Fun with Ian 7-29

This couple of days went by really fast with a six year old hanging around. We didn't do as much outside as we might have, but it was so hot during the day. The last couple of days the thunder clouds moved in so it made the afternoons more bearable and Ian rode his bike and scooter. We watched movies, ate popcorn and watched a lot of the sports channel, so we saw a lot of water sports which I think helped him try harder during his swimming lessons. He never really got into trouble...just a scolding or two when his attention went off where he wasn't supposed to go. He likes to tease, but he learned fast when it wasn't appropriate. He's fun to have around. He missed his Grandpa the last couple days though. He liked to help me with the watering of the trees and he was very good at it.

Family Visit 7-27

This past week it has just been steadily 100 to 103 during the day and the evenings and nights have varied from pleasant to stuffy.

Thursday Andrea’s family arrived for the weekend and we had a good time of course. They couldn’t wait to get up here and play Mexican Train with us…crazy people. Mexican Train is a strategic domino game…lots of fun. We gave them the grand tour of the Fallon area and they were pleasantly surprised by how green it is here….I guess they don’t call it the Oasis of Nevada for nothing.

Andrea and Will left for home yesterday and Ian is staying here with us for a few more days…I’ll take him back home on Thursday…I had plans to go to Ukiah then anyhow…so it works out really well.

Ian wanted to play domino’s with us, but I told him I would teach him after his parents left and he has done really well considering he doesn’t know the strategy involved and you have to be patient…he counts every dot on the tiles he has left…good practice for him and I don’t have any reason to rush. Larry, Ian and I played a game together…it was a lot of fun…Ian has a wicked sense of humor and he knows how to back his doubles and click his tile when he has one left, we’ve played with adults who take longer to make a play than Ian does.

Today we enrolled Ian in swim lessons, he had started last week at home and we thought he could just continue here and is working out really well. Hard to take swimming lessons though when you don’t like getting your face in the water….can’t say I really blame him.

We were settled in for the day when Larry got called out, so he hit the road for the wilds of California. No more naps for me….laugh!!!

Ian took a lot of pictures with my camera last night…we have to edit them yet and then I’ll post a couple.

Hot days 7-20

Larry got home Friday evening. Not much going on here, it has been hot and sunny, with one day of thunderstorms in the late afternoon and one evening we were treated to a glorious light show off to the east...lots of lightning in the big clouds, nature's fireworks!

I've been glueing glass and grouting, Larry has been working on the trailer.

Creating and Hummers 7-16

A quiet day for me today, Larry is out of town for a few days and the first day home alone I tend to do a lot of nothing. I did do the Wii Fit for almost an hour when I only planned on doing a teeny bit…the Wii’s piggy bank of workout time amounts to about an hour of real time when it clicks on 30 minutes, so that was good. I just can’t seem to stop reaching for at least that 30 minute goal and once I get beyond that I reach for the hour…very sneaky of the designers.

I did some laundry, did some reading, did some cyber communicating and grouted another mosaic. The air is so dry here you have to work fast and I think I started too dry to begin with…practice, practice. I glued some glass on another project and that is about it. Made some killer fried rice for lunch with all the leftovers in the fridge and called Larry to gloat over it….smile….he only made himself a sandwich.

In our travels watching how animals behave in different environments has been interesting. There aren’t that many hummingbird flowers in the desert…I have a couple of red Salvia’s that hummingbirds love and the hummers work differently out here…instead of a sip here or there and then zipping on, when this hummer shows up it stuffs its beak into the tube of the flower up to its face and works the flower over and then does that to every flower on the plant….it is funny watching it back up to get its beak unstuck out of some of the flowers that aren’t quite open all the way yet, but they need to get all they can before they move on. I haven’t tried a feeder…the solution gets so danged hot here.

These pictures are of the last two frames I have finished tiling. They turned out pretty good for only my second and third endeavors. The grout makes all the difference of course and the color chosen can really affect the final look of the piece. The last frame I have a before grout pic and the after picture. I like this one the best so far.

It was 101 here at some point today and now the sun has set and the wind is blowing, but it is still too hot to open up the windows. I prefer fresh air to being closed up and un covered windows to covered, but you do what you have to do to stay cool…I try to keep the house from being hot and stuffy and I keep the temperature of the a/c as warm as I can tolerate to conserve energy.

As it will probably be more of the same for me tomorrow, it might be a couple of days before you hear from me again and if it is…have a great weekend. Take the time to watch a bird!

Great Weekend 7-13

We had a nice weekend puttering around and keeping busy.


We had company yesterday...my Corral cousins, Pat and Mike came over from their place in Minden to check out our place...we got their stamp of approval...laugh! We had a great visit and a lovely dinner...Pat brought a huge salad and I cooked salmon...yum. We haven't seen them since Yuma and they travel as much or more than we do so it was nice to hook up with them again and get caught up. There is never enough time though...I thought of all kinds of things I had wanted to ask them but just never got the chance...next time.


I am figuring out how to do mosaics. I grouted the first frame and I think it turned out really nice...but I learned that I want to leave the grout higher on the next one...which I did today. These pictures are of the first frame and a picture of my grouting station in the garage that Larry cleared out for me!


Today we collaborated on a glass tile cutting box. I want to be able to nip and cut tile in my work room, but flying glass, carpet and bare feet do not go together...so I was thinking of a box...Larry found a clear box...he cut holes for my arms to go through and then we came up with a way to keep stuff from flying out....it turned out really good...I can't wait to try it tomorrow...had to wait for glue to dry.


I grouted my second frame with black grout...the tiles are red and mirror...it is stunning and I have laid out a third one and have been working on a glass candle holder...it has been fun. I'll post pictures later.


Yesterday and the day before we had lots of wind...today was a bit cooler without wind so really enjoyable, but starting tomorrow and through to the weekend we may get up to the century mark...yuck...then back down into the mid to high nineties...summer is heating up here.

Truck fixed and a nice drive 7-10

I'm having an I can't put my words together in an interesting way evening....I'm too hot and tired so this will be short and short.

We went to Yerington to the small Chevy dealership there to get our blower motor control processor. It had arrived and then the parts man was kind enought to let Larry install it to be sure it was the right part and what we needed. Thankfully it was and $140 later we were back on down the road. Yerington is a nice little town and its valley is really green...lots of alfalfa fields.

We stopped in the Fort Churchill area that is on the Carson River where there are large old stands of Cottonwood trees and really tall sage brush...which is where we saw this guy...he moved like he was under strobe lights...really herky jerky.

We had lunch at the Black Bear in Fernley and then went to Lowe's where we spent about an hour in the tile/grout area and figured out the different merits of the grouts and picking colors and then looking at tile for current and future mosaic projects.

It was in the low 90's today and clouded up some late afternoon which is why it isn't cooling off like it usually does after dark...the clouds must be holding in the heat...though they seemed kind of thin, not much of a breeze either.

Larry pulled in last night just as it was getting dark, I had the gates open and lights on and he backed everything in the yard with nary a problem...of course. He was beat...he had put on 937 miles in his three days of taking care of business, not to mention all the stuff he was taking care of.

Today he finished unloading and showed me the fancy steps for the camper...they arrived here on Monday, just before he pulled out...they sure would have been nice to have on our return trip from Washington...

Because he is smart and knows how to read schematics and wiring diagrams he tracked down our trucks problem to a blower moter control module...so we go to Yerington at the Chevy dealership to get the part tomorrow...he just pulled the fuse to that area in the meantime so our batteries are not being drained.

I worked on glueing my mosaic to the frame today...it is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle...my first effort is kinda of busy, but I wanted to use a lot of different colors and glass, my second is a little more sedate, but flashy still, tomorrow I'll pick up a few colors of grout and hopefully get one grouted. I also have to glue the second frames pieces to the frame...I just laid them out today. The glueing gets a little messy and a few times I would touch the glass with a gluey finger, then I would have to clean it off...but I managed without too much of a mess! I need to remember to take pictures...I get involved and then forget to photograph my progress. I am going to start taking pics of the layouts in case I bump them before I get a chance to get it glued on. I would be pretty unhappy if after spending an hour or so on a design and then knocking the whole thing all over the place...I would probably end up saying some potty words!

I am going to start haunting the thrift shops and yard sales for cheap china, broken etc. and at the same time look for subjects to mosaic...I already have a few lined up....Laugh.

Chores and Puttering 7-8

Just a nice quiet day of chores, messing with the truck and starting on a mosaic. The batteries were lower than Larry wanted, but the truck started, though it didn’t sound its usual robust way…so I ran the truck for awhile and then hooked up the battery charger to keep a trickle charge on the batteries for a few hours. Larry talked to someone yesterday in Sacramento about electrical problems with the truck and the guy just groaned and said it could be a nightmare tracking down the problem….time will tell.

I cleaned the bathroom, dusted and vacuumed…and then spent the day puttering around, separating glass and designing my first project…I decided to start small and easy….a picture frame…so I can get a feel for all the materials I will be working with. My biggest block in my creativity is I want it right the first time and in all my planning and thinking I can get stalled. I wish I could be like other artists I’ve seen…they do test runs and throw stuff away right and left before they get the final product done…I don’t know where I got this hang up…I don’t know if it is about waste and frugality….or that old adage if you’re going to do something, do it right. I should have piles of watercolor hits and misses….I have a small pile but they are all hits to me.

Larry was running around in the Yuba to Sacramento area today taking care of business, he should be here any time now…he wanted to get in with enough light to get the communications trailer backed in….he hasn’t done this one yet and the camper just adds to the challenge, but he has yet to ever scrape or even nudge anything with the trailers.

The pictures in this entry are some of the pictures of the last place we camped in Oregon way out in the middle of nowhere…at least ten miles from the nearest asphalt road and a few miles from the nearest Forest Service gravel road. The camper is very teeny in a couple of the pictures, I wanted to get a couple of different views of our home for the night. The wild flowers were everywhere and the birds were singing all day, the chipmunks were frolicking and the mosquitoes were attacking….almost perfect!

The very last picture is of north western Nevada…contrary to my past biased opinion…there are a lot of beautiful places in the state.

Murphy and Full Moon 7/7

Darn that Full Moon, wreaking havoc and lining up with that old Murphy’s Law guy.

Larry pulled out yesterday for a few days to help one of the other “trailer guys” over in Willow Creek area of California who was having all kinds of equipment problems. I called Larry before turning in for the night and he was having his own problems….no headlights and no engine brake on his work truck…so he was grounded until sun up.

I get up this morning, take my walk, water the plants, spray weeds with killer, have my breakfast and then jump in the truck to run a couple of errands…..click, click, click is all I hear and the gauges are all doing funky dances….go figure, first day by myself and a broken truck.

I called my mechanic….Larry…at least he was in phone range…and he ran me through volt testing both batteries…deader than mackerels…odd, because nothing had been left on, so Larry thought maybe one of the batteries was bad or our alternator might have conked out. So he directed me to the battery charger and talked me through hooking it up and volt testing again and after about 40 minutes I was able to get the truck to start. The meter came up on the alternator, so we don’t think that was the problem.

Then it was over to Walmart for new batteries…they were backed up with people getting tires….and I didn’t want to attempt changing the batteries….too heavy and I didn’t want to squish something important…namely me. So I left them the key and walked home…I didn’t have two hours of shopping in me while waiting and it was only 82 so I figured I wouldn’t collapse of heat exhaustion in the 20 minutes or so it would take me to get home.

After a couple of hours they called and I walked back to Walmart…forgot my hat, but I still made it okay…the sun is just really intense here…I walked through the air conditioned store and cooled off on my way to the automotive area, picked up the truck and toddled off on my errands.

Thrift shops are the most interesting places for finding treasures…I found nine or ten large 16X20 prints from some motel somewhere with nice frames with glass…parrots and flowers…not my décor, but I’ve been wanting to enlarge some photos from our travels and large frames are pricey….for these wide interesting molding frames….FIVE dollars each. They are white and dirty, but cleaned up and then spray painted black they will be stunning! I came home with five of them….I try not to pack rat…staying mobile minded…though I was tempted to get them all…but that is how it starts….LAUGH!

After I got home I turned off the truck and reached behind the seat for our shade thingy we stick in the windshield and realized that there was air blowing onto my arm from the back vents…hmmm, felt the ones in the dash…air blowing gently through them too, so now I am listening and I can hear the fan motor running, but not at full capacity….BUT any capacity with the truck turned off and the key out is a VERY BAD THING. SO now I think we know why the batteries were dead…now we just need to figure out why something is running when it shouldn’t be…computerized cars…some aspects great…others not so great. I turned the key back on and shut the air system off with its switch and when I turned the key off, no blowing air and the fan wasn’t running…BUT what else may be running that shouldn’t be? Weird.

So Larry had me test the voltages a couple more times this evening…it seems like they may be down a teeny bit…normal?...I don’t know, but I’ll find out the good or bad news in the morning…need to see what happens. Larry is having conniptions because he is worried that I am stranded…not hardly…I can walk and there are neighbors I can call on in a pinch, so it’ll all wait until he gets home…which should be some time tomorrow….Lucky him. The Chevy dealer went away last fall during the first crashing of the economy so I guess it’ll be off to Reno unless we hear of a brilliant mechanic here in Fallon.

The Full Moon is apparently bringing out the epic writer in me!

Today’s pictures are of a thunder storm we encountered in the plains of Southern Oregon and then Abert Rim and Abert Lake.

Osprey Family Pics 7/6

These are photos of the Osprey nest and family at the Clyde Holliday State Park in Oregon. We had seen the two parents and knew we had seen one young one and maybe another...once we were home and I could see the pictures on the computer...then I could clearly see the second baby.

I also threw in another picture of the Bullfrog pond and the last picture is of a lovely clump of Bachelor Buttons sitting alongside the John Day River.

1st set of pics from last weeks trip 7-5

This first picture is of the green northern Nevada desert.

The second is of north eastern Oregon.

The third picture is of southern Washington south of Yakima...all the hills were very brown and dry, but the orchards and farm land kept it from being dry looking.

These white flowering shrubs were along all the highways we traveled in Oregon near rivers and in the mountains....they smell so very exotic, like plumeria...they are Mock Orange and are supposed to smell of orange blossoms and jasmine...I wish there was a way for you to smell these...they were scrumptious!

This next picture is of the Bullfrogs at Clyde Holliday State Park, you can see one head on the left but if you click on the picture you might be able to see the rest of the heads poking up out of the water. I had focused in on one charmer and he croaked just as I took his picture so his shiny yellow throat was expanded.

Camper Road Trip 7-4

Happy Independence Day! I hope everyone had a great day with their families and friends! It was in the low 90’s here, sunny and a teeny breeze. I have been inside most of the day doing laundry and getting caught up on “stuff” since getting back from our five day road trip.

I am going to try this a little differently to get caught up…I always have too much to say and can’t get all the pictures to match up and it gets to be such a big project….so I thought I would first tell you what we had been up to and then add entries with pictures later seeing as I am back at the house and don’t have too much planned travel wise in the near future. Then as you have read this entry (hopefully) you might figure out what I am talking about with the pictures…you can always scroll back down to this entry if you need to. When I get overwhelmed with the information you get the point A to point B short version…this is the full version…just no pictures yet.

As most of you know the next few summers Larry is working for a friend hauling to, setting up, and maintaining on site a Helibase Communications trailer at forest fires around the western states when called. He is provided with the truck to haul the trailer and a camper so he is comfortable whether they are staged out in the middle of the forest somewhere or at an airport.

We were asked to pick up the camper for this truck in Yakima, Washington and as we don’t mind traveling and had nothing going on…no problem. We were traveling through some country we hadn’t had a chance to get to in our travels yet and got to revisit some places we hadn’t been to in a really long time.

It was a beautiful drive…with the three weeks of rain northern Nevada and eastern Oregon received last month it was unusually green and lush and the wildflowers…WOW. Sadly this tall grass and vegetation will go dry and brown and create some very intense fuels for wild land fires.

We had a long drive so we left Fallon early in Larry’s work truck loaded up with the stuff we needed for the trip back. We took 95 north which hooked up with 80 east to Winnemucca and then on north on 95. We had never been north of Winnemucca and we were surprised at the terrain and the ranches and little settlements…it wasn’t as desolate as we expected.

As you cross into Oregon the speed drops from 70 to 55…a mistake in our opinion…puts you to sleep it is so slow and boring and people are constantly passing which makes it unsafe. When you can see the same landmark or house for 5 minutes or longer….too slow.

AND the IDIOTS, we were in Idaho where the speed picked back up to 65 and up ahead there was a car stopped in our lane…a two lane highway I might add…no flashers on so I slowed way down and as we went around slowly and looking to see what was the matter….the insane woman had her window down and was talking to a motorcycle driver that was stopped on the shoulder! Not the best place to stop and chat or ask for directions….INSANE and RUDE! Not to mention down right dangerous.

So anyway, Nevada, Oregon, into Idaho and then back into Oregon…we decided to stop for the night at a motel in Pendleton, Oregon, get some rest and then get up early and drive the last few hours to Yakima in the morning.

The trip from Winnemucca to Idaho was all new highway for us and then from Idaho on up to Yakima was new to us also…beautiful, remote country but surprisingly populated…lots of farming and ranches.

We drove 580 miles and eleven and a half hours on our first day…Monday. I helped by driving for an hour or so, the bigger truck was different…it has dualies so I was conscious of that extra tire on both sides all the time.

Our motel in Pendleton was nice and clean and modern, but when they modernized this 50’s era motel within the last decade they slacked on the electric and the soundproofing. I had the coffee maker going and was blow drying my hair and our room went dark….Laugh. So we had to call the desk and they had to go push something somewhere. During the night I could hear someone in a room either next to or below us snoring away…plus for whatever reason someone from the room next to us had to go downstairs at 3 in the morning and talk right below our room….

On Tuesday we were up and out early, we had to be in Yakima at 10:30 to pick up the camper. The motel had a little continental breakfast downstairs which we partook in before we hit the road. We left Pendleton about 7:30, got fuel and headed west on 84 then hit highway 82 west in Washington to Yakima. Washington didn’t get the rain that Oregon and Nevada did and they were very brown…more what we expected to see the whole trip. The orchards and hops were all green of course but the hills were brown, brown, brown.

The camper and truck got whatever was needed done to them so they would work together and then we got the systems walkthrough by one of the salesmen….lordy, what should have taken a half hour took this guy an hour and a half! He was one that you didn’t try to hurry along or we would have been there twice as long…now mind you it wasn’t that we didn’t think there wasn’t anything new we needed to learn…there were a couple of things, but it was all the other stuff that we couldn’t get him past…oh well.

It just illustrated the changes in Larry and I…he played the guys game and just let him go knowing it was the only way we would get out of there while we were still young enough to climb up into the above cab bed. I on the other had kept my serious, stone face…can you get on with it mask on and he kept making comments about making me laugh or smile…geez….like I could sit there through that whole spiel with a goofy smile on my face….NOT. A person that can’t read their customer is annoying because they are convinced they know it ALL about everything better than anyone….that was this guys attitude.

So we finally were able to get on the road back south…without the steps to the camper…they apparently are added on at the dealers and they had sold the last step that was the one we needed. (it will be shipped to us) The door was waaay up there and the bumper was narrow and high too….the first few times I went in Larry had to give me a shove from the rear! I have never been particularly agile…mounting a horse was always entertaining and I have never just hopped over a fence…nope….painful for me and hilarious for whomever I was with! Getting back down out of the camper I looked like a very timid monkey clinging to the handle and the wall feeling for the bumper with my foot and then finally reaching the ground without landing on my back or pulling some vital muscle…laugh!

After leaving the dealers we grabbed a really good hamburger at Miner’s, which seemed to be a Yakima hot spot right next to the mall. We must have missed it when we were in Yakima four years ago…we hosted a month near Yakima in August of ’05…wow, so much time already.

Now we had to drive until we found a Walmart to get all the stuff one needs when staying in a camper and getting the food we would need for our return trip. We wanted to shop in Oregon and it was two and a half hours before we got to the Hermiston, Oregon Walmart. We did pretty good, I made a list and we started at one end of the store and with no backtracking…a very good thing because this Walmart was one of the HUGEST Walmarts we had ever seen…twice the size of most Super Walmarts….we had seen one other like it in the south somewhere. It would have been exhausting to go back to the other side if we had forgotten anything!

We had to get creative in the food/cooking department…no microwave and we had left the box of cookware in our garage…and cookware has, like everything else gotten so expensive we didn’t want to buy something we already had, so we bought a cookie sheet and some frozen meals we could cook in the oven. We were way tired by the time we got to the food so we just got the basics. We still had to get to a campground and get everything put away and figured out in the camper.

It was about 7 p.m. when we left Walmart, we got fuel and then headed on down the road to find a place to stay for the night. We headed down good old US Highway 395 and scoped out the first campground we came to. It was Ukiah-Dale State Park and as it was getting dark it was as good a place as any to stay the night. No hook-ups and we were on a creek, but we were tired and just wanted to get everything put away, have a snack and get to bed.

I haven’t slept in a camper in 25 years and climbing up into that bed being that tired was a chore…I had to use the kitchen counter as a step…humiliating and funny…laughing didn’t help much….I was worried about poor Larry’s eyes! He was still down below and behind me. Though he was so tired I think his eyes were mostly shut.

Here is another bitch note from me to the manufacturer of small spaces…why, why!?! would you put speakers that hang down into a space that is minimal and head knocking to begin with? Why wouldn’t you use flush mount or hang the speakers in the corners pointing back to where you would be lying in bed….NOOoooOOO, they are mounted right in the middle of where one wants to put ones head when maneuvering around in less than two feet of clearance. We both knocked our heads on them and as I type this on Saturday evening I have been informed that they are not there now...Larry says they have been drop kicked through the goalposts of life.

We slept pretty good our first night in the camper…we got a little cold, but I kept the hatch open in the roof above our bed so we wouldn’t die in our sleep from the new smell fumes. They didn’t burn the heater off at the dealer’s so that would have killed us quicker…laugh. We got some stuff moved around…you don’t have hardly any room in a camper and things keep getting moved back and forth until it all gets figured out. We had breakfast, took a little walk and then hit the road.

We left Ukiah-Dale around 10 and drove to check out the town of Ukiah to see how it compared to Ukiah, California…it was smaller than the California town had ever been, one street, remote but in stunningly beautiful country.

We only drove about a few hours or so on Wednesday and got into Clyde Holliday State Park west of John Day around 1:30. Ooh wee…they had showers and they had just finished cleaning them….off I went for a shower…last one was at the motel…I’m not too sure about this roughing it stuff….no laughing…now a days this is roughing it for me… Now I know I can do anything…I could sleep on the ground in a tent again if I had to…but I don’t have to and I don’t want to…ever.

Which brings me to another question….were there always this many bugs in forest campgrounds? The mosquitoes were after our blood and the other bugs just added to the general annoyance. Larry can tolerate sitting in the sun where they didn’t bug him so bad…I can’t handle that much sun so I just got real cozy with my book in the camper. It was nice to laze around horizontally for a bit, then we took a walk…this campground is on a river and they have nice trails to walk that are graveled. We had power and water hook ups. While on our walk we opened all the windows and vents and fired up the heater so it could burn off all of its smells.

We had decided to take the trip back a little easier rather than haul all the way back in a day …no reason to push that hard…plus being in the camper gave Larry time to figure out where to put things, what was needed and what might need changing.

On Thursday morning we took a walk out along the path that goes along the river and then cuts in and meanders along a big Bullfrog pond. That’s what I call it because the frogs were doing their bullfrog croaking and if you stopped and looked hard you could see their big heads poking up out of the water and duckweed all over the place. There was also an Osprey nest that was occupied by a lovely Osprey family…and there were lots of flowers…poppies, yarrow, wild rose and bachelors buttons.

After our walk we buttoned up and hit the road, heading for Burns and then on down to the Lakeview area. We had breakfast/lunch at the Apple Peddler in Burns after getting fuel across the street at 11:37 (Larry just looked at the fuel receipt), and we left Burns about 12:30.

We had been on 395 from Burns to Lakeview five years ago, but it was after dark when we came through then and we missed seeing Abert Lake…we knew it was out there glimmering in the moonlight, but we couldn’t see how big it was and I missed seeing the Abert Rims big square looking block edged top…so impressive…at least to me…I like rocks, mountains and geology; so much energy and violence to create something so beautiful. But then that is just Planet Earth as I think about it…..

Larry decided we would go find Willow Creek Fremont National Forest campground east of Lakeview off of highway 140. We had camped there way back in September 1978….thirty one years ago….really roughing it….though still not on the ground…laugh! We just had a camper shell on the bed of Larry’s longbed pickup truck that he had made a platform in for our sleeping bags, which is where we slept. We had all the usual camping gear…stove, lantern, etc. It was memorable because it was 10 miles down a gravel road and we were absolutely by ourselves in the middle of nowhere and back then I was afraid of everything…though I never wanted to show it. BUT, because we had passed two guys with guns hunting on our way in my vivid imagination kicked in and I was sure they were going to come into camp and rape, pillage and kill both of us. I insisted we sleep with our heads near the door so we could hear well and then the coyotes started howling which just amped my fear up…..Larry of course knew I was afraid and after I finally fell asleep...Larry was awake all night. Needless to say we left there the next morning…we still laugh about it.

Well it is still out there in the middle of nowhere, but I’m not so fearful anymore…thank goodness…very taxing managing all that fear…but the mosquitoes were really, really bad….being on a creek, but I think with all the rain in June and all the vegetation the mosquitoes are just worse. We haven’t been this bothered by mosquitoes since we were in North Carolina… Anyway, after taking a walk we decided to drive higher up and away from the creeks to see if the bloodsucking creatures could be avoided.

We found a track that headed up hill and ended up in an old burn overlooking a beautiful valley and way off in the distance another valley overlooked by a table mountain and the wildflowers again….flowers just everywhere….Indian Paintbrush, Indian Tobacco, yarrow and lots more I don’t even know the names of….three or four different daisy looking flowers, oh and there were a lot of aspens. For the first time in I can’t remember when we were miles away from any road, highway, train, town, people, houses…the only sign of civilization was the occasional jet going over way high up. The birds were our music and the wind whispered through the pines and the aspens were doing their quaking…that was the only sounds…there was the occasional mosquito….until……it was dusk…then it was bombardment of every mosquito within a mile it seemed. They were bouncing off of every screen and doing their darndest to squeeze their little bloodsuckers through the mesh….we had some bug spray and that was the only way we could get the door shut without letting a cloud of them in…whew.

We had a really good sleep, no trains, no one talking, no barking dogs, no booming stereos or racing engines…so peaceful and I wasn’t scared that bigfoot or a crazed bear was going to rip into the camper during the night…nice…ahhhh. We were tempted to stay another night there, but decided to leave the forest to the bugs and the birds and chipmunks, so after a leisurely morning we hit the road around quarter after eleven.

We headed back up the gravel road to civilization and caught highway 140 west back to Lakeview to 395 south and then on back to Fallon through Cedarville and Gerlach….that is one little traveled road through a lot of open rangeland…oddly enough we haven’t traveled south on it before this…always north…different view of all the mountains.

It being the Friday of July 4th weekend we hit a sobriety check point west of town…wow, what a lot of cops and cars from two counties. We got to the house around 6:10 or so and it was 95 and almost that in the house….hit the a/c and then brought our things in and put them away…didn’t take long.

Then it was go through the mail and go through the 50+ emails now that we are hooked up again. It was nice to come home and Larry didn’t have to cut the lawn or pull dandelions…the rocks look just as nice as when we left them….smile. Oh, we traveled about 1,450 miles over this five day trip.

It was a great experience to be able to use a camper again and get out in the wilds….at least as wild as I’ll probably get as far as being out in nature….smile. We just have never been ones to drag our trailer over dirt and gravel roads and cram it back between some trees…to valuable to beat it up so…not to mention the cleanup.

Before it got dark Larry had the camper and truck scrubbed and shiny, it was filthy….we hit a swarm of bees south of Lakeview…pelted us good….just after getting the windshield cleaned of course and Larry had to make a bunch of jokes about the Bee movie…we’ve seen it many times with our grandsons. He even waxed it…

Today he worked on getting his work home cleaned and organized, while I did laundry and cleaned and puttered. I started the day by going to Walmart and getting that out of the way before they got busy with the last minute snack and ice shoppers.

We had a lovely BBQ of zucchini and garlic cooked in a foil packet on the grill, and smoked kielbasa which we put on sour dough bread and corn on the cob….yum…followed by little apple pie blossoms, a nice quiet day.