Hello from Chatfield Reservoir Littleton, CO

Hello from Chatfield Reservoir Littleton, CO

Saturday afternoon, July 26, 2008 (fifth and final travelogue of this trip)

We are at Chatfield Reservoir (here). As is always the case, you can click on the link to get to Google maps. We strongly recommend that you switch to the satellite view, since it is much more interesting (I try to set it for that option, but I don't think it happens all of the time). On this link, if you zoom out a couple of times, you will see a subdivision to the left of our location. This is Kelly and her family's subdivision. They are staying here at the campground with us. We will be celebrating one of our granddaughter's (Molly, turning 3) birthday tonight.

Since our last blog, we drove to Sterling, CO where we stayed at a rather run down campground (Buffalo Hills). We always debate about whether to stay in a campground vs running our generator when the weather is hot and we need the air conditioning. We paid $28 for marginal power (could only run one air conditioner). We would have had to run the generator for perhaps 6 hours (probably less) and that would be about 3 gallons of fuel. That really points out why we stay in Wal Marts so often. This campground did have a swimming pool and it was quite invigorating (read: cold), but that felt pretty good since it was darn hot.

Another issue with campgrounds is that some have a lot of trees. That can cause a problem with our internet and TV reception. This campground had a lot of trees, but I walked around with a compass and found a site that would get reception.

Periodically I update the statistics of our use of the bus. We made our maiden voyage in March of 2006. Since that time we have spent 421 nights in the bus. We have traveled a bit over 45,000 miles. We have been very fortunate in that we have encountered very few minor problems (no major problems and that is amazing, considering who did all the work {grin}). While our bus is not fancy, we feel like it is our home when we are the road and it is very comfortable. We are fully self-contained and go for two weeks without having to connect to water/sewer/electricity. We have a washer and dryer and a full office with relatively high speed internet (via satellite). I continue to work on the bus, but it is doubtful that I will ever get it “finished”.

Wednesday (7/23) we came to this campground. It is a neat area with fun views and it is quite relaxing. It also allows us to see one of our daughter and their family who live close by (the ones camping with us this weekend). This is always neat when you have been on the road for a month. We went swimming with the two youngest granddaughters on Thursday.

Being close to the Denver area, we ran a bunch of errands on Thursday. Today we went to our oldest granddaughter's (Amanda, 12 years old) swimming meet. I had swam with Amanda last year when we were in Florida and she just blasted me away with her swimming skills! Today she swam several events including the 100 yard individual medley (four laps with four different strokes) and came in first in several of them. It brought tears to our eyes to see how grown up she is getting and how talented she is. It was fun to get to see all of Lisa's family.

Tomorrow we will make the very short trip home.

We will catch up with Judy and her family early next week.

That is all for this trip. I will start blogging again in a couple of weeks as we travel to Europe.