Hello from Evergreen, CO

Hello from Evergreen, CO

Tuesday morning   January 24, 2012   (fourth travelogue of this trip).

Before we get started, I did “wash” the last post by pasting my word processing work in a text editor and then pasting the text editor document in the blog.  It did seem to solve the word spacing problem.  Not a big effort, I just have to remember to do it.

In our last post, I talked about leaving San Antonio on Sunday and taking a leisurely drive home.  Well, that did not happen.  Sunday our GPS program took us on a route that had very few towns with reasonable hotel options.   We finally made a course change in Paducah, TX and headed west so that we could connect with I 27.  We ended up stopping in Plainview, TX at a Holiday Inn Express.  That put us a bit less than half way home (about 450 miles that day).  We ended up crashing after having a great Mexican dinner at a local restaurant.

Monday we left the hotel about 8:00 AM and arrived in Raton, NM about noon (with one hour time change).  The weather was great, but there were some indications that it would snow today (hasn't really started).  We ate lunch and made the decision to drive the rest of the way home on Monday.

We really could not have asked for better traveling weather on Monday.  The same could not be said of Sunday.  We fought terrible high winds most of the day.  At times we could not see more than 100 feet in front of us due to blowing dust. 

We had noted that our route on US 87 in NM took us through Des Moines.  We had hoped to have lunch there to say that we had spent some time in Des Moines, NM.  Turns out the town is very small and like most of the towns in the area, it is slowly becoming a ghost town.

The vast amounts of blowing dust conjured up pictures of the terrible “Dust Bowl” that took occurred in the 1930's.  While the terrible dust bowl conditions existed in a large area of the US and some of Canada, the major impact was on the Oklahoma and Texas panhandle area – right were we were. 

There are lots of good reference on this terrible period.  Here it the Wiki link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl

I have often wanted to read John Steinbeck's “The Grapes of Wrath”.  The  excerpts I have seen suggest he vividly portrayed the tragedy and suffering of that era.  What we saw was very scary.  The farmers had really tilled the soil to the point is was very finely divided.  That coupled with the terrible drought they have suffered the past couple of years make you wonder if the conditions might be conducive to a repeat.

We do not have any plans for travel until May.  You never know when that will change.  As a result, our posts will not be frequent for the next few months.  You can check in once in a while or sign up for the email option.

That is all for now.

Hello again from San Antonio, TX

Hello again from San Antonio, TX

Saturday evening   January 21, 2012   (third travelogue of this trip).

First, I would like to acknowledge that some of you get these blogs via email.  Those email versions have a word spacing problem (often, several words are run together).  The word spacing looks fine on the Internet version of the blog.  It looks like “Word” type programs contribute to the problem.  I type this blog in an “Open Source” version of Word, and then paste it into the blog.  I will try an intermediate step of pasting it in a basic text edit program to see if I can “wash” some of the control characters that may be causing the problem.

Now, back to our normally scheduled program.  Thursday I traveled west on I 10 to Boerne, TX to finish a fire suppression system installation.  The customer wanted to install a second system triggered by a “safety switch”.  I had done some of the installation on the system when we worked on the coach in CO in September.  It took all day to finish the install, but I took my time and “spruced up” the original install.    The weather was in the high 70s and sunny.  That made the install pretty pleasant.

Yesterday it was cool and very overcast.  It was foggy most of the day and it seemed to me to be a misting rain, although the weather folks did not report that.  By afternoon, it cleared up a bit.  I took a long walk on the River Walk.  It really goes on for many miles.  Our hotel is on a “U” shaped channel of the river.  I walked about a mile to the main river.  The River Walk is lined with all kinds of restaurants, including many well known chains.  There are also many large hotels on the River Walk. 
All of the River Walk is located below ground level.  Both sides of the river have walking paths and wonderful landscaping.  It is just plain beautiful.

Just down from our hotel on a branch of the River Walk is the River Center Mall.  It is as large as any mall in the Denver area with dozens of stores, including many well know chains.  It also has a fairly large food court that has served our food needs many times this week. 

I have been enjoying my quiet time during this trip.  I had a bunch of computer email digests to read, did a bit of tax record preparation, and generally just goofed off.  To top it all off, the Barrett-Jackson multi-day classic car auction has been on the Speed channel several hours each day.  They are selling over 1300 vehicles this year – many for over $100,000, some for much more.  They even have a fantasy bid contest that I have been playing with.  Update:  we just came back from dinner and they were auctioning off a '48 Tucker and it went for $2,650,000!!

Last night Pat and I, along with one of her downline, went to eat at Luciano's on the River Walk.  It was a great Italian restaurant.  They had great Crème Brulee that Pat had scoped out a couple of days ago {grin}. 

Pat's Leadership Convention ended yesterday.  Obviously, she had a ball.  Today is a lower-key regional convention.  As usual she thoroughly enjoyed both of the events.

Tomorrow we will start home.  We will probably take a leisurely 3 days to drive the 1000 miles.  Looks like we could hit some snow.

That is all for now.

Hello from San Antonio, TX

Wednesday afternoon January 18, 2012 (second travelogue of this trip).

Monday we drove from Dumas, TX to San Angelo, TX – about 370 miles. We again stayed at a Hampton Inn (this chain has become a favorite of ours). Tuesday we drove a bit over 200 miles and got to San Antonio about noon. That gave us the afternoon to walk around the area.

Our hotel room overlooks the famous River Walk. River Walk is described on one website as follows:

The San Antonio River Walk is a public park, open 365 days a year. It is a network of walkways along the banks of the San Antonio River, one story beneath approximately 5 miles of downtown San Antonio.  Lined by bars, shops and restaurants, the River Walk is an important part of the city's urban fabric and a tourist attraction in its own right.

The River Walk winds and loops under bridges as two parallel sidewalks, lined with restaurants, shops, hotels and more. It connects the major tourist draws from the Alamo to Rivercenter Mall,  Arneson River Theatre and La Villita,  the San Antonio Museum of Art, and the Pearl Brewery.

The photos below show the River Walk. Since it is January, the trees are not leafed out, but it is still beautiful and peaceful.

View of the River Walk from our balcony

View of our hotel from the RiverWalk

Yesterday it was almost 80 degrees and we ate lunch at an outside table beside the river. It was gorgeous. There are many signs asking you not to feed the birds and other animals. Obviously folks have ignored the signs, as a couple of beautiful ducks walked right up to us and waited for us to offer part of our lunch (we obeyed the signs).

After lunch, we walked to the Alamo. It is well restored, but not at all what we pictured. It is not a fort as most folks think. It started as a mission in the 1700s and slowly changed so that it had a military basis including a hospital. The grounds are well kept with beautiful trees, shrubbery, and flowers. It is only a couple of blocks from the hotel and right in the middle of downtown San Antonio.

Pat's activities started today, but we were able to get away for lunch. She has her Manager's Reception tonight, so I will have to have pizza and beer on the River {grin}.

Tomorrow I will travel about 30 miles back up I 10 to finish installing a special auxiliary fire suppression system on a customer's motorhome.

That is all for now.

Hello from Dumas, TX

Hello from Dumas, TX

Sunday evening January 15, 2012 (First travelogue of this trip).

Well, it has been a long stretch since I last posted. As I have mentioned many times, most of the posts in this blog detail our travels. We have not traveled much in the past few months.

We did make a short trip to Dillon, CO between Christmas and New Years. We stayed two nights at our daughter Kelly's family's townhouse. They have a wonderful arrangement for their place. It is leased year round by Climax Molybdenum (not sure that is their name today). They house selected employee families there while the employee looks for permanent housing or finishes a temporary assignment. For the last two years, the unit was vacant during the holidays. So, they get to use their great townhouse and still collect rent!

We were surprised at how little snow Dillon had. Last year, they had a huge amount by Christmas. We had planned a lot of activities, but ended up just being lazy and enjoying ourselves.

Now, let's talk about this trip. Pat has a Stampin'Up convention in San Antonio and I have an installation to finish up in the same area. We are traveling in the PT Cruiser. I had hoped to get the Durango engine back in and broken in, but it is taking a lot longer than I had hoped.

We left Denver early this morning and had a pretty uneventful drive – avoiding any bad weather. We drove south on I 25 to Raton, NM and then traveled on US 87 to Dumas. I had forgotten that US 87 is a pretty good road. They are finishing up making it a four lane highway. The construction was not bad and the traffic was very sparse.

We watched the outside temperature climb to almost 70 degrees. With the sun load, we had to run the air conditioner for a while. We arrived at the Hampton Inn mid-afternoon.

We drove just short of 400 miles today and have about 550 miles to go. We will make one more stop before we arrive in San Antonio.

That is all for now.

Breast Cancer, The Journey

Breast Cancer, The Journey

Monday Evening, November, 7 2011 (thirteenth post in this series)

We started this blog to document our travels and for the most part we stick to that goal. However, we are “off the road” for a few months and I need to catch up on the thread we started earlier this year on our daughters “journey” with her breast cancer diagnosis.

Kelly publishes update emails that describe her journey. I am posting the last three on today's blog. My goal is to present, through Kelly's words, the major elements of what is entailed in making the decision to have a double mastectomy. The process is incredibly involved, including several surgeries and a great deal of physical and mental pain.

I started this series in March of this year with this post. As you can see from the header to this post, this is the thirteenth post in this series. Here are Kelly's updates:

6/23/11

My healing process has had its ups and downs, but I’m still so thankful that I will not have to have any radiation or chemotherapy!!  The recovery from the surgery has gone at least as well as I expected, if not better.  My only remaining symptom from the surgery is the fatigue that I expected, but wish it would progress a bit more quickly.  I continue to work on patience!

The reconstruction process has been a bit more than I expected, but, I guess if I stop to think about it, it all makes sense.  When they did the mastectomies, a plastic surgeon placed “tissue expanders” as the first step in the reconstruction process.  I guess I didn’t stop to think exactly what expanding the tissue might entail.  Each week (or every couple weeks depending on our travel schedule), I have to have saline injected into the tissue expanders, thus stretching the tissue.  At first I described the process as being similar to having your braces tightened, but I’m now realizing that the similarities are pretty limited.  Luckily I only have two more “fill” appointments and then I will have about three months to heal from this process before the next surgery.

Kelly and Damon



8/26/11
I continue doing well with my cancer journey.  My last “fill” was July 18^th and I expected to be back to myself by the next week, but realized that it was another time to practice the art of patience.  The reconstruction process continued to be challenging, but I finally felt like I had a breakthrough last week.  I started sleeping without ice, sleeping almost through the night, and being able to sleep on my sides for a few minutes at a time (all things I took for granted before this journey).

I have discovered that physical therapy is a great tool during this process.  I have found a therapist who knows what she’s doing and is incredibly supportive.  She helps me remember that it’s not uncommon to take five steps forward and then a couple back, but I’m so thankful that she’s helping me through this process.  We started with the simple art of breathing because I had to re-train my body since I hadn’t been able to take a deep breath for so long.  She has taught me some great stretching exercises and we’re hoping to progress to some weight work in the next week or so.

My next surgery is scheduled for November 9^th so I shouldn’t have any more appointments and will continue the healing process until then.  During that surgery the tissue expanders (or rocks as I fondly refer to them) will be removed and permanent implants will be placed.  That surgery will be a day surgery and should be much simpler than the first one.  As Madison says, the surgery will also probably be easier than the fills.

Kelly and Damon

11/4/11

One of the most moving points of our fall was our participation in Race for the Cure.  Damon and I used to do the full walk/run before we had the girls and even up until Molly was walking.  We still look back at that last year because Damon had Madison on his back in a backpack and I had Molly on my front in a pack and they both kept getting in and out of the backpacks and it wasn’t a whole lot of fun.

Each year since then we’ve done Sleep in for the Cure which was just our speed.  This year Molly talked us into going down for the family event and we’re so glad we did!  We were amazed at the number of people who come for that event.  It was an emotional day for me, realizing that I wasn’t walking for the women in pink shirts, but was now wearing the pink shirt.

It was also a day to remind me of my good fortune.  Seeing the women without hair and talking to a woman who went through lots of radiation and chemo helped me keep my perspective and continue to feel lucky in my situation.

The next surgery in my reconstruction will be next Wednesday.  During this one they will remove the tissue expanders (AKA rocks) and replace them with saline implants.  I’m looking so forward to having something more comfortable and I know it will be nice to be able to comfortably cuddle with the girls.

Damon and I went to the pre-op appointment yesterday and learned that, although this surgery will be SO much easier than the last one, some of the restrictions will be the same.  This surgery will be about 2 ½ hours versus the 4 hours for the last one.  This recovery is expected to be shorter, hopefully only a week or two.
I’m still coming to grips with the fact that I won’t be able to lift my arms over my head (including washing my own hair) or drive for two weeks and I won’t be able to work out for a month.  I will only be able to lift 5 pounds for about a month.  I guess these are small sacrifices compared to other things I could have gone through.  I am especially thankful that I won’t have drains this time!

As I continue to focus on humor, I’m picturing the “Iron Maiden Bra” that I’ll be wearing for a couple weeks.  I’m sure it’s going to be very sexy, but I promise not to send pictures!

Kelly and Damon

Hello from Evergreen, CO

Hello from Evergreen, CO

Wednesday afternoon October 26, 2011 (eight travelogue of this trip).

Well, as you can see from the title, we are home. As I write this, there is about 8-10 inches of snow on the deck and it is predicted to snow most of the day.

I wanted to comment about the Wal Mart in Topeka. After it got dark we noticed a large neon sign in front of the coach (all we could see from the windshield was the end of the sign). I went out to investigate, and it was a great looking sign marking the site of the Chief Drive-In Movie Theater (see photo). Apparently, they built this store on the drive-in movie sight and left the great sign. 

 Great Looking Neon Sign in front

of the Topeka Wal Mart

Monday night we stayed in the Wal Mart in Goodland, KS. We have stayed there before and it has pretty good parking and ease of entry.

Yesterday we left right at sun rise to make sure that we would beat the storm. They had predicted it would not hit until the evening, but you just never know. We got here at about 11:00 AM – plenty of time to unload and park the bus in the shop. I elevated the bus with the jacks and have it sitting of jack stands so that I can do some work underneath and in the lower bays (more comfortable working position) over the winter.

That is the good news. The bad news will be detailed in a minute.

Periodically I present a summary of our travels in the bus. The bus made it's inaugural trip in March of 2006. Since that time we have driven it over 65,000 miles, through 27 states and have stayed in the bus 716 nights.

This trip covered close to 3100 miles and we were on the road 41 days. The bus performed very well. We had one minor incident in IA where the charge air cooler hose came off. It took about 15 minute to get it secured back in place. Other than that, we had no problems.

Now for the bad news. As most of you know we tow a rather heavy service truck behind the bus. About a mile from the house, the hitch broke and the truck swerved from side to side quite a bit. It could not have happened in a worse spot, as the truck swerved into the ditch and the right front wheel hit a big rock and tore up the front end pretty good. I lost a tire, a high dollar aftermarket wheel and at least two of the control arms. Because of the snow, I can't inspect for further damage. My guess is that it will be several hundred dollars to repair – with me doing the work. Long ago, I converted to very robust safety chains, and the kept the truck from breaking away from the bus.

Funny thing was, I had just added to my to-do list, an item for me to thoroughly check all of the hitch components over the winter.

As a side note, I have a bunker where I store the trash bags until I can take them to the dump. It is pretty darn secure, as the walls are made of railroad ties and the top is made with 2X6 boards. When I walked around back it was fairly obvious that a bear had ripped the boards off and dug through the trash. What a mess. There have been several reports of bears in the area. We are careful not to have any food in the trash, but they probably smelled the food containers containers (we even rinse them out, but their powerful sense of smell tells them that food is/was present. It will be interesting to see if they come back.

That is all for this trip.

Hello from Topeka, KS

Hello from Topeka, KS

Sunday evening October 23, 2011 (seventh travelogue of this trip).

We are parked at a Wal Mart in Topeka KS (map). This Wal Mart parking lot is large and fairly easy to get into. We can park quite a ways from the store and that makes us feel comfortable that we are not blocking valuable parking.

Yesterday we stayed at a Wal Mart in St Charles MO and it was rather difficult to get into and the parking was not the best. Indeed we had to unhook the truck to get parked in an appropriate location.

We left the Blue Springs parking area about 9:00 which should have easily gotten us to St Charles by 10:30 AM. The drive was less than 60 miles. It always seems that the short drives are the worst. Even though it was Sunday morning, the traffic was terrible and then, we came to an area where they had I 70 shut down for a accident. It took us about a half an hour to edge forward in the traffic (they were diverting folks off the highway.) When we got within a half of a mile of the wreck, they opened up the highway and we did OK after that. That said, the traffic was still pretty bad and our exit was a bit of a challenge, but we made it.

By the time I got into the Wal Mart lot (did I mention it was very tight?) I was a wreck. As I was unhooking the truck two folks came up and asked if I was a Colorado driver. I thought that was a strange question, and then the guy introduced himself as Kevin Brown – the son of the lady we were going to spend the day with.

As a bit of background, Kenny and Kay Brown had three boys in the same time-frame as our three girls. Kenny and I were good friends and we attended a lot of car shows together all over the country. Kenny and I would work on some paint project in the garage and Pat and Kay would play all kinds of games an compare notes on what it was like to raise the “opposite gender” children. They moved away from Denver about 44 years ago, but we stayed in touch. Kenny passed away about 10 years ago.

Kevin and I have communicated a few times over the years and we have a lot in common. He is an engineer and loves cars (races a 2009 Challenger). After Kay, Pat and I had lunch, Kay dropped me off at Kevin's house and we had a great time. I got to see his car and we talked like old time friends.

Pat and Kay continue to have lots in common. Now, they are both into genealogy. They picked up where they left off many years ago without missing a beat. The three of us had two great meals in the amazing downtown historic district of St Charles.

Today we got an early start so that we could get out of the Wal Mart lot before it became “crazy”. We had planned to drive the 900 miles to Evergreen in four days so that the drive would be relaxing. I wanted to make sure that we got through Kansas City today (not a fun drive normally, and today they had I 70 closed for construction – had to take I 435 around the town to the south). By the time we got out of the traffic, we could not find a place to park, so we jumped on the turnpike and ended up here. That was a bit over 300 miles.

We are watching the weather in Evergreen and there is a winter storm watch for Tuesday, late afternoon (sever inches of snow possible). That is changing our plans. We will try to get around early tomorrow and get close to the CO/KS border, so that we have a fairly easy shot into Denver on Tuesday. If the conditions look bad, we will stay at Chatfield State Park for a Day or two until the weather gets better.

That is all for now.