Life on the High Plains

I haven't gotten much hiking in this summer.  Between all the traveling we did and going back to work I haven't gotten out on the trails as much as is needed. We had snow on Wednesday last week followed by a beautiful day so Irv, Maisy and I loaded up and headed over to my go-to hiking place, The Garden of the Gods.  Maisy gets really nervous whenever we take her anywhere in the car.  This time she made it all the way to our destination without getting car sick.  Once we arrived she peed, pooped, and threw up all in about a two minute time frame, but then she was ready to go (she has to carry her own poop when she goes hiking). We saw several beautiful blue jays. While taking the shot of the blue jay I caught a glimpse of a deer crossing the trail right in front of us. This little guys was within an arm's reach. He was completely desensitized to humans which is not a good thing especially if they start allowing urban hunting to cont...

Well, it's that time of year.  I have to accept the fact that summer and fall are over and winter has arrived. This is what we woke up to this morning.  It's only October and we've already had three snowfalls. Just ask me how much I love winter and I'll tell you.  NOT AT ALL!  I'd gladly pack up the house and move to Arizona tomorrow.  From October to May we'll be stuck mostly inside...that's eight months.  Irv is a little resistant to moving, he doesn't really like any kind of change, but I'm going to keep working on him.   I actually accepted that the camping season was over after we returned from the balloon fiesta a couple weeks ago.  We had wanted to take the RV up to the mountains for a final 2019 camping trip, but we couldn't fit it into our schedule (I've been back at work for a couple weeks.) The end of camping season means winterization time for the RV. With our old RV that meant a trip to the RV deal...

A couple weeks ago we loaded up the RV and made the trip down to Albuquerque, NM for the International Balloon Fiesta. They have quite the set up for RV's.  There are various levels of campsites VIP to Standard--over 1800 sites.  We got a last minute reservation for a Standard site.  Basically, it's rally style, dry camping.  What that means is that you park right next to each other in a line and there are no amenities--electric, water, or sewer.  This was fine with us because we were there to see balloons. The first morning was a bit of a disappointment because it was too windy to launch, but every morning after that was outstanding! What was really cool about being in the RV lot was that the balloons would launch from the field about a mile away and then they would float right over us. Every morning we would roll out of bed when we heard the first burner above us.   In the middle of the RVs there is an empty field ...

Now that I've completed my blog posts about our Europe trip, I can start on some of our other adventures from this summer.  I'm about a month behind in my posts. We spent a week at our timeshare in Jackson Hole last month.  On one of those days we decided to hike around Jenny Lake in the Grand Teton National Park. As I now know, it would have been good to read the trail description before just heading out.  We knew it was about 7.7 miles around the lake which should have been no big deal. We chose to travel around the lake in a clockwise direction.  Big mistake!  Now I know that traveling in a counter clockwise direction is mostly flat, whereas the direction we chose was anything by flat. The trail used to follow the shoreline, but they are reforesting that trail and the new trail goes up, up, up--about 728 foot elevation gain.  That normally wouldn't be problem, but when you hike with Irv you sleep in and don't get started until...