YCGL - Sept 20, 2024 - Where should I Begin....?Currently located at North Fork Campground

 Hello Dear Readers,

Yes, I am alive, mostly well, and have a lot to finish and a lot to catch up on.  I'm just going to give some broad strokes and then fill in as I can.  

Travel this summer and September, very briefly:

June 13-19 - Texas with my brothers and families
June 19-July 2 - Greece and Footsteps of St Paul tour
July 2-5 - Bergen, Norway
July 5-15- Hurtigruten Cruise up and down the coast of Norway
July 15-18 - Trondheim, Norway
July 18-24 - Vingelen, NO and Tore and Marit's Wedding
July 24-31 - Martha's Vineyard, Boston and Home
August 1-14 - Home, getting ready for next trailer trip
August 15-27 - Fruita, CO, Afton and Cody WY
August 28-30 - Silverthorne, CO
Sept 1-3 - Home
Sept 4-10 - Camping at North Fork
Sept 11-18 - Home
Sept 18-23 - Camping at North Fork

July 25 - Martha's Vineyard after my flight from Trondheim.  I woke up that morning with a severe cold and sore throat.  I texted Erik and said "I'm quarantining myself until further notice, probably a couple of days."  I stayed in bed all day Wednesday and most of Thursday when I got up and had dinner with Eliza's family, but sat at the end of the table and tried to be away from people.  And then immediately back to bed.  I felt reasonable on Friday, so Erik and I went site seeing that afternoon, 

Wesleyan Grove is the site of a Methodist Revival Camp started in the 1830 with people staying in tents.  In the 1870's people started building cute little (and not so little) gingerbread cottages.  A permanent "tent" was constructed in 1879 out of cast iron, named the Tabernacle.  It is functioning today as a community center and "meeting tent."

Flying Horses is the oldest carousel in the US.  It still has an arm that holds rings that riders can grab.  Most rings are stainless steel, but if you get a brass ring, you get a free ride.  While we were there, one boy was able to consistently grab four rings at a time.

We had a marvelous lunch at Nancy's, not too far from the ferry port.  I had easily some of the best scallops I've ever had.  I've since read that they are known for their fried scallops!  I'm really looking forward to eating there again next year..... 

Because.......

Erik and Eliza are getting married on September 13, 2025 at the Bower Compound!

Yes, folks, it is now semi-official.  They haven't sent out the "Save the Date" letters yet, but my insider informant (Erik) has confirmed it a couple of times. 

We also went to the Martha's Vineyard Museum, drove across the island and then came back by way of David McCullough's house on Music Street.  

Erik and I took the ferry back to Boston Friday evening

and stopped at a Home Depot to get some supplies for our next project.  Over the Spring and Summer, Erik built a sauna in his backyard.  He built it on a gravel and stone foundation that extended about two feet beyond the building.  He wanted to build a deck around it so you wouldn't have to step out of the sauna onto the rocks.  That was our project for Saturday, Sunday and Monday afternoon.  

That evening, we all went out to a Portuguese restaurant that we had been to two years ago.  And in all this time, I didn't get a single picture of Eliza.  Likewise, I was still feeling bad enough on Thursday that I didn't try to get a group photo of the whole family. Next year!  

My I flew home to Laramie on the 30th Boston-Denver and Denver-Laramie, with a four hour layover in Denver.  Erik had a Visa Reserve Club Pass that he couldn't use, so he gave it to me.  Pretty sweet having a much nicer place to stay, have a late lunch and a rum and coke.

Life's good.

However, I was pretty happy to get home.  I was gone a total of seven weeks.  It was a lot of fun, I learned a whole lot and it was just an awesome time start to finish.  

While I was at Martha's and Boston, I had time to read.  I get the Sky and Telescope newsletter, and I read an interesting article about a new telescope.  It was everything I don't like about new telescopes, and the writer had my viewpoint as well.  The scope is small, with only a 2 inch diameter objective, i.e., the size of a binocular lens.  While I've done binocular astronomy, the small objective really limits what you can see.  Second, it is a GoTo automatic telescope, meaning you don't need to know anything about the sky to use it.  You tell it what you want to see and it automatically goes there.  I'm old school enough that I want to study the sky and search to find the objects I'm looking for. You don't even, no, can't, point the scope where you want it manually. Heck, you don't even have to stand out in the cold, bundled up like an Eskimo and then hoover over a tube that if you bump it, you've lost the last 5 to 30 minutes of trying to find that nebula. Third, it doesn't have an eyepiece.  It's a camera and you can't look through it.  To me, the joy of astronomy is locating that object and seeing it knowing that the only thing between me and it is a couple of pieces of glass.  I'm seeing the object as it looked when that light left its surface.  So, what is there to like about this telescope?

The author argues that things have changed since he got into astronomy 25 years ago.  The club that he joined was aging, that they were losing members and new people would come for a few sessions and quit because it was tough learning the sky well enough to point a telescope.  It certainly is true with our club.  I'm not the youngest member, but I'm on the younger side of the six of us.  He says that this scope, and a few others like it, is changing the people that visit.  They don't have to contort their bodies to look into an eyepiece on the top or bottom of the scope and not bump it.  They don't have to look briefly at an image and then let the next person look.  They can see the picture of the image on a telephone.  They can get .jpg's  of the objects that they've looked at and look over and over again.  And they can get beautiful pictures, because this scope doesn't just take one picture, but a series of pictures, as many as you want, and it stacks the pictures on top of each other, so it's like taking a 5 minute, or 10 minute, or 60 minute or 4 hour picture with all the detail that you can get with stacked pictures.  And, it costs $500.  Or $450 on sale.  I ordered it while I was in the lounge in Denver.  I got it five days later.

August 1-14  - It was cloudy for the next 12 days....   My very first photo was in the late afternoon of August 6th of the sun.  The next shot was one minute later....

I finally got some good shots on August 13th and 14th, the night before I left for Fruita.

The Dumbbell Nebula, M27                                  The Hercules Star Cluster, M13

These were shot in my driveway with the streetlight one house away, they get better.

Things were in good shape when I got home on the 30th.  I had all my mail to go through, and I spent most of the next week ambling my way through it. My step-grand-nephew Will (Jere's husband's son) got married to Deanna in the Big Horn Mountains behind Buffalo on the 10th or 11th and Jere had a reception for them in Fruita, CO on the 17th.  (The wedding was high in the mountains above 10,000 feet and a 5 hour hike to get in.  When they got to the lake they were going to camp at, they decided the fishing was so good, they postponed the wedding to the 11th.  Got keep your priorities!   Arthur was the only family member to go, I think there were a total of 9 people there to camp out.)  And since I was going to be in Fruita, I should go ahead and do a western Wyoming trip to Afton and Cody.

I decided to go to Jere's for the reception, so most of the second week of August was spent getting the truck and trailer ready to go.  If you remember from my April trip to Texas for the eclipse, I got pushed off the road and bent the steps to the trailer badly.  When I got home, I ordered a new set of steps but never had the time to install them.  Pastor Nate came over and helped me and we got it done in about two hours.  That seems ridiculous when it meant unbolting 4 bolts and bolting four bolts on.  It took the two of us all of that time!  But, it was a bright, sunny day to work.

My brother Mike's daughter-in-law Heidi Edgar called me two or three days before I left and said that she and Colin are at their house in Silverthorne, CO but they were going to be leaving on the 31th and I should come down.  I was planning on getting home from my Cody trip on the 28th, but looking at dates, I was able to shorten my stay in Cody by a day and get home on the 27th.  

August 15-19 - Laramie to Fruita, CO, just west of Grand Junction.  

I try to drive no more than 200-250 miles a day, about four or five hours.  Driving alone and pulling a trailer is tiring and that's long enough.  From Laramie to Meeker, CO is 216 miles and requires driving over Rabbit Ears Pass and through the narrow main street of Steamboat.  I pulled off in Craig to get diesel and pulled up to row of gasoline pumps.  I saw their diesel pumps were off to the side of the station so I had to pull through the gas pumps and snake in to the diesel pumps.  Unfortunately, the trailer didn't snake enough and I caught a bollard on my right, blind side.  By the time I felt the tug, I had torn the right awning arm off the side of the trailer.  A couple of zip-ties held it in place, and I'll deal with it later.  

The regular campground I stay at didn't have any pull-throughs available, so I stayed in another, "Meeker River Bend Park."  It was quiet, easy to get in to and didn't cost too much.  And kind of pretty.

The next day was only 116 miles to Jere and Tom's.  Jaye and Lyndon were already there.  Lyndon is also an astronomer and has caught the bug.  That first night, I set the scope up between our two trailers and started taking pictures.  He was as blown away as I was.  He ordered his on their way back to Albuquerque.  He got it a few days later, and had cloudy skies for almost a week.  That is a common theme for new telescopes....

Being with family is wonderful.  Always crazy, always a fun.  And, of course, this get-together was for Will and Deanna's reception.  Tom and Jere had rented awnings, tables and chairs and had them set up in their backyard.  They had cakes and a buffet from Chipotle (at Will's request).  All the Wojahn's (including Juhl and Lisa and Rob and Liz and their twins) and Mitchell's (including Kelly and Jeff)  were there, (sadly not Erik or Liz, neither could get away but they were coming out to Denver for the family get-together in Denver around Nov. 1).  And A LOT of Deannna's family and friends from Fruita and the surrounds.  I would guess there were 60-70 people there.  I got a few cute pictures.  The cake

cutting pictures I shot from outside through a window standing in the bushes so I could see their faces.  They finally saw me outside!

Interesting factoid.  Will finished his Associates Degree at Sheridan College in the Spring.  He is transferring to the University of Wyoming for the Fall semester.  Jere asked me in early summer if he could stay with me.  I thought about it and finally said yes, so he is going to stay in the Edgar Inn in the basement.  However, school is starting while I'm still in Cody, so he is going to move in while I'm not there.  I tried to tell him things he should know about the house before I left Fruita and gave him a key code for the lock on the front door.  So, now I have a room mate.  As I write this in mid September, he has been a model boarder, I hardly know he's there.  He and Deanna live in Buffalo.  She is getting a nursing degree at Sheridan College and is working in Sheridan, so they are living apart for their first two years of marriage.  Sadly, her hours are such that it is not convenient for either of them to drive together for a weekend.  Its tough, but so are they.  I'll tell you, she is a tiny powerhouse, and nothing will get in her way to achieve a goal.  I am proud of both of them.    

August 19-22 - Fruita to Afton - I left Monday and drove to Lymon, WY, just south of I-80.  Unfortunately, the drive did not start out so good.  As I was driving out of Tom and Jere's driveway, my GPS initially said to turn left.  I drove to the right side of their culvert to give the trailer room for the left turn.  However, as I did that, the GPS recalculated and told me to turn right, which I did without thinking about it.  When I did that, my trailer wheels slid off the side of the culvert and the trailer dropped down onto the steps....that Nate and I had replaced exactly 7 days earlier.  Yep, I bent the steps and they won't open.  (When I got to Afton, I bought a Rubbermaid two step platform so I didn't have to climb so high to get in the door.

)  

It was 245 miles to get to Lymon and a Harvest Host.  The route is interesting and beautiful in a western way.  You have to drive over Douglas Pass which I think is still the original roadbed as the Native Americans used 150 years ago.  Its tight and twisty.  There are a lot of places where you don't want to meet a semi-truck going south.  And then you drive by Dinosaur National Monument, the south portions of Flaming Gorge Reservoir, and then you get to Lymon.  The Harvest Host is Bridger Valley Buffalo Company, and I drove right passed their office which is a little trailer at the corner of a four-way stop.  But it was nice and level and I bought some buffalo steak and burger (which cost more than my campground at Meeker!)  

I had to wake up early the next day because I had to be in Cokeville, WY, 51 miles away, by 9:00.  This Harvest Host was Ulrich's Fossil Gallery which is located on the road to Fossil Butte National Monument(864 Chicken Creek Road).  I signed up for a fossil hunting experience and had to be there way earlier than I would normally like.  But it was well worth it.  This whole area (100+ sq miles) was seabed 53 million years ago and there are fish, alligator, bat, turtle, small horse, insect and plant fossils buried in the sandstone beds.  The monument protects a portion of the lake bed and much of the rest is on private ground.  The tour drives you out to a site on the top of a bluff and provides you with wedges and hammers to chip and peel away at layers of sandstone.  If you are lucky, you may find a fish fossil in the layers.  I found 18, including a good panel split with a fossil on both sides.  When you get back, the guide cuts the panels down to a convenient size around the fossil.  I went with another couple.  They left after about 2 hours, I stayed the entire 3-1/2 hours and would have kept going if I could have.  It was a neat experience.  

                   

Chisels and Hammers                 Digging under a panel

The next day was a leisurely 89 miles to Afton to meet up with Ashlynne, the young lady who built the tiny house on the motorhome bed in my driveway back in April/May.  We still had to get some siding put up on the ends of the house.  A next door neighbor had some pieces of siding he didn't want, so we could use those.  I brought my metal tools (angle grinder, drill, impact driver, etc) and we could work in the other neighbor's garage.  We got it done in two days and I'm really pleased with the result, as was Ashlynne.  

This piece of siding was cut to the curve on the left and vertical on the right.  The 2x4 was there and I was able to fit the piece around it on both side of the board.

August 23-26 - Cody, WY - The trip from Afton to Cody is really incredible.  It is 70 miles to Jackson, WY, much of it driving through the Snake River Canyon.  Then, north of Jackson is Grand Teton National Park.  I stopped here for lunch and got this picture.  I didn't stop anywhere else because I needed to get to Cody on time.

Directly north of the Tetons is Yellowstone National Park.  Then you drive Highway 14 along the North Fork of the Shoshone River past Buffalo Bill Cody's Pahaska Tepee and Wapati, the north side of Buffalo Bill Dam and Reservoir, into Cody and past the five museums of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, and finally to Buffalo Bluffs RV Park.  It really is a spectacular drive (as are several around Cody).  I had dinner that night with Norm and Dottie Bock, two long time friends from Laramie who moved to Cody last year.  Dottie was a bookkeeper in the College of Engineering when we moved to Laramie, Norm was the principal at both Slade and Indian Paintbrush Elementary schools where Erik and Liz went and where Sally taught under Norm until he retired.  And they were mainstays at Trinity Lutheran for many, many years.  We ate at the Irma Hotel in Cody, built by Buffalo Bill Cody and named after his daughter.  It was the center of Cody for many years.

Saturday 24th - Cooke City, Tower Junction and Red Lodge, MT -  I drove the Chief Joseph Highway, up into Yellowstone to Tower Junction, and then back to Cooke City and up the Beartooth Highway to Red Lodge, MT, and then back to Cody. 

Two years ago, I had driven Chief Joseph up to the north east entrance to Yellowstone, but that entrance to the park was closed.  I had never been in the Lamar valley, so I wanted to drive that section this year.  

Driving north out of Cody, the Chief Joseph Highway starts the left hand turn at the "Y".  It is 26 miles long and technically ends where it meets the Beartooth Highway.  The significance of the highway is that it is part of the route taken by Chief Joseph and the Nez Piece tribe as they tried to escape the US Calvary in 1877.  They were being forced off their native land in Oregon to be put on a reservation in Idaho.  They traveled 1800 miles avoiding the calvary trying to get to Canada where they could meet up with Sitting Bull.  They were finally captured 40 miles from the Canadian border.  They passed through northern Yellowstone and the middle section where the highway goes now.  

The summit of the highway is Dead Indian Pass.  The pullout there is well worth the stop to see down the Sunlight Valley into the Clark's Fork of the Yellowstone River on the far right.

At the bottom of the valley, you get to the Sunlight Bridge.  It was a major project for WYDOT and won a number of awards.  You could easily drive over it and not appreciate what you were crossing, either on the bridge or the river.  The span of the bridge is 260 feet and the height over the Sunlight Creek is 285 feet.  

Looking west and down stream

Looking east and upstream.  It is quite a view.  The Corvette Club of America was having is annual meeting in Bowling Green, KY and there had been a gathering of 300 in Boise the night before on their way to KY.  Probably 50-60 Corvettes crossed while I was there. 

Passing through Cooke City, MT I had to stop at the local BBQ place.

 This was right before you got to the NE entrance to Yellowstone. 

From the Park, I drove up the Beartooth Highway.  It is one of those scenic wonders of a drive, it was named a Forest Service Scenic Drive in 1989, although the road was opened in 1938.  Lots of pictures, but a few:

Important Warning (though I've never seen one)             A recent bridge installed for wildlife to safely                                                                                             pass under it.  The watershed may be only an                                                                                             acre or so.

                                                                                       A view to the south from the summit outcrop.

A little further down the road is the Rock Creek Vista Point.  It's a beautiful overlook of the valley of Rock Creek which flows into Red Lodge.  

The info board on glaciation is very interesting and I would suggest clicking on it and seeing the processes that made this valley.  

Somehow, the pictures taken at the Golden Hour don't reflect the beauty of the scene.  

From there, dinner at Red Lodge, MT and then back to Cody.  It was a beautiful day.

Sunday, 25th - I went to church that morning, to Trinity Lutheran in Cody, where I met up with Norm and Dottie again.  After church, I drove up to Heart Mountain Relocation and Confinement site.  More than 14,000 Japanese Americans were held here during World War Two.  

Then I went to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West.  This is one of those remarcable gems that you would never expect to see in north western Wyoming.  It is five significant museums in one location.

Whitney Western Art Museum (The Reader's Choice, Best Art Museum in the US.)
The Buffalo Bill Museum
The Plains Indian Museum
The Cody Firearms Museum and the Remington Arms Collection
Draper Natural History Museum

If nothing else, I go to the museum to see the entrance the Buffalo Bill Museum.  As you enter, you meet

Buffalo Bill.  It is a video projected onto a vapor waterfall to give a ghost-like image.  The total video is about 2 minutes long.  That's cool, but even better, the actor is an old friend of mine, Pete Simpson.  (more on Pete)

While I was in Cody, my niece Heidi  called again and said, "Mike and Claudia are here in Silverthorne, and they are leaving on the 29th, so get here when you can." 

Monday, the 26th, I was scheduled to drive to Kaycee, WY.  But it was rainy/drizzly that morning, so I wasn't in a hurry to pack up.  Finally, about noon, I went out to hitch the trailer up to the truck.  As I was lowering the hitch on to the ball, the hitch slipped and slid off the ball, the trailer rolled backward and fell down, luckily onto the stack of levelers I have under the lift.  I was able to get my jack under the hitch and lift it high enough to get it back onto the ball.  But the reason why it rolled back was twofold.  I think my wheel chocks loosened up because the tires were warm when I parked and it was now thirty degrees colder.  Second, my back right trailer tire was flatter than a pancake.  I was able to jack the axle high to dig a hole in the gravel to get the tire off, get the spare tire on (with different sized lug nuts!), inflate it to 80 psi, and get to a tire store and mount a $184 new tire.  

Other than that, it was a nice drive.  From Cody to Ten Sleep, it is flat and dry country with not much farming or ranching.  But going east of Ten Sleep, you enter the Big Horn mountain range and much of the drive is big and sweeping.  It is an easy drive, and you hardly notice going over the pass, at least in summer.   But I got into Kaycee after 9:00 and it was dark.  There may have been one bar open at the turn on to main street.  There were no lights any where.  As I drove up the street, I saw something dark in the middle of the road.  As I got closer, it was a woman riding a horse down the middle of main street.  Kind of spooky.  And when I got to the RV park, there were no lights in the yard.  I had called ahead and was told to pull into sites #9 or #13.  I couldn't find any numbers, so I pulled into an available space.  At 10:30, two trucks pulled in and informed me I was in the wrong site.  Luckily, I was telescoping and not in bed.  We located #9 and I pulled in there.  Interesting night.

I got home on the 27th, got the tanks dumped, greeted my new room mate Will, did laundry and got clothes together for two nights in Silverthorne.  I drove down the next day, the 28th, and found Colin and Heidi's place and got to see Mike and Claudia.  They were originally planning to leave on the 30th, but decided to add another day on their drive home so they left on the 29th, so I did just get to see them.  It's interesting, I think as Mike has aged, he's looking more and more like dad.  And Colin looks a lot like Mike. 

I don't see Colin and Heidi often, they live up around Dallas.  On the other hand, they like to ski (which is why they have a place in Silverthorne) and so does Erik.  And the headquarters for the company Heidi works for is in Boston, so they commonly get together a couple of times a year.  I think that is just great!  Anyway, I stayed with Colin and Heidi for another night and then left so they could pack up and get out the next day.  It was a whirlwind, but it all worked out.

So, that got me home on the 31st.  

I guess in all the traveling I've done this summer, the Paul tour of Greece, the Hurtigruten and then being in Vingelen with Sally's family, and especially after we scattered some of her ashes there last September, and then doing the western Wyoming trip, all trips that Sally and I had talked about or (with Wyoming), trips we've done many times, she's been on my mind a lot this year, a lot.  She died on September 7th, 2021, so we were coming up on the third year anniversary of her death.  I've read that sometimes the third year is tougher than the first two.  I've certainly felt that way.  The first place where we scattered some of her ashes was at the North Fork Campground in the Snowy's just west of town.  That was always our favorite campground, we'd be up there three or four times a summer.  So, I decided I would go up there for the week around the 7th, starting the day after Labor Day, Tuesday the 3rd.  

(Oh, that's weird.  As I am writing this up at the campground, a Google Memory just popped up of the day we scattered some of Sally's and Sandy's ashes at Rocky Mountain National Park with the Wojahn's  What makes it stranger is that I've been having trouble getting an internet connection here and I just got a connection about 20 minutes ago.  Bizarre...)

On Thursday, I made the short hike up to the clearing where we buried her ashes.  But everything is different.  In the last year, many trees have fallen in the area.  I had blazed a trail to the clearing that was easy to walk down, and trees have covered most of the paths, and only one of the trees with the blazes is still there.  And when I finally scrambled down to the clearing, the tree that we buried the ashes next to is gone.  And I can't find the plaque that I had placed on the tree later.  My guess is that the tree fell on the plaque and I might be able to find it next year when the tree is fully rotted.  It's bittersweet.  I know I was on the right spot, I GPS'ed it.  I want to be here, but nature is taking her back.  Which is what Sally wanted.  She wanted the wild around her.  My emotions, I want to hold on.  I want that spot.  But, that's the way it should be.  And maybe in another year or two, the trees that are downed now will be gone and I'll be able to walk back and find her plaque.  

But something else happened on that Saturday, the 7th.  I fainted in the trailer.  It came on quickly.  First my stomach got a little upset, then I got dizzy, I went to the bathroom, and when I walked out, my legs gave away and I went down.  I may have been out 15 seconds or it may have been a couple of minutes.  I don't know.  I felt woozy and weak afterward and didn't feel like driving.  But the next day, I drove to the ER.  After what will probably be $3-5000 worth of tests, the diagnosis was low blood pressure.  There is a test where they take your resting blood pressure laying down, then sitting up and then standing up.  My systolic was 80 when I stood.  I've been taking a blood pressure med for 20+ years. Now I'm taking my morning blood pressure and deciding if I take the med now or not.  Then, Friday that week, I met with my oncologist for my fifth year review of my prostate cancer and my PSA readings are still below detection levels.  So I think I have that one whipped.  

And this past week, the weather has been nice and the skies clear, so I came back up to the North Fork campground, where I am right now, and am taking sky photos.  It's been getting cold at night, down in the low 20's, so it sure is nice to get my photos by telling my telescope where to point while I'm sitting in my nice warm trailer.  :)  Life is good!

OK, I'm going back down to Laramie tomorrow and then I'll be able to add my photos.  

I just added up my travel days so far this year.  I have been away from the house for 118 days, almost 4 months.  I have spent 58 days in my trailer.  I've read statistics that the average trailer/motorhome gets used just over two weeks a year.  I'm winning!!!