of snow in back of the truck.  It's getting smaller...maybe it will be gone by mid-June.     This is my "little house" and my front porch.  As you can see I have an electric meter.  In the employee RV lot we have full hook-ups.  I wouldn't have done this adventure without that luxury.     We brought the generator along just in case of power loss.  In the 6 days we've been here the power has already gone out several times, but it comes back on fairly quickly.     This is another view of my "front porch".  I've got my bird bath, my spinning trailer and of course...     ...my fairy garden.  I've got solar lights wrapped around the garden ...

We have arrived!  Yellowstone is all I expected it to be an more this early in the season and more.  Hardly any people and lots of critters. I've been loading up in the company van every morning and going to Old Faithful for training.  It's only a 17 minute drive, but it takes abut 45 minutes.  Irv has had the opportunity to go out and play when he's not fixing something in the trailer.  We've had water leaks and other little things that have required his attention.   We've had quite the wildlife adventure so far.  This guy was outside our camper when we camped in the Gros Ventre Campground in the Teton National Park the night before moving into Yellowstone.   Here he is after getting up from his morning nap and meandering off into the woods.   The roads in Yellowstone are crowded with bison who really don't care if cars think they have the right of way.  It's so cool to have them walk right past the car. ...

The big day is finally here!  After several days of loading the trailer with everything I might need in the next 115 days, it was time to head north.  The further north we got, the windier and wetter it became.  Fortunately, we only passed through snow for a very short distance. We had cross winds of 40+ miles per hour which made the travel slow and most of the day we got about 5 miles per gallon.  Yes, I said 5 miles per gallon.  We had to stop for gas every two hours! Our planned destination for the night was Rock Springs, Wyoming and that's where we are parked now.  We are at the KOA which is directly off the interstate with these lovely Conoco Phillips fuel tanks in the background.  The KOA offers free Wi-Fi, but it is really slow so I can only upload this one picture. The cat has done amazing well.  She huddled in the crate in the backseat of the truck all day, but once we parked and unloaded her into the trailer, she has been explor...

Our last day in Europe.  We stayed at a really nice gasthaus called Villa Mittemeir in Rothenburg ob der Tauber--this means Red fortress above the Tauber.  This is one of my favorite German towns.  It dates back to about 950 A.D.   It's a medieval city built as a fortress.  Our hotel was right outside the walls which we did intentionally because parking is scarce in the city center.     We had to stop to find a geocache and leave another travel bug.   This is St. Jacob's Kirche, a lutheran church.   Very beautiful!   I love the stained glass windows.   This altar was upstairs in the balcony.   This is the Rathaus.     Ah...there's the street I was looking for, I knew it was here somewhere.   Rothenburg has a Christmas museum that I always used to love to visit.  It's huge, you walk upstairs and downstairs and left and right...it's never endi...

One of the things we wanted to do in Germany was to visit where we lived and worked when Irv was stationed there from 1989 to 1992.  It's hard to believe that it has been 25 years since we left Germany.   Towns change in 25 years and Schwaebisch Hall is no exception.  It took us a little while to get our bearings, but then we found the road to Rinnen, the village we lived in.   It's about a 5 mile drive up a very narrow and curvy road.  This particular curve is where Irv totaled my car. Luckily no one was hurt and the car was a lemon so we were happy to see it go.     The village of Rinnen is pretty much the same except that there are more houses.  This is where we lived on the first floor.  There are houses directly behind and to the left of the house now.  There were orchards there when we lived there.     This was the neighbor's barn.  I remember looking at the cornerstone on it once and i...