Last morning in Colorado springs

After a restless night with a sick puppy, we'll be breaking camp and rolling north in a few hours for the next phase of ""Our Great Adventure 2010"

Read about sick puppy's here: http://firstgens.com/forum/22/1035.html?start=30

After five days of Carol having blog nightmares, I'm gonna put some pics up here and on firstgens, what's a vacation saga without pics?

The Turd, hooked up and ready to roll on out of here.

Night one's campsite, Lake Anita State Park in western Iowa.

Garden of the Gods Campground in Colorado Springs. Commercial campground, packed us in kinda tight, but a nice facity, good water, even cable TV.

We saw this lil fella yesterday, while cruising out toward the gold rush town of cripple creek. We stopped at a pullout along the road and he came right up to the car, begging for handouts. he showed no fear, and hung around for quite a while. I'd call this a learned behavior for sure.

Main Street Cripple Creek Colorado. This was a huge part of the gold rush days, old abandoned mines all around the town. Kinda sad today, mostly seedy lil casinos and old folks killing what time they have left feeding one armed bandits.

spotted this herd of deer on a ridge, siloetted by the setting sun, on the way back from cripple creek.

Same spot, facing the other direction.

Just a cool lil shot while hiking in the woods.

A small waterfall along the same trail.

Garden of the Gods State Park

It was hotter than hades the day we went into Garden of the Gods. Here's Riley, he found some shade and decided he was gonna take it easy for a while.

So now you're all caught up to date. It's Tuesday morning, we're gonna get some pancakes and sausage going for breakfast, get showered and dressed, clean up the campsite and the bus, and break camp and roll north. I'll check in with you'all later!

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Colorado Springs!

Here it is the third day of our great adventure 2010, and we're settling down inside the bus at 9:30 pm local after a very busy day.

Let's see... last night we w ere on the shore os Lake Ogallala, somewhere west of north butt nebraska. Now nebraska is interesting... not. flat as a board and road straight as an arrow, endlessly. 460 miles from one end to the other. The east side, omaha / lincoln, where the highway follows the river, is a lil interesting. West of where we stayed the night the land dries out, farms give way to grass and sage, and it looks more western.
In between, it is an endless flat wasteland of corn on the left beans on the right.

So we got up this morning, made blueberry muffins for breakfast, showered in a nice facility provided by the state of nebraska, and broke camp early and hit t he road. A lil delay when I decided to bring the air pressure up in the bus. I'd been running a hundred pounds looking for a better ride, but the steering had not been nice to me, wandering all over and very slow to respond to corrections. So we stopped at a truckstop and brought all six up to max, 120 psi, actually i went to 125 since the tires were warm.

By 10 am we were in colorado on I76, and on the outskirts of denver by 1. We tried to find something called red rock ampatheature to stop for lunch, but between Carol's map reading skills and "bitchin betty's" not showing me every interstate (doncha think at "the right" zoom, if it showed some it swhould show them all?) well, we failed... ended up stopping for lunch in some big office complex parking lot (empty on a saturday) and picknicking in a shady spot on the shore of the retention pond.

Was great to finally see the rocky mountains again. As I said at the beginning of this blog, that's why we're here, cause I'm sick to death of the flatlands. Heading south on I25, we had a couple steep climbs, and drove through a bitchin thunderstorm that we watched come down out of the mountains.

Finally around 4 we hit colorado springs, and found "Garden of the Gods" campground. This is a commercial facility on colorado ave at maybe 36th or so? very close to the state park of the same name. So we're packed in here like sardines, but the facilities are nice, the place seems quiet enough, and of course you can't beat the location.

After a great dinner of steak fajitas cooked outside, we went and found red rock canyon open space, a fairly new huge park / hiking place that turned out to be right across the street. We hiked the canyons for a mile and a half or so, and riley got some much needed excersize. And now it's time to give the pup one last walk before bed, and find someplace to get rid of our garbage bag. g'night all.
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nebraska

see my post on firstgens.com, as my connection sucks to badly to go thru another post/.
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Today is the day, The Great Rolling turd will roll!

Riley let us sleep in today, to a little after six am can ya believe it? I went back to bed after taking him out, and me and the missus pretended to sleep for another hour. It's still a max humidity steambath outside, rained during the night but that did not kill the humidity.

Shower, breakfast, load a few other items, hook up the jeep and we're ready to roll.

I'm gonna go get some blueberry muffins in the oven and head up to the shower.
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24 hours!

It's wednesday mornig, and in 24 hours we'll be saddling up and hitting the road.
Got lots of packing done yesterday, mine and carol's clothes, and most of the rest of the food.

If I go to work early, do I get to leave early?
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3 more daze...

spent this morning washing and waxing the bus, gawd that thing is big. Used the spray and wipe quik wax for most of it, but the front clip got mcguires paste wax, dayum that was a job.
Then we went to CostCo for some meat. Scored some good steaks, some lunchmeat, and 3 rack of fabulous baby back ribs for just a schosh over 10 bucks a peice! Love Costco meat.
also cleaned and checked out our bicycles, so they are ready to go.

Left to do:
Load clothes
fishing stuff.
rest of the food.
toolkit.
one more shopiing trip.

I'm ready, let's just do it all ready.
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five days from now

I'll be relaxing under my awning, in my camping world recliner, sipping a cold margarita on the shore of Lake Anita in Western Iowa, our first day of traveling will be at an end.

finished getting the jeep ready. tow lighting is all set. Tow bar, emergency cables. Aux braking system with breakaway finished today. Washed her and waxed her.

tomorrow the bus comes home. The bus stays in the driveway now until we leave.

Almost time.
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Wow, less than a week?

guess I skipped a few days? SIX days now until we leave. Today, a Friday workday, a long weekend, and 2 workdays next week, then we's rolling west.
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9 more days

Today I loaded up the truck and drove to Indy.
Tomorrow I install a system at Adidas, they print every sports T shirt in the country here!
This is my last big scheduled "work" before our holiday.
Once it is done, it is going to be very hard to stay focused on work.

while I'm on the road, I need to find new wiper blades for "the bus"
Not much luck so far.
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Colorado anyone?

It's finally time to go see Colorado!! Hopefully that link will hook us up with my wife's official colorado blog, and I'll ass my 2 cents here in my own special(ed) way.

Anyway, I think she said we leave in 10 days. Come on along with us!
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Saturday again??

Sorry for my , uh... 3 or 4 fans... been a whole week. Maybe you should just read me on facebook or firstgens.com?

So Thursday I had a road trip to indianapolis, and somehow I brought home a PUPPY!!
Riley is a Norwegian Elkhound, and he is 8 weeks old. Here's some pictures:

So far so good, puppy is housetraining quickly. Elkhounds are very very smart, friendly, and mostly well behaved dogs. Maybe someday they will get the recognition and popularity they deserve.

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is it gonna rain?

Happy weekend everyone and welcome to Saturday! Wonder what I'm gonna do today? It's looking kinda cloudy and soggy outside, but it's 47 degrees so it not all bad.

Guess what? We brought the bus home last night. Hopefully I'll get started on some spring maintenance as camping season is approaching. For some odd reason, the backup camera display won't powerup, so that will be on my list. Service the gennerator. I wanna get some liquid roof to recoat the rubber roof, it looks like crap. oil changes and stuff, and I want to sound deaden around the engine better, maybe the genny compartment too. Carol's gonna be working all day, so I can get into all the trouble I want to!

I think Mark and Sandra are home from Disney, I'll have to bug them for some pictures.
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