Browsing Category2015

Colorado Springs, CO, Part II: SCOTT!

Over the past month, Jake and I have been lucky to spend time with several friends from our lives before Dyna who haven’t run away from us screaming “leave me alone crazy people!” Our friend Scott added himself to that list while we were in Colorado Springs, CO. He flew all the way from the not-so-sunny city of Rochester to hang out with us for a long weekend.  We didn’t want to disappoint him by not doing enough stuff, so we climbed 2 ‘Fourteeners‘, hung out 1,000ft below the ground, camped under the Super-Blood-Moon-Eclipse, and drank good beer. Oh, and we…

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Colorado Springs, CO, Part 1: DEXTER!

Dexter & Daddin’ (this is my brother’s name since becoming a father. He has also been known to go by ‘Andy’, ‘Terd Burglar’ or ‘Dink Stankle’) made a flight out to see us for a week in Colorado Springs, CO. It was the best week ever. We did a lot of little boy things and some grown boy things and mostly we had fun (although sometimes Dexter became infuriated and proclaimed: “I hate your RV!!!” and threw tantrums because we asked him to take a shower). I wish that we could tow a smaller RV behind our RV so that Dexter…

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Longmont, Denver & Fort Collins, CO

After driving up into Wyoming from Steamboat in order to avoid the Rockies, Dyna, Jake & I spent September 8th-13th hopping between some beer-laden towns in North Western Colorado. We spent a few days parked at St.Vrain State Park, which was an interesting location (read: state park next to a highway), but allowed for easy access to places such as Boulder, Oskar Blues Brewery, an Apple Store and an RV Salvage yard. Boulder is a cool town; we bought some new plates that are difficult to break (I bet I can still break them!) and some cookies there. Oskar Blues…

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Steamboat, CO

August 25th (a glorious day, because it is the day that a very special G, A.Crain, was born!) through September 8th was spent near Steamboat Springs, CO.  We parked Dyna a bit outside of Steamboat at Yampa River State Park.  What’s so special about parking here? It wasn’t just the vibrant night skies which put on a nightly show of the entire milky way. It wasn’t even the mosquito bites which frequently occurred due to the fact that the park has been designated a ‘no spray zone’. Nope, it wasn’t the super attentive park rangers who covered the tent campers’…

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Salt Lake City, UT

Just spent a sometimes salty, sometimes smelly, mostly subdued two weeks in Salt Lake City, UT.  Sometimes we did fun things like saunter through gardens, shop the farmer’s market, and drive on salt flats. Sometimes we did not so fun things like go to the dentist, remove one of the lunky couches from Dyna, and fix the plumbing (yes, again). Good things about the last two weeks first, because there are more of those and, well, they’re ‘gooder‘. Jake found the ‘Up’ house and brought me to it! I love ‘Up‘, and I love this house. So cool. We made new…

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Thompson, UT

This is a post about things that we did in a literal ‘middle of nowhere’.  We spent a week in Thompson, UT. Now, Thompson is not ready to admit that it is a ghost town so they tout Sego (4 miles into a nearby canyon) as ‘the ghost town’.  Anyways, Thompson is about 45 minutes outside of Moab (the closest form of civilization), very few people live or stay there, and Jim of Ballard’s RV Park in Thompson seemed like a nice gentleman, so we decided to stay there. Great decision- we were the only people in the park all…

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Blanding, UT

This weekend was spent in ruins. Literally. Like the Anasazi kind (remember those guys? I ‘learned‘ about them in Elementary school. I bet you ‘learned‘ about them too).  Anyways, I didn’t remember anything I ‘learned’ about them either, so here’s what these dudes were all about.  Jake & I hiked into Cedar Mesa with the hopes of spotting a few of the buildings they left behind.  A nasty storm kept following us, so we had to add a little extra hike down the primitive road to get to the actual trails (and by ‘a little extra’ I mean 10 miles).  We…

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Page, AZ

We’ve been doing some stuff over the past week.  Like meeting up with my long-lost college running mate and goodfriend, JessBrown (she will always be JB- JessBrown- to me. Sorry Andy!). And moving Dyna up to Page, AZ.  And adventuring on foot, car, and kayak. And playing a fun little game called ‘plumbing’.  Let’s start with the fun game.  After an afternoon of exploration and getting conned into eating at this place with every European tourist in town (no, we don’t recommend you go here for good barbecue, but the people watching was elite status), we tucked in for the…

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Rout 66, AZ

Our weekend plans were interrupted by some weather (of the foul variety), so we found ourselves ‘playing it by ear’ (from now on, I will denote use of this metaphor with the acronym ‘PBE’). We nixed a second trip to the Grand Canyon and decided to go explore some nearby towns on Rte.66.  We drove through a ghost (Ash Fork) before hitting Seligman, which is anything but a ghost. We were even greeted by a parade! Now, the parade was only ~8 vehicles (2 fire engines, an ambulance, a few cars pulling hay wagons) and 2 horses long, BUT it passed…

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Grand Canyon, South Rim, AZ

2:30am alarms suck. The Grand Canyon does not suck. Hiking the Grand Canyon completely negated a 2:30am wake-up.   After doing a lot of online research (all of which said DO NOT do a ‘day hike’ into the Canyon in July), we decided to do a day hike into the Canyon in July.  We found a 13.5 miles loop that would get us pretty close to the floor of the Canyon without roasting us alive by actually attempting to hike to the Colorado River & back in one day. This involved starting from the South Rim, hiking down most of the…

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