Hello from Evergreen, CO

Hello from Evergreen, CO

Tuesday morning October 12, 2010 (fifth travelogue of this trip).

In our last post, I said that the travelogue for this trip was complete. As I drove yesterday, I thought of a couple of things that I had forgotten to say or wanted to add to this travelogue.

For our route home, I chose to go mostly two lane across Kansas and Colorado. Part of the decision was that we have traveled I-70 many times and I wanted to see new scenery. Secondly, this route was more direct. Lastly, I wanted to avoid the Kansas Turnpike (can you say cheap?). We chose to hook up with US 400 and US 50 for most of the trip.

We took most of that route when we traveled in September 2009 to an Eagle Bus Rally in Afton, Kansas in the service truck (blog link). On that trip we enjoyed the small farming communities and the huge feedlots in Kansas. On this trip, it was not quite as much fun, as we had a deadline to be back in Evergreen. Having said that, the small towns are fun to see, no matter what the situation.

We left Garden City at about 7:00 Evergreen time and got home about 2:30. I feel kind of bad that we cheated another towing company out of income {grin}. The bus did very well on the trip and we did not have to come home behind the hook.

The weather for the drive home was not ideal. It rained quite a bit in Kansas, and we had a pretty strong cross wind in CO. Guess I should not complain, as it is spitting snow as I type this.

As I had noted, we needed to be in Evergreen yesterday to be help our daughter's family while she has surgery today. She has had severe back problems for several years, and they are going to do a bit of a touchy surgery on her. She has a great blog that details her crazy life in Bailey, CO.   Her blog yesterday details the surgery (blog link). Obviously we are nervous, but taking care of the grandkids will keep our mind busy. Her husband will stay with her tonight in the hospital.

Every so often, I publish the statistics of our bus travels. We bought the bus in late 2000 and planned to do a quick conversion. We finally got it on the road for its maiden voyage on March 6, 2006. The bus is fully functional, but still has a lot of finish work that will get done someday. I have detailed the bus project (here). The project pages are in sad need of updating, but you can get a general feel for what the conversion project involved. I have not kept my time log up to date, but I can document at least 3,000 hours on the project.

The maiden voyage was a trip to California. We can't believe that I finished basic bus conversion (including a huge engine conversion project) and we headed out on a long trip. I was not bloging in those days, but I do have a lengthy travelogue that I might post someday.

Since our maiden voyage, we have driven the bus close to 61K miles and have spent 635 wonderful nights in it. At times it has been a love/hate relationship, but we can look back on some fun times in this crazy vehicle.

That is all for this trip (for sure this time).

Lets finish the details of the CA/AZ trip

Lets finish the details of the CA/AZ trip

Saturday afternoon March 28, 2009 (ninth travelogue of this trip)

Well, it seems a little strange to be finishing up this extended travelogue so belatedly. It further seems strange to be posting this information from Hawaii. That will be the subject of the next travelogue. Since we got home, I have been going at full speed on several projects. One was getting our taxes ready for our tax person. That takes a full 4 days of work to sort out all of the business records and expenses. You would think that I would use some sort of good business accounting system, but so far that has not happened. Given my tendency towards procrastination, I would probably not keep the records up to date anyway.

Now to our trip home. After our wonderful, extended stay in Yuma, we headed home on March 2. The journey home was about 1200 miles, and we decided to break the trip down into smaller legs than we normally do. We have a goal to schedule shorter travel days, but somehow that does not always work out.

Our first stop was the Cliff Castle Casino in Camp Verde, AZ (map). This is a casino between Phoenix and Flagstaff on I-17. We have stopped there before and Pat rates it as one of the better casinos. Our next stop was the Sky Casino (exit 102 on I 40 in NM) (map). We had not stopped there before. Again, Pat enjoyed the casino and came out ahead at these casinos. From there we made our traditional stop at the Wal Mart in Trinidad, CO (map). We tend to stop there, as it allows us to arrive home in the middle of the next day. We arrived home home March 5 about noon.

On the last two legs of the trip we fought gusting cross winds most of the way. Some were very strong and at least one semi was blown over after we went through the area. Fortunately, the bus does pretty well when subjected to these terrible conditions, but it is still not a lot of fun. We did hit a good weather window for our trip home. A day or two after we got home we had a small snow storm. Given the road to our house, we would not want to be driving the bus in the snow.

Periodically we update the statistics of our travels in the bus. We started our maiden voyage on March 6, 2006. In the three years since, we have spent 517 nights in the bus, and traveled over 50,000 miles. We have had almost no problems during that time – quite a feat give the age of the bus (over 24 years old) and the fact that it was modified/maintained by a crazy engineer {grin}. We feel very fortunate that we are able to travel in our very comfortable, fully equipped bus.

I have attached a photo of the Shepherds and Hackenbruchs.

That is all for this trip

The Shepherds and Hackenbruchs

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.