Travel

This pretty Forest Service campground is just up the road from the small resort town of Almont, Colorado. The road has some large potholes going in, but is easily navigable by any vehicle if you go slow. Located deep in the Taylor River canyon, the sites are nicely spaced, surrounded by tall pine trees and right on the river bank. It’s technically close to the highway, but because it’s on the other side of the river, you hardly notice it due to the wonderful river soundtrack.

Proving that blogging is the first thing to suffer as soon as stuff gets interesting, we’ve been horribly quiet over here lately. It’s been a whirlwind of activity as we’ve purchased our trailer, set it up and hit the road for our first work trip.

After much going back and forth, we decided we wanted the Airstream Flying Cloud 27FB. It’s a nice compromise between the compact length of the 25FB and it’s slightly awkward sleeping accommodations and the spacious 30 foot which would severely limit some of the places we would like to go. As soon as we were sure that our house sale was going through, we began a nationwide search for our perfect trailer. We finally found the one we wanted at Colonial Airstream in New Jersey. Even though neither of us have any real towing experience, we went with that old adage about fortune favoring the brave, and dashed to the East Coast to pick up our new home and bring her back to Oklahoma!

So, my three weeks off is coming to an end.  It’s been an amazing whirlwind of activity that has moved us closer to our dream of the open road than the last few months combined.

This week was a slow return towards normalcy. I personally spent most of the week doing client work, cleaning email and getting business work taken care of after the craziness of the last two weeks.  Kind of nice to write some code again. I didn’t think I would miss it so soon.

I think there is an inverse correlation between the frequency of blogging and how busy someone is. The silence here should be indicative how exactly how insane the last week was for the both of us. However, as far as making progress on our dreams, this was the best week yet.

We started off at a fairly calm pace. Mark and I did a large quantity of tree pruning, replaced one wall of paneling on the old detached garage and finished getting the porch squared up and ready to go. Grace continued getting ready for our estate sale which was scheduled for this last Saturday.

It’s been amazing to see what can get done in a week if you can get the time to focus on it.  I started this week with a laundry list of home and garden tasks, some of which I had been ignoring for years.  I end this week with some major projects done and progress on many others.

The major task of this week was my front porch which has been long needing to be re-decked. With diligent effort, Mark and I were able to finish this, which is the most daunting of my repairs, within the week.

It’s been a frustrating few weeks for me on the home liquidation front.  Partially, I felt stuck in a rut of analysis paralysis; constantly planning and no action.  However, mostly it just not finding time to get anything done. Between my day job, my side work on Fore & Aft Design and just the stuff that we have to do to keep our lives afloat, there just wasn’t enough hours in the day.

For me, it started with a dream of boats and wide open spaces. While growing up in Oklahoma City can’t be described as exactly living in a concrete jungle, it also wasn’t the exactly the great wide open either. I then spent several years in Chicago, which really was the concrete jungle before returning once again to Oklahoma.

And yet, my favorite memories are of traveling through wide open vistas, whether family camping trips through Big Bend, TX, backpacking in New Mexico or any number of bicycle trips. After seeing quite a few of those American vistas, I thought the next wide open space to visit would be the ocean.

Last weekend Grace, Gwen and I along with Gwen’s friend Alica took a whirlwind tour of my old stomping grounds in Chicago. We were only there for four days, so it was really a short time, but it was nice to see the place again and it was fun to act as a tour guide for Gwen and Alica on their first trip to the city of big shoulders.

The last day started off beautifully. The weather was predicted to be clear with a strong south tailwind with storms moving in for the afternoon but long after I would have gotten into South Haven. With Grace being so kind as to pack up camp, I was out on the road by 6:30 and was setting a good pace. However, it wasn’t long into the morning until it quickly became clear that the weather people had gotten their timing wrong.

So after a weeks worth of rest, I felt more than ready to tackle the last ride of this Oklahoma trek by riding in this year’s Tour de Cure. It was great feeling of accomplishment to see this fundraising effort coming to an end. It was also great to see a bunch of the other Freewheel riders back from their rest and ready to go, like Sharon who completed her first Freewheel this year and is already ready for more: