Thanksgiving

We came back to Colorado Springs from Westcliffe on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Got our RV out of storage and re-set up and took care of some errands like getting groceries.

The next day we made a visit to my Grandmothers apartment and spent lunchtime and the afternoon with her. I helped with a couple of items around the house and we visited. We also went to a game room and let the kids play some air-hockey and work on a puzzle that had been left out. It was a good time to be able to sit with her without too many distractions and she got to show off her grand kids to her friends.

Thanksgiving was spent at my parents apartment. Grandma came too and so did my sister and brother-in-law from Westcliffe. She and my daughter made the traditional Thanksgiving dinner while the parade was on (We cut the cable cord a long time ago and don't get to many movies so out of the huge list of "stars" I think I only knew the Muppets and Santa Clause). Football games on TV and lots of visiting consumed the rest of the day.

Friday we went over to my aunt and uncles house and had a great lunch of lasagna and meatballs and sausage. My parents, sister and brother-in-law, and grandmother were also there. We spent the afternoon in their basement with the local Air Force Academy football game on the TV and playing games. They have a pool table with a ping-pong or air-hockey insert so that was in use and there were also several other skill games being attempted.

My kids have worked up a routine to be able to show off their Rifle Drill skills, so they performed for our family in the back yard. They did a good job and all were impressed.

 Saturday, my family along with my aunt and uncle, took a drive to Denver to a Colorado history museum. We really wanted to spend some time with my cousin and his new wife and finally meet there son but scheduling conflicts prevented them from being able to come down for the holiday so we met them half way and spent time in the museum and having lunch and walking around the 16th street mall in downtown Denver. Their son had just recently turned one and my daughter really wanted to hold and play with him so we are glad that this worked out.

 

The Kids got another chance to hang out with their new Civil Air Patrol friends from the squadron that we have been visiting. They were having a fun night that was being spent at an indoor Go-Cart track.

Son in front, Daughter right behind.

The next week was all about car and RV repairs, and chores, and getting some school done. We did meet with some friends of ours that we knew from high school and college and had fun reminiscing about old times (oh glory days). On Sunday we spent the day with my parents and did some packing. The temperatures were getting colder over the last week and it was getting more difficult for the RV to keep from freezing it's pipes once the temperatures got down into the teens at night, and we were often dropping to single digits overnight. The forecast was also showing a huge cold front coming for the next week so it was time to say goodbye to Colorado. We are scheduled to be in Mesa AZ by the 14th of Dec. but didn't have concrete plans for what to do in between. We thought about Tucson, and even decided on Las Vegas, but ultimately went somewhere else.

Needed to get out of town before more of this happened.

Westcliffe Colorado

We went and spent a week at my sister and brother-in-law's place in Westcliffe Colorado. Well technically they live in a town called Rosita but it's an old mining town/area and is included in Westcliffe for mailing purposes even though they are about 10 miles from there.


House up on hill, small barn below, Notice Deer to the left of the barn.

Their VIEW.  I know we are not to covet, but come on.



Wife enjoying morning view

They live up almost to the top of a hill that gives them an extraordinary view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. It makes looking off of their deck or out their windows just an awe inspiring experience.
 

Mountains turn Red for a short time right at sunrise.

The deer in the area just walk through the property like they own the place and are almost tame enough to feed by hand. I'm sure that all of our Colorado relatives are bored of all of the deer talk, but for those of us who have lived most of our lives in cities outside of this state, this is a real treat.

Deer right off of the deck.

It didn't quite happen, but it was fun to try.

It was a relaxing week as we left the RV in storage at the Academy, so I didn't have any projects I could do. I even played with puzzles. If it weren't for being at 9000 feet elevation and always feeling like I was trying to catch my breath, it would have been perfect.

Daughter got some excellent cooking instruction from her aunt, and both kids got some video game time with their uncle.

Kneading bread with her aunt.

"I made these from scratch" Pumpkin Cupcakes.

"Haven't you guys heard of Instant? Can't believe I got to crank this thing".

One of our favorite stops on the way to or from Westcliffe is a stop at Cañon City. They have a great burger joint called Big Burger World, and as you can see in the pic, the burgers are huge. There is also a great park in town we like to stop at if we need to kill some time, and a road called Skyline Drive, that goes right up on the ridge of a mountain. At the top of the mountain is a ridge where a dinosaur walked in some mud at one time. The foot prints were buried in a layer that turned to rock and the mud layer disintegrated over time leaving casts of the footprints.



Recreating an old picture from when the kids were here once before.

Bumps coming out from bottom of rock ridge are left over dinosaur tracks.

View of city from Skyline drive.

Video below is of Skyline drive. Mom was not to happy with the drop offs as she is afraid of heights. She didn't even get out of the car to get a close up look of the foot prints.

This Burger is as big as my Face.

How do you Bite this thing?

Son enjoying the view in the park.

Exploring the banks of the river in the park.

Civil Air Patrol on the Road

Since we have been here in Colorado, the kids have gotten to three Civil air patrol meetings with two different squadrons. They need attendance and some other requirements to promote and are working on getting those accomplished. They have new camouflage uniforms at the tailor getting patches sewn on, so they have been going in their dress uniforms and they get a fair amount of looks with all of the bling they have. The two squadrons here don't have an active honor guard or rifle drill team, so they have been asked by many who see them what the extra rope on their jackets is for. They have also been approached by some who want to start an honor guard program and one squadron even had a couple of rifles that they found in a closet to let my kids show what they could do. It was neat to see them show off a little. 

This video was added late to a previous post, so in case you didn't see it before I thought I would add it here as well. It's of a drill that was done at our permanent squadron just before we left. My kids are in the back, on the stage.

Mom, who is still  helping out the old squadron in Virginia, found an administrative officer here, who was using a newer computer program to help track members accomplishments, has been getting lots of instruction on how to use it and make record keeping much easier. Hopefully she will be able to help our old squadron even easier.

The kids have also gotten squadron patches from both, so that might be a great to have more souvenirs from the trip that are small and fit in the RV easily.

Hanging out in Colorado Springs

This week was a start working on school again week as the kids had off for most of a month as we were getting started and doing lots of sightseeing and seeing friends and family. We're not sure what school is going to be like on the road, but we are sure that they need to keep up with some subjects, especially math and language.

While the kids were doing school, I was knocking out a honey do list at my parents, and trying to get our Mi-fi fixed so we could get Internet. 

We are staying at the beautiful Air Force Academy campground, but there is no Wi-Fi here, only a couple of small Mi-fi signals at the laundry facilities that don't reach more than a few yards away. Of course most of you know who have Windows 10 installed, there have been a few updates lately and they have been slowing our computers down or even making them inoperable while the download is in progress. We had to take our computers over to my parents place the last few times we went, to take advantage of their fast Internet to get them done. This and our own slow Internet and life in general have made it hard to post lately, hence why so many came at once. I wrote them when they happened but couldn't upload them with any pictures, so I just waited.

We've been able to do a little exploring after school and toured the Air Force Academy, and also hiked around the Garden of the Gods. We even saw a deer that didn't seem too woried that we were there, or that some other hikers had dogs nearby (the dogs didn't bark though so I'm sure that helped).

Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel

Mountains behind the Academy

Hiking through garden of the Gods

Not so afraid deer.

Iconic Pic from Garden of the Gods Parkway

Nice wide roads with bike and hiking paths. One way roads.

The must do pics at Balanced Rock in Garden of the Gods.

I think this one might make it to our Christmas Cards. ;)

Son still loves Airplanes, even ones on the play set in the campground. (I talked him into this one)

Our Explorer is fixed, but I'm finding new problems with the Bronco. This would be a good place and time to fix it, but the bills are adding up fast. The Explorer fix needed a shop cause it was out of my realm, and 45 year old Bronco parts aren't cheap, but necessary. Guess I know what I'll be working on in a couple of weeks after the holiday.

We are going to be in Westcliff Colorado till just before Thanksgiving, visiting my sister at her place up in the mountains. It's beautiful there and the deer just walk through their property and look in the windows of their house. It will be a great week.

Colorado Springs

We finally got a couple of days to relax. The Explorer is in the shop and we are set up in a great campground. We got some shopping and laundry done on Friday and while out walking around saw a jet black Albert's squirrel with tall tufted ears. Had to Google to figure out what it was.

Albert's Squirrel. In this area they are completely black.

When I was walking the dog at dusk I heard and got to see two great horned owls. I saw one fly away and as I was looking up into the tree where he had just come from, there was another sitting about twenty inches tall, just looking at the dog. A few seconds later and it swooped down towards us and flew about 10 feet over my head.

Great Horned Owl. Hard to see but he's right in the center sitting on a branch.

We spent Saturday at my parents place and celebrated my son's birthday a little more properly with my grandmother and my sister and brother in law also there.

 We spent most of the time just catching up and playing games. It was a great day. We even got to see deer feeding by the road on our way back to camp. All of these animals that we see but they are so quick I can't get my phone out fast enough to get pictures.

The Storage Fiasco

I'm very thankful for U-haul, as they make it fairly easy for us in the military to move ourselves and generally have reasonable rates (I'm not plugging them, just saying). As you know if you have been following lately we wanted to put the last of our stuff in a 5x5ish storage unit here in Colorado Springs, as most of my family is here so this is kinda a default home base for us. When I set up the trailer rental I did it through the corporate offices instead of the local stores cause I didn't have a typical move as I was going to have their trailer for an extended period. While on the phone with the company they talked me into a storage unit here in Colorado Springs that was 5x6, and they were giving me a good deal by reserving it with the trailer rental, and it was close to my parents place and right where we wanted to deliver the trailer now that we would be done using it. We showed up to the U-haul storage lot and were informed that our unit was actually a locker that was 5x6 and 8 feet tall but sitting on another locker that was 5 feet tall. To get into it required rolling a set of stairs in front of it. Two of the items I have required to be rolled into the unit and there wasn't even a ramp available, so this wasn't going to work, and none of the other available units were near the size we wanted.

I called the next U-haul storage place but they didn't have anything small available, so I called the next U-haul storage place to see if they could help, but they must have been busy and the phone call ended up being transferred to the corporate offices. They said that there were 5x6 units available there but they were on the second level, but there was an elevator available, so off we went.

We showed up at the place that was now fairly far away from my parents place, and as they were busy and after waiting for a while, got the paperwork done, just to find out there wasn’t an elevator. 😠

Like I said, I like U-haul, but I've come to the realization that their company offices don't seem to know much about, or talk to their dealer sites. Remember I set up the trailer rental through corporate and told them I would be keeping the trailer for an extended time, but the lot we were returning it to never got that message either and were not happy with me. I think they already had another renter who was supposed to pick it up the day after what would have been the regular time period.

After lots of time on the phone we finally found a unit with another company that was 5x5 and had a really high ceiling. I'm good at playing storage unit jenga and got it all to fit, but now we had just enough time to get the trailer returned before U-haul closed.

The day was very stressful, especially as all of the driving around we were doing was using the RV to pull that trailer all over town and sometimes into places we weren’t sure we could get out of without having to backup. A hard thing to do with a 38 foot motorhome and a very short trailer that jack-knifes if you look at it wrong.

Leaving Florida, on to Texas

We left Florida on Friday afternoon after my son got his learners permit, and we made it to Louisiana and stayed at a Wal-mart for the night. The next day we made it to Dallas for lunch and had to eat at an In-N-Out Burger. It was a pretty expensive stop after having to add three T-shirts to the receipt. 

We headed West for the rest of the afternoon until we had engine problems with our Explorer. We got off of the road and arranged for a tow to the next town, Ranger TX. We juggled the trailer around to the back of the RV and started driving the Bronco to an RV park in town but had to wait until Monday as everything was closed for the rest of the weekend. We got the news that the engine needed repairs that were out of the range of the small towns in the area so we called in the cavalry and my parents came down the next day with a car trailer to help us get to Colorado Springs where we could get it fixed right, and be more comfortable and visit with friends and family while the car was fixed. Long term plans for the car were to let my mother use it while we are road tripping and maybe give it to my son later, so we weren't planning on selling it yet.

Our trip from Ranger TX to Colorado Springs went well. We were now a motor home pulling a U-haul trailer, a large truck pulling Our Explorer on a trailer, and driving our Bronco, which only had 1700 miles on it since getting it rebuilt and now it was getting the ultimate test. Thankfully it did OK. We took it slowly the first day only averaging 55mph as we were learning it's highway characteristics. The next we averaged 65 and could go higher in a pinch but the wind was really blowing the lightweight Bronco, and the RV around most of the day but we made it to Colorado Springs in the late afternoon and were able to setup camp with daylight at the Airforce Academy.

Whew, what a trip.

Mom driving the RV as Dad was now driving the Bronco.