Aly & Bryan are always up to something…
Recently, Little Rock Grotto decided it wanted some new shirts and several things fell into place nicely.
* White Nose Syndrome was in the news
* Brian Gould promised to hook LRG up with a great price on the shirts
* And Aly came up with a clever design
We took a couple of photos of the shirt tonight. The front features the LRG logo while the back promotes White Nose Syndrome awareness (and a strategy to aid the decontamination procedure).
Well… I’ve ridden my bike home from work before but today Aly is riding her bike to a work related training session at the 4H Center ~17 miles north of here. Yay her! This is why she’s leading her office team in the Walk Across Arkansas challenge and she’ll do this today and tomorrow.
Did I mention there was a chance of rain today? Hopefully she makes it up there sweaty and not rainy.
Today, Mandy and I took the GTT out for a ten mile ride around town. This ride pushed me over 100 miles for March 🙂 We’ve been trying to ride every day and we’re hit and miss. We’ll get the whole weather + cooking + chores + homework + riding thing down though.
Our new clipless shoes work really well… I didn’t realize how much effort it took to keep your feet on the pedals without them.
We were talking the other day about what states we have and haven’t been to and I found the little map widgets shown below that can demonstrate better than words how much more Aly has traveled than Mandy or I.
But don’t worry… we’ll definitely work on getting Mandy and I caught up (c:
Aly
Make yours @ BigHugeLabs.comBryan
Make yours @ BigHugeLabs.comMandy
Make yours @ BigHugeLabs.com
Well… we did it
A few days ago we noticed a Greenspeed GTT for sale on ‘BentRider Online and we decided to go test ride it because, ya know, we’d never get a chance to do so again and it looks like a really fun bike.
So we went and tried it out. And that was our biggest mistake since we REALLY liked the bike. We asked more questions, did additional research online and decided we wanted it. We haggled a bit and got the seller to show us how to adjust a few parts and pieces and then paid for the bike and loaded it into our truck and headed home.
And we’ve been grinning ever since.
Below you’ll find a few of the photos of the bike that the seller had posted online. The last photo shows the handlebar, brakes and shifters and how they relate to the seat.
Over the weekend Mandy and I manged to help Aly build a compost bin (Happy Valentines Day honey!) and then go backpacking on the Ouachita Trail.
The three of us hiked from Flatside Pinnacle to Crystal Prong Creek and back again. We crossed several tributary’s to the main stream and they were all flowing pretty good due to the recent rains.
After returning to Flatside, we said goodbye to Aly and headed for Brown’s Creek Shelter. We hiked 7.3 miles today and were glad to see the shelter when we got there. We hoped no one else was around (and they weren’t) but one never knows on a holiday weekend.
That evening, after our freeze dried dinners, our applesauce and candy dessert and our roasted marshmallow dessert (roasted on the skewers the Lopez’s gave us two Christmases ago) we killed some time by drawing space aliens with an LED light and a long exposure time. BTW… Mountain House freeze dried dinners have proven to be pretty yummy. Tonight, I had Spaghetti and Meatsauce while Mandy had Beef Stroganoff; both were yummy.
We got up the next morning, moved slow because we had no where to be… no school & no work. We had some freeze dried scrambled eggs with ham and bell peppers, instant oatmeal and some hot chocolate. Afterwards we packed up and headed for our vehicle which we had parked 4.9 miles from here.
When we stopped to pump some water from Brown’s Creek, I heard some rustling in the leaves nearby. Upon inspection, it turns out the rustling was a lizard! The lizard actually ran on to the trail and up Mandy’s leg 🙂 When she tried to catch him he managed to run away and we thought he was gone but when we started hiking again, he showed up on top of her head!
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3263314&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1
While hiking today, we noticed that many of the aluminum Forest Service mile markers had been supplemented with newer looking markers on a nearby tree. While these new markers were pretty, I don’t know how useful they are since they are above eye height (I tend to look down when hiking) and they are on the side of the tree facing the trail which makes them hard to spot from a distance.
We had a good hike… 12.2 miles over two days. Mandy carried a crappy schoolbag style backpack which hurt her shoulders a bit. We are looking for a decent backpack for her but we’re having trouble finding one that will last a couple of years and doesn’t cost more than our packs!
At the end of the day we were tired and ready to head home for a bath and to meet Mom for a Chinese Buffet dinner.
Once again our family spent the New Year holiday at Hamilton Valley with CRF/Mammoth and good times were had by all. Mandy got to run through the compass course before heading over to Adwell Cave to survey Roger & Lynn Bruckers new surveying course. Aly and I helped in varying degrees and our closure wound up being 1.2 feet horizontal and 0.5 feet vertical over the course of a 511 foot loop.
This is a multi-part trip report… if you haven’t already, you should start with Day 1.
Start: Monahans Sandhills State Park
End: Home!
Daily Mileage: 679
Total Mileage: 2870
(I know that doesn’t add up but that’s what the final odometer reading said)
We wake up amid sand dunes but far from a beach. Monahans is a weird place. I take down the tent and pack up while Bryan sets up the tripod for photos. The visitors center rents discs for a dollar and sandboards for two. I take the last picture of our gnome, walking up a dune toward the sunshine. Tonight we’ll sleep in our own bed, at home.
There’s nothing out here: the speed limit’s 80 and that seems like a good idea. Dairy Queen has supplanted McDonald’s as the fast food chain of choice. We drive past miles and miles of scruffy, ugly pasture land and oil rigs. Odessa is dirty and sad-looking and Midland, while surprisingly large, isn’t much better. The businesses along the highway are all drill-rig and tank and pipeline suppliers. The sky is big, though, and blue.
Texas is interminable, never-ending. They’re proud of being the “Lone Star State” but don’t realize that this is nothing to be proud of: one star means BAD service. I drove a lot today but I don’t think it helped much. We pull out all our long-trip tricks: Gogol Bordello, They Might Be Giants, Shel Silverstein. And we’re not even in Arkansas yet.
We’re torn between not wanting to end a great trip, and the realization that a hot bath in our own tub sounds wonderful. Both of us have very sore calves, odd since we felt good for the whole hike: maybe that long downhill at the end is what hurt us. (I’m pleased and surprised that my shins and knees (which are often a problem) are perfectly fine; the combination of trekking poles, good boots, and insoles saved me.) We must look funny, each time we stop to get gasoline, lurching and hobbling around the truck on our sore legs.
Click to see the panorama larger!
We arrive home before midnight. The house is fine, and so are the cats, in spite of our worry, or perhaps because of it. We unload the truck, close the garage, and go to sleep in our own bed.
Bryan told me the other day about a photographer who had assembled in one place a collection of his life’s best work, a hundred great shots. Averaging 1/100 of a second each, the whole set represented one second of his life. One second.
Is this the way all our lives work? Is it the tiny details that are important, rather than the big story? At the end of my life, will there be a hundred little bits of beauty, shifts in perspective, pieces of kindness and truth and love and joy, that will represent my life? Could there be a book of a hundred pictures that will let me say “Look at these: this is what was important about the person I tried to be?”
Here are the photographs I would include from this trip: The feeling of a pack on my back as walk into the desert. The sound of Mandy’s voice on the phone, eager and curious. The smell of bacon frying in a tent doorway. The sound of the snow falling on the trail past Juniper Basin. The way Bryan’s hand felt in mine as we looked out together at the purple mountains.
Thanks for reading!
Bryan taking photos and Aly warming her feet in the bathroom at Monahans Sandhills State Park.
Don’t forget to check out our Flickr page for more photos from our trip.
Also, let us know if you liked the “blog” format of our trip-report. If it goes over well, look for future adventures to be posted here at http://summerwood.blogspot.com.
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This is a multi-part trip report… if you haven’t already, you should start with Day 1.
Start: Tucson, AZ
End: Monahans Sandhills State Park
Daily Mileage: 565
Total Mileage: 1984
Our hotel room smells awful and looks like an REI explosion, but we’re clean and fed and rested and all our gear is dry now. It’s worth noting that the Fairfield Marriott has an excellent free breakfast, complete with good coffee, lots of pastry choices, a self serve Belgian waffle maker, and all the peanut butter packets you can sneak into your tote bag.
Our gnome likes his morning coffee, and he likes Belgian waffles too
We head east on I-10, a little sad to begin the end of our trip. We take an almost immediate detour and spend a lot of time finding a good spot to take panographic pictures of Tanque Verde Ridge. We hop a curb at an office building and Bryan uses his new pano tripod head, and I take pictures of him taking pictures, and of cholla in the snow.
Bryan and his tripod, camera, and pano head
In places, the towns are an hour apart, which makes for a miserable McDonald’s line on a big travel weekend. We sit in an interminable drive thru; I attempt to use the bathroom but abort the mission when I count 34 other women in line. We listen to “Jesus Don’t Want Me For A Sunbeam” (by Nirvana) on the iPod and then give up on McDonald’s, getting back on the interstate. We’ll get some nuggets somewhere else.
Here is a quote from my travel journal, written while flying down I-10 at 75 miles per hour:
Soaptree yuccas are stupid looking plants, like wandering midgets with bad hair, drunken and lost, lurching through the pasture grass. Some of them wave toilet brushes above their heads. Are they trying to hail cabs, out here in the weird, lonely west? Do they know how ridiculous they look?
We wander through an outlet mall, then eat supper at Chili’s in El Paso, a generic choice but we’re grumpy and tired. We talk to Mandy and enjoy hearing her cheerful voice, a bright spot in the evening. She is interested in our trip and glad to tell us that she’s impressed her friends in Oklahoma by doing 168 sit ups.
For awhile we parallel the Mexican border, and after dark we enjoy the idea that we’re looking miles away to the south at the lights from another country. About nine o’clock we pull off the interstate with all the other traffic to drive through a border patrol checkpoint. It is unexpectedly scary but after our truck is dog-sniffed and we tell the officers that we’re American citizens, we’re on our way again. The truck stop in Pecos is nasty, and we’re tired and ready to stop long before bedtime.
We arrive at Monahans Sandhills State Park around midnight. The camping spots are all surrounded by dunes of soft, light sand. It’s already below freezing but it’s not windy. We quickly realize that the sand won’t hold tent stakes, so we pull out the North Face 4-season tent Britt and Debbie sent with us. We’ve never set it up but it’s simple and before long I’m sitting up inside it, a luxury after hunching over in the little backpacking tent. Bryan takes some photos while I pop a flash inside the tent.
The stars at night, are big and bright, deep in the heart of Texas!
It’s funny how we get accustomed to chill, and how much more comfortable good gear makes things. I think about the friends who’d never consider tent camping in winter, but I’m cheerfully ensconced in a cozy tent, snug and warm in my sleeping bag, dry socks, down booties and vest.
We all have strange little quirks, and I find one of mine: I can’t sleep with a cold nose. I find a handwarmer and open it, put it on my nose, and quickly fall asleep again. The stars are clear and bright on this last night of our trip.
A selection of additional photos appears below, for more photos from the trip checkout our Flickr page.
Bryan taking a set of photos of Tanque Verde Ridge
An old train in front of the mountains
Teddy bear cholla
New Mexican sign: Their road map spells “Flying” and “Missile” wrong, too
Some of the overpasses in New Mexico were really neat.
Yes, that’s a truck, in a truck, pulling a truck
Worst name for a car dealership? Ever?
West Texas’ answer to the Chik-Fil-A advertising campaign; at least the ranchers can spell.
This is a multi-part trip report… if you haven’t already, you should start with Day 1.
Start: Saguaro National Park (Juniper Basin)
End: Tucson, AZ
Daily Mileage: 14
Total Mileage: 1419
Miles Hiked Today: 7
Miles Hiked Total: 25
I wake early this morning, no doubt a result of our lion-induced super-early bedtime. We both slept better than we expected, I think, and the night passed without incident. It’s been raining for a couple of hours, and gusty. I listen to the iPod in the safe orange cocoon of our tent and wait for Bryan to stir.
Breakfast in bed, sort of.
The rain gives us a little break, so we get up and begin cooking breakfast. I move the packs inside the tent as it starts to rain again, and we finish cooking and eating our meal sitting in the doorway under the little awning. As we eat toasted bagels and oatmeal and bacon, we watch the light winter rain turn to sleet and then to snow.
Our faithful traveling gnome serves as a tent stake, replacing the one lost in the windstorm, while our tent collects snow.
We pump water and pack up camp in the falling snow, then head down the ridge. I like hiking in the snow, and Bryan begins by enjoying it but after several hours the novelty wears off; his feet hurt and he doesn’t like the falling snow in his eyes. The fact is, though, that the snow is beautiful stuff: puffy, Christmassy flakes covering the trail and softening the edges of the world. As we descend we see, again, ocotillo, then more and more yucca and cholla, and finally the first saguaros signaling our much lower elevation.
An uncommon photo opportunity
The lone hiker we’d encountered is gone by the time we get to the Javelina picnic area, and we have three miles of road hiking before getting to the truck. We could both walk the road with our packs, but since his feet are starting to hurt, Bryan volunteers to wait in the damp cold with my bag. I’m grateful to be rid of my heavy pack and enjoy the soggy walk on Cactus Forest Loop Drive. Not a single tourist offers me a ride, but I’m warm in spite of the rain. The far-off mountains are still shrouded in clouds, but the closer, lower peaks are snowy.
I hold Bryan’s pack while he takes a few quick photos and then I snap a picture of his silly grin. Spirits were still high!
The truck is a welcome sight and I drive it slowly back to pick up Bryan, who reports that all the old picnic shelters leak. (Apparently, actual rain shelter is not an important design feature in the desert.) We hurry to the visitors center to check in with the rangers before they close at five; it isn’t a requirement but we want to log our encounter with the mountain lion. They are interested in our story and tell us that a lion had been reported by someone else not long ago, on that part of the ridge. We also fill out a complaint form indicating that the bathrooms should be more conspicuous.
Click the photo to see a larger version since it is stitched together from six images to form a 41 megapixel image.
I come up with a plausible reason for another hotel stay: our gear is all soaked, and we need to be dry and organized before starting home. The hot shower and clean socks feel good, and so does the prospect of a big supper.
Marriott provides whole-room gear-drying services
I love the fact that we have a favorite restaurant in Tucson. We wait for our table in El Charro’s bar, and when we’re finally sitting in the warm dining room we enjoy our enchiladas and tamales and tres leches cake. We’re tired but not miserable, at least as long as we don’t touch our calves, which were fine earlier today but are now suddenly very sore.