Extraordinarily Long Post That Sounds Dismal But I Promise I'm Still Having Fun!

Dan has read this post and told me that it sounds like I'm having an awful time. I can assure you I'm still enjoying myself greatly, and this post was a nice little vent about our trials and tribulations. It's over 5,000 words long though, so brace yourself!

I seem to have a habit of going to bed at 9pm and getting up at five to write. And hey, why not? I can do what I want. The computer is cold on my wrists, and my fingers are numb from walking the dogs and goat in the dark, windy Wyoming parking lot that is our campsite at Wind River Casino in Riverton, WY, but I’m feeling perfectly warm with our little heater, piles of comforters, and dogs for slippers.

It’s been difficult to blog on the road as much as I’d like because it’s quite an inconvenience to go get Internet. Innumerable times Dan and I have both thought, “X would be so much easier if we had more money.” Then we wouldn’t have to go twenty-five miles out of the way to find better directions for that campsite that didn’t actually exist. We would have a generator for heat on the nights when the animals are all shivering with us under the blankets, our faces are afraid to be exposed, and our thoughts are on Rosie by herself in the cold car. We would just buy diapers to be able to keep her safely snuggled in the bed with us. We’d take our car and camper in for repair and be on the road again in three hours instead of taking three days to do it on our own.

There’s a certain art to living so frugally, but the catch is that our main expense is time. That’s unfortunate when attempting to see most of the northwest part of the country before winter hits. It generally takes us an entire day and often half of a night to reach a new campsite that is three or four hours away. Stop for gas, stop to check the tires, stop because a cat threw up, stop because there’s goat poop on the floor, stop because there’s a pretty view, stop because we don’t have good enough directions, stop because the GPS took us an hour out of the way, stop because Dan needs a smoke or he’ll go insane, stop because Fred wants to pick up a dead thing on side of the road. (Ok that last one hasn’t happened yet but it potentially could; I like to tan hides from roadkill since I don’t hunt. Yes I’m an oddball.)

At least a third of the time, the campsites listed on freecampsites.net either have bad directions, don’t exist, or aren’t free anymore. Multiple times we’ve had to just go ahead to the next place or stay at a truck stop along the way, spending at least another few hours on the road and usually arriving after dark. Thanks to the inaccuracies of this site it probably would have cost us less money to stay at a campground than to drive around looking for the free ones. That said, most of the places we do manage to find have spectacular views and are next to water sources. Additionally, the drives are impressively scenic, and the open road is uplifting and inspiring to our spirits. Until we’ve seen that same road fifteen times trying to find the turn we missed and now it’s dark and the cats are pooping in their cage and the dogs are howling because they saw a rabbit shoot past in the dark and Rosie is headbutting the other cat and the camper just hit an invisible pothole so big that we wonder if there will still be a floor attached when we finally stop. It all makes for a grand story, but it’s a pretty gross and stressful situation at the time, and it’s one that we seem to have happen almost every day of travel.

Keep all of this in mind as I backtrack a bit back to Moab. We arrived at around 4pm (still daylight!), which I think is a record for us, and spent two nights at a paid campground called Pack Creek Campground just outside of town so that we wouldn’t have to worry about heat or cold with the animals while we went to visit Arches National park.

The first day and night was spent on cleaning and doing laundry; I generally need to completely pull apart, wipe down, and rearrange the car and camper about once a week due to the excessive accumulation of dirt, hair, and other disgusting bits of stuff. I went through every drawer and culled things we didn’t need, and I ended up with a suitcase, a backpack, a cast iron frying pan (very sticky and pitted, otherwise we would have used it), a lantern, some dishes, a bag of clothes, coat hangers, and some other stuff. We took the gear to an outdoorsy consignment shop and made fifteen bucks for the cast iron and lantern, and I got Rosie a backpack for seven dollars. The rest we donated to a thrift store in exchange for ten percent off our three-dollar purchase of cat litter box liners, a dog sweater for Piper, three books for me, and an extra leash. A sale at the general store nearby found us with two more dollar metal chain leashes, and now we’ve almost recovered from the loss of our original leashes due to a flaming goat on the first night of our trip.

Arches National Park was beautiful, but it was also ten dollars to get in. That’s a lot of money to us, and Yellowstone will cost even more at close to fifty dollars for two people driving in a vehicle. (Not sure if that information is correct; the website’s breakdown of fees is confusing.) Our country has some phenomenal national parks, but we have discovered that many of the free places are even more impressive and entirely less crowded. After our second night at Pack Creek I decided to find a free campsite in the area and stay a few more days because Moab has a lot to offer.

Freecampsites.net listed about four places within a thirty-mile radius, and we left the campground at lunchtime to scout one out. First we tried Onion Creek, about twenty miles into a canyon and halfway to another town. The dirt road wasn’t terribly bad, but the previous days were rainy and there was a creek crossing to contend with. Onion Creek crosses over the road about 27 times, but we were only interested in the campsites after the first crossing. We unhooked the camper in a parking lot just to be safe, and crossed in the car. The creek was too deep to take the camper across without some hesitation, and there were also some drainage ditches in the road that were too large for our clearance. We stopped at a nice little campsite for a few minutes to let the animals run around, contemplated the situation, took some pictures of the surrounding canyon, and decided to try the next place. Three hours wasted, but overall not a bad drive.

Kane Creek was next on the list, and as we were pulling into the McDonald’s at the head of the road to find directions we went over a puddle. It looked like a puddle, anyway, but it was definitely not a puddle. It was a foot deep by two feet wide pothole with a cone submerged inside.  The camper went down as if a sinkhole had swallowed it. The poor thing has been dragged over many dents in the road, but this was a solid “ka-thunk!” Upon checking there didn’t seem to be any damage, so we continued our search. The drive to Kane Creek was simply awe worthy and entirely more impressive than the National Park.

A lone tee-pee by the cliffs.

This was a paid campground way deep in the canyon.

Looks like an arch is starting to form. There were lots of ATV trails here, too.

A double-hairpin turn that descended three hundred feet into the bottom of the canyon was a bit harrowing when the brakes seemed to be slipping on the gravel for a moment, but other than that it was a gorgeous drive.

I look over the side of the cliff at the double-hairpin turn.

View from the top of the descent into the canyon.

That's a long way down!

There's no way two vehicles could pass each other if they met in the turn. One would have to back up.

However, when we got to the creek crossing we stopped yet again to determine our chances of continuing. It was muddy and the bottom wasn’t visible, so we used a stick to test the depth as far out as possible. It seemed to be about four inches deep, and though we couldn’t test the depth all the way across the ten or twelve foot stream we could see the mud eddying up from the bottom and figured it was the same all the way across. We decided to chance it. Luckily our assumption was correct; the water didn’t even touch the bottom of the camper. Good thing, because we had a rather large hole in the back corner of the camper that allowed water into some of the storage spaces.

 Crossing at Kane Creek

Dan tests the depth of the creek to see if we can cross.

After crossing the creek we drove on until we hit ten miles where the dispersed camping should be. A forestry sign informed us that there was NO dispersed camping anywhere along Kane Creek Road. Another two hours wasted, and sundown approaching.

The "No Free Camping" bulletin board was surrounded by quicksand!!!

After a long drive, the bulletin board says "NO FREE CAMPING!"

On the drive back Dan waxed poetic about the landscape.

Quite frustrated at this point, we decide to give free camping one last chance before giving up and leaving Moab to stay at a truck stop. I always attempt to find information about free campsites from other sources to verify a place before we try to visit, and our directions from three different sources were incorrect. However, after turning around a couple times our GPS managed (for once in its life) to find Willow Springs Road. About twelve miles from Moab and a short drive down a rough dirt road there is free camping along Willow Springs Road. Popular with ATVs and dirt bikes, it’s not always a quiet place but we’re not picky. Passing up one site we continued down the road to see if there were any better ones; there were not and the road became slightly more concerning, so after a stressful and tight turn around we went back to the first site. It was taken. Driving back and forth about five times past a guy sitting beside the road contemplating the desert and mountains, we finally determined that the empty space we kept passing that we didn’t think was a site actually had a fire ring that was hard to see, and set up camp just as the sunset was finishing.  Six hours of driving to end up twelve miles from where we started. That’s how it goes.

Frankenstein got to adventure by herself for a little while.

She's the only cat that is allowed outside.

Moab is gorgeous.

People stopped by the site all the time asking, "Is that a goat!?"

Somehow the cats decided to allow us to get this perfect picture.

Hi, Dan!

Rosie got to spend some time in the camper.

She enjoyed the time but she got kicked out because she tried to eat the wood paneling!

Rosie's backpack.

"Dan could you help me?"

Feed Me, Pet Me, Love Me!

Modeling for the camera.

Just like a show dog!

She eventually made peace with the big mean thing on her back.

The Sal Mountains surround the campsite.

Dan likes to spend most of his time reading on his iPod.

A wonderful sunset from McDonald's parking lot in Moab, where we bent the camper axle in a pothole.

Dan was whispering rebellious things into Rosie's ear.

They're best buds.

This is how to do dishes without a sink.

We stayed at that site for almost a week. In that time I tried for about ten hours to upload a one minute video and a picture album for you readers to enjoy, but I myself was only enjoying a .12mb/s upload speed and a decrepit operating system on an overloaded old laptop. Our intention in staying in the Moab area was to do three scenic drives and possibly visit Canyonlands National Park and Dead Horse Point State Park, but those all require money in the form of entrance fees or gas and our entire budget no longer exceeds $500. We contented ourselves with our little desert home and took the dogs and goat on a couple walks around town and some visits to the local dog park.

Rosie loves meeting new doggie friends!

If they start to play too rough we move Rosie over to the small dog side. 

Dan dreams of having a mighty goat steed.

Rosie's favorite new friend.

Getting some exercise.

"That's not a dog!"

We also took the time to caulk up that hole in the camper so the wood wouldn’t rot in the corner and our stuff wouldn’t get wet anymore.

Rosie supervised. Then proceeded to eat all the new caulk out of the cracks.

Speaking of wet stuff, so far I’ve had a Kindle take a dive into the dog water bowl, an iPod with a close call in a puddle, a waterlogged e-collar, and more to come with electronic problems.

An enthralling hour for me was a visit to a massive rock and fossil shop at the edge of town. It was basically a geology and paleontology museum in which everything was for sale. I’ve always had a penchant for rocks and bones and I wanted to take them all with me. I have a rock collection at home, and I’ve been trying not to pick up every cool rock I see on the trip because rocks are the opposite of lightweight. Ultimately I prevented myself from paying for rocks, finally found the bismuth that I had been looking for to show Dan how it was my favorite, and inquired to the cashier about the lack of halite (a clear, cube shaped mineral that is really just salt) which I found astonishing in a shop that had literally every other kind of rock, mineral, and fossil I could think of. He replied grimly, “I know the guy who has all the halite.”

In our travels Dan and I generally keep to ourselves. We’ll occasionally have a conversation with a fellow camper or someone we meet along the way at a truck stop, but until Moab we hadn’t really met any young travelers like us. With Rosie tied out to the front of the camper we’d hear a car slow down every fifteen minutes or so an exclamation from the rolled-down window, “It’s a goat!” and we were obliged to tell our story to the passersby whether in camper, car, on foot, bike, ATV, or dirtbike. One evening as I was getting Rosie used to her new pack (which I have painted with our blog url) and taking her on a treat-induced walk, I passed by the campsite of the man that we saw a couple days earlier contemplating the view from the edge of the road. He was camped in just a one-person tent, and next to his was another tent with another young traveling couple that he had met at a coffee shop in town. The goat is excellent at starting conversations, and by the end of the night we were sitting around a campfire with those three and another couple, cooking dinner and swapping stories. The Moab desert there is rimmed half by the Sal (I think?) Mountain range and half by canyon walls. The sunset was never bright but always a glowing pale burnt orange that perfectly backdropped the silhouette of the mountain and cliff-tops. I had to blink to make the automatic mental image of a lone cowboy atop his pony at the edge of the horizon in the brightness of the full moon disappear. The nighttime chill had all seven of us leaning close to the fire and feeling like we should be back in time on the western frontier.

After almost a week at Willow Springs the decision was made to check the weather and head North to cover the states I haven’t yet seen; Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and back down to California. The plan was to do it all in ten days and beat the upcoming winter weather. Unsurprisingly, we are behind schedule. After running errands, finding internet, and packing up it was five in the evening by time we left Moab, with a three and a half hour drive to the next campsite near Salt Lake City. I felt ecstatic to be out on the road again. We got to the campsite without much of a hitch and just at dark, but there were paper signs up saying NO CAMPING. It seems that the recreation area had closed for the winter. We weren’t tired yet, so Dan suggested continuing four more hours to the next campsite and stopping at a truck stop if we became too sleepy.

The middle of nowhere on the way to Newton Dam.

There’s a seventy-mile or more stretch of highway along the way that didn’t have any gas stations, and we came close to running out of gas. The GPS took us twenty miles off the road to our only option for gas, the next station being sixty miles away. The place was called Randy’s and it was in a teeny podunk town that was entirely closed for the night. Luckily the pump took cards, and I could tell we were indeed lucky because through the window I could see “Ran Out of Gas at Randy’s!” souvenir t-shirts for sale. Continuing onward, we arrived at Newton, Utah around midnight. The street names there are insane, and our GPS doesn’t have enough spaces in the coordinates input boxes to be correct within two miles. It put the campsite location as some person’s backyard, so we had to drive twenty-five miles to the next town for some McDonald’s wifi. Our address, wonky as it was, was indeed correct but the GPS would only recognize it if we changed the city to the next town over. Finally after three hours of driving around in circles and two visits to the wifi, we found Newton Dam at N 9000 W, W 5800 N, Clarkston, Utah.  Another half hour circling the dam in the dark we found the entrance to the campsites just past a ten-foot long and six-foot wide puddle (not making that mistake again!) blocking the driveway. I drove AROUND the puddle, found an adequate parking lot, and we thought we should sleep in the car until sunup what with the extremely close and noisy coyotes. I was walking the dogs and goat in the cold darkness and Dan was putting the litterbox and food and water in with the cats.

I may have mentioned that Bartleby likes to bolt every chance he gets. He is a very inconsiderate cat.

So now it’s four in the morning and we’re chasing a black cat from one end of the car to the other end of the camper and back. It’s his favorite game. I can’t put the dogs and goat in the car because then the cat will be too scared to run back into the car. So we play his game. For an hour. Dan is freaking out because his cat’s going to be eaten by coyotes, I’m cold and grumpy from the twelve hour drive that should have taken three hours, and the dogs are tugging on me and barking and whining at every movement in the bushes, and Rosie is jumping out of her skin at the same thing. Finally Bartleby is retrieved, everyone sleeps in the freezing car, and in the morning we scout out a campsite. A quick drive down to the obviously malnourished reservoir shows us that the best campsite right by the water is inaccessible to us due to a couple massive potholes on the steep hill which caused the entire litterbox full of cat mess to overturn in the floorboard. Our lives are mainly animal excrement at this point anyway.

Finally made it to Newton Dam!

Rosie enjoys her spot in the shade.

The water level was pretty low.

It was a lovely day, though, and we chose a site right beside where we parked overnight. The reservoir wasn’t exactly picturesque, but it was smooth as glass and the reflection of the orange, yellow, and red fall colors in the water was quite pretty. Rosie had plenty to snack on and we stayed an extra night since we were ahead of schedule.

Side note: I change tenses a lot, yes. Don’t worry about it.

Welcome to Wyoming!

For some reason it is impossible for us to get packed and ready before 3pm, so then we were on our way to Rock Springs, Wyoming to camp with some wild mustangs. It was a four and a half hour drive, and we even saw a rainbow along the way! I’m eternally impressed by the way that each state line has immediate changes in geography. The moment we hit Wyoming, Utah’s red cliffs and canyons were transformed into rolling sand hills that were simultaneously the most flat and hilly expanses of land that I’ve ever seen. The only other place that we could see as far was the Rita National Grassland back in Texas.

We took a scenic byway to get there, and along the way we drove by Bear Lake. It's a massive bright blue lake that seems to change colors depending on the weather. It also contains, if I remember correctly, seven species of fish that are found nowhere else in the world. The rest area was a welcome break from the drive.

View from the rest area.

Again, we arrived at the area right after dark and had to take a while to figure out where our road was. White Mountain Road has three different entrances, one of which is quite steep and was the first one we tried. It was about 9pm by this point, and we made it maybe a mile up the dirt road. It quickly became about a 15% grade (maybe more) and very winding and narrow, with a dirt cliff drop off on one side and shale deposit wall on the other. The Element, being a four cylinder, could not pull the weight of the camper up the hill, and I’m not even sure that it would have went even without the extra weight. We were quickly stuck in between a rock and a no-place. That no-place being thin air over the edge of the cliff.

Best pic I could get of our situation.

I soon discovered that, unlike the Craigslist ad from which I bought that car stated and which I based the entire purchase of the vehicle on, my car does not in fact have all wheel drive. If it does, it wasn’t working when we needed it most. Unable to go forward, and almost unable to PREVENT our party from sliding backward, the only way to go was down. As Dan and I are both relatively inexperienced at backing up trailers, we were soon jackknifed in the middle of the road, blocking both lanes (although there was really only one and a half lanes), and there was a car coming. A poor young fellow who was unable to help and was coming back down from what we imagine was a steamy evening with his girl had to wait for at least half an hour for us to finagle our contraption to one side so he could pass, albeit with his tires crunching on the sandy cliff edge. After another hour we managed to get the trailer around the curve and onto a 600-foot straightaway down the hill to a place where we could turn around. Unhooking the trailer and turning around was out of the question because 1) we’d never get it hooked back up and 2) even the chocks wouldn’t keep the camper from rolling merrily over the cliff and down the mountain. Dan’s the man for backing around a curve, but he cant back straight worth a hoot so I took over with shot nerves. Another half hour or more and we were finally scraping the camper over the ditch in the turn around and headed back to town to try and find the other entrance to the road.

By this time it was about eleven. McDonald’s internet was next to impossible, and the workers there had no idea what road I was asking about. An hour sitting there and we finally came up with some directions. We could have stayed at the truck stop in Little America a half hour back, but I wanted to see the daggone wild horses. The dirt road was 27 miles long and we found no campsites after driving back and forth, so at 1am we finally just stopped and camped in a little turnout with a creepy tombstone monument to some guy who died there in the sixties from a car crash supposedly three miles into the desert.

It felt like we were on top of the world.

The coyotes or possibly wolves were howling up a storm and they sounded like they were within a few hundred feet of us, so Rosie slept in the car and the cats slept in their cages so we wouldn’t have any escapee coyote snacks. As we have since discovered, the wind in Wyoming is furious, unrelenting, and excessive. The next morning we packed up under the watchful eye of seven or eight wild mustangs in the distance.

See those tiny dots?

I was so excited to finally see wild horses!

On the road again, the Wild Horse Loop is 27 miles of plains with views of the mountains and almost a guarantee of seeing some horses. We stopped at an overlook so I could take pictures and Dan could fiddle with the GPS. As I was turning around to go back to the car I faceplanted over a massive boulder that was placed entirely in the wrong spot.

Whose idea was it to put a boulder there?!?!

I almost broke my leg, and I’m lucky I didn’t knock my teeth out, but the camera didn’t fare so well. The telescoped lens slammed into the rock and jammed back crookedly into the camera, bending the metal and knocking the lens extender off the track. The camera grinds and can’t move to turn on and off, but it still works, kind of. Although now it can’t focus so it’s basically useless. Dan’s working on it, so we’ll see if it can be resurrected.

A few miles down from the overlook we came across two mustangs right by the road. Dan stopped and I walked over, took some pictures with my iPod, and got about ten feet away. They ignored me, aware that I was approaching, and slowly moved away never once looking up from chomping grass. One was black and had scabbed and scarred hoof-marks and bite-marks riddling his hide, and the other was a large dappled gray. Two bachelors eating their way across the countryside.

They didn't mind me at all, but definitely knew I was there.

One of my favorite books from childhood, and one of the three books that I brought along to read, is Smoky the Cowhorse. It’s about a wild mustang pony who becomes a one-man cowhorse and eventually a man-eating rodeo bronc. This moment in Wyoming was a direct replica of the environment that horse had as a young pony, and I couldn’t have been more pleased.

On the way to Idaho we had a happy drive and I saw a rainbow! I always get really excited about rainbows and crazy clouds. The drive was wonderful and beautiful.

Frankenstein generally rides in my lap.

Dan had a quite windy cigarette break.

Dan gets some lovin'.

My hair obscured the rainbow but this was a neat picture.

A rainbow, a rainbow!

Excellent co-pilots.

Rosie always gets in trouble for stealing straws.

Our next stop was to be Ririe, Idaho, right beside Yellowstone, but it was quite a haul and I did not want to be setting up in the dark again. Instead we chose Lander, WY, where the city had a free 3-day campground in the city park. No electricity, but flush toilets and a picnic table in an easy-to-get-to and definitely THERE and EXISTING place. It was supposed to be two hours away according to Google, but we made it in about four with the dummy GPS. Another sunset setup, but it wasn’t stressful. The morning brought heavy rains and winds, and lunchtime brought heavy HAIL, so we were obliged to stay another night. Lander is a nice little all-American kind of town with lots of blonde housewives with perfectly groomed blonde little soccer stars and beauty pageant girls. It was pleasant, and on our way out of town we stopped at a tire shop to have a problem diagnosed with our camper tires.

Rosie has a habit of looking dead.

Sometimes it's adorable, but also scary looking.

If you recall, we just had both tires replaced less than a month ago in Junction, TX, after leaving the llama farm. Well, by time we reached Moab one line of tread was missing from the inside of the left tire. When we got to Lander half the tread was missing! The tire guy diagnosed that our bushings and leaf springs were bad and we would just need to replace them. It would be $70 a piece and we would have to wait two days for the parts. We told him we couldn’t stick around that long because we’re trying to beat the winter weather. I also sent pictures to my dad and he said that most likely the springs were fine, that guy was wrong, and the axle was bent. A half hour away was a free campsite in a casino parking lot with an electrical hookup in a town of 10,000 people, so we just went on to Riverton, WY to get a second opinion. A stop at the local farm supply store to get dog food and check for leaf springs in stock gave us a hint to call Jerry’s Welding as that outfit had bought out a trailer company a few years ago and might have parts.

Dan's not used to mechanical type work.

A tumbleweed kept Rosie entertained. She ate about five of them.

Halfway scrubbed tires.

Impossible to remove lug nuts.

I called Jerry’s Welding and spoke to an enormously helpful man named Jeff who actually knew what he was talking about! He said he was booked up and couldn’t work on it himself, but since we wanted to do our own work anyway we could work it out. I took some measurements as Jeff directed and he determined that I was in luck and he had one axle that would work for our camper! It should have taken us about a half hour to remove the wheels and axle, since each side only had four lug nuts, four u-bolt nuts, and one bushing to unscrew. It took Dan five hours, two different sets of tools (some borrowed from Jeff), and bouncing his entire weight on the wrench to loosen the eight lug nuts.

The guy who changed the tires in Texas used a pneumatic wrench and torqued it way too tight. Even after removing the bolts it took a while to dislodge the wheel from the bearing. By the time the axle was removed it was 5pm and I dropped off the whole thing so that Jeff could work on it in the morning.

In the evening as I walked the goat and dogs there were about thirty Native American Arapahoe tribe members in the corral at the back of the parking lot having a group and riding horses. Some children accosted me on account of the goat and after putting the dogs away the kids brought me to be a part of their circle. Everyone had to tell how they were feeling without saying good or bad. Most people said they were cold or that they were happy to have ridden a horse. I said that I felt like a stranger but glad that the kids brought me in to meet everyone and have this experience and also grateful for the glorious Wyoming sunset over the mountains that is so different from NC. I also said I was sorry that I didn’t get to ride a horse, and the leader of the group said, “well then we’ll put you on a horse!” Ten minutes later I was riding Midnight for a couple laps around the corral before the group packed up to leave. It’s been almost ten years since I’ve been on a horse, and it was very bumpy but I hope to have another ride again soon.

Our four poor camper jacks and one car jack were all that was supporting us that night, and while I had gone to pick up the new axle one of the jacks partially collapsed with a lurch, a jerk, and a thunk while Dan was in the camper. By ten the next morning Jeff had it ready with the spring plates welded to the opposite side to give us more clearance and our weird four-bolt wheel pattern replacing the five-bolt original on the new axle. I had to buy a new tire to replace the worn one, and $200 and three hours later we had an upgraded and much higher-riding camper.

Now I sit snuggled in bed with Dan and the animals, preparing to eat, pack up, and head out. Grand Tetons and Yellowstone are up next, but we may discover impassable and unmaintained roads and freezing weather as well as major grizzly bear country. It might be wise to use our quickly dwindling funds on a bear-free campsite with electricity. Sorry for the lack of pictures, but I don’t have time to upload any and at any rate I don’t have many good pictures since the camera took a tumble! Hopefully the next posts won’t be a so few and far between.