StanAndConnie.com

Winter/Spring 2005

May-July 2005

Cactus and flowers bloom in the spring here in Arizona just like anywhere else. Here's a nice bird of paradise and some cactus blooming.


(Click photos to enlarge)

We left Mesa Arizona right after July 4th. We stayed longer than usual just to get some work done, and really the 110 degree heat wasn't that bad. Really. It's a dry heat. No, really! Just stay inside during the day and it's not bad at all!

Seriously though, I was surprised to find that I didn't mind going out in the heat for a walk because it's just a "warming" heat -- instead of making you sweat like the midwest heat does, it just warms you up and actually feels good for awhile.

Anyway, on July 4th we saw an amazing fireworks show right through our front window. We don't know what city or organization was sponsoring it, but a lot of money went up in smoke. It was beautiful.



Mesa to Denver

The next morning we headed for the Denver area to attend a software conference. Oddly enough, the first of these conferences we went to was in Phoenix, 9 years ago. Now we're taking an almost identical trip only in reverse (and in a motorhome instead of a car).

Once we got a ways north of Phoenix it was high elevation all the way (I'm really enjoying the altimeter I bought for the motorhome), so there was some relief from the heat (oh boy, it's only 95 degrees at 6000 feet!).

We stopped for a couple nights at Meteor Crater RV Park, which is pretty nice. Except maybe for the constant wind in the afternoon -- there are shirts in the gift shop with "I survived the wind at Meteor Crater RV Park" on them.

We'd seen the crater before so we didn't bother unhooking the car to go see it. It's 5 miles away from the park, so a walk was out of the question. Too bad they don't offer a shuttle service.

But just so you're not too disappointed, here's a photo from our 1996 "reverse" trip (I suspect it looks much the same today):



Heading east on I-40, we enjoyed the painted desert and other mountain & rock formations, and I always like seeing the black chunky/bubbly lava flows across the highway that look like they happened recently. Of course they're thousands of years old, but mostly still black and barren.

We also passed by the Petrified National Forest -- we'd visited that before also, but I love seeing the huge petrified tree stumps lying out in the open along the highway. I guess they figure they're way too heavy for anyone to steal (besides being on fenced-in private land), but it's still amazing that they're still just laying there like nobody has bothered them for centuries.

OK, once again here's a photo from our previous trip since we didn't want to stop traffic on I-40 to take a new one:


What the heck, while I'm being nostalgic I might as well include this photo of me "working" at the Grand Canyon. The photo was taken on that same 1996 trip and was inspired by a magazine ad for a laptop computer. I always though that would be a nice "office" view...



New Mexico and Colorado

Next we stayed at the edge of Albuquerque for a couple days. More barren desert, wind, and dust storms (luckily the dust storm was observed from a distance). July is not the time to visit. But we did have to stop somewhere for some groceries...and a post office, which happened to be in the back of the grocery store, what luck!

Finally when we got near Santa Fe there was some greenery and rolling mountains, but that quickly ran out again when we got into Colorado. There was still some greenery in the distant mountains to the west, but to the east it's mostly just brown plains. There were warnings of a forest fire in the mountains, which didn't surprise us at all.

We stayed the week in a great little town called Monument. It's a newly booming bedroom community, being about half way between Colorado Springs and Castle Rock. At an elevation of 7500 feet the weather was moderate, about 85 degrees and still pretty dry. From the "Lake of the Rockies" RV resort we had a beautiful view of some mountains and a great camping spot with a small fishing lake, but we were sad to hear that the campground won't be there next year. The owner has sold the land to a developer, no doubt for upscale homes.

Here are a couple views from the park so you can see why we liked it.



Anyway, we enjoyed the conference which was in Denver, at a really nice Hyatt hotel. We didn't even notice the record-breaking 106 degree heat outside. However we did notice when there was a tornado warning and we all had to go downstairs. What fun.

We also made a quick tour of Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. I had been there when I was a kid (funny how the rocks seemed more huge then), but Connie hadn't been there before. Nice scenery, and a chance to take some pictures. This is the first real "test" of my new Sony DSC-T1 camera, and it did great. Amazing clarity, which I'm afraid you won't really see here because the full-size photos would be too large. Just take my word for it! :-)

Here are a few nice shots:



OK, for geeks like me here's what impressed me about the clarity. First the full-size shot, shrunk to about 23% for the web site (click on the photo to enlarge it, then come back here).


Did you see the two little specs on top of the right-hand rock, near the small protrusion that looks like a frog? (Look again.) Now here's a section of the original photo, so you can see what the specs really are (click on it to see the section in its original size):


OK, lets move on...

Of course the Garden has some famous main attractions, like Balancing Rock and Ship Rock.


It's funny how the balancing rock looks completely different from other angles:


We also found a few formations that we named ourselves:

Balancing baby:

Dinosaur looking backwards:

Stairway to heaven:

The man (columns) behind the curtain:


I also had some fun trying to compare photos from my trip to Colorado with my parents 35 years ago with the ones I took this time. I wish I had taken those old ones with me so I could get identical angles for comparison, but I didn't think about it beforehand. In any case, it looks like the rocks haven't changed at all. However they used to have a walkway up to the top of Ship Rock, with railing at the top. Now they don't have that, which makes for a more picturesque photo (and probably less people falling off).

Here's one of the old photos (sorry about the poor quality, it was scanned from a slide), next to a new one:

That was me standing under the rock!


Homeward Bound...

After Denver, we headed for Kansas City. We cut through Elizabeth, Colorado, just east of Castle Rock, and discovered a beautiful little town where it seems everyone has horses in their yard. Yes, they have big yards. After Elizabeth the scenery changed to prairie and farms.

We stayed overnight in Russell, Kansas, which is a tiny town but it has a little oil museum. It's right next to the RV park so we walked over and visited it. Not much of a museum unless you like reading the history, but an interesting diversion. (Did you know that Howard Hughes made the bits for the oil drilling rigs, and he didn't sell them -- he rented them?)

They also have a bunch of "post rocks" which were commonly used for fence posts in this area, I suppose because there wasn't a tree to be found for miles.


We stayed for a couple weeks in Kansas City to visit family & friends & doctors (the latter of which wasn't as enjoyable as the other two). Now we're on our way to New York once again, to visit our grandson (and of course his parents too).

Thank you for visiting our travel site. Please visit our other sites too:

	Campground Master -- A tracking program for your campground or inn. Easy to use and learn, but modern and powerful. One of the most inexpensive systems, great for small campgrounds. Designed by campground owners and full-time RVers.
	MysteryPhotos -- Every week a new photo is shown, which may be a close-up of something, or a section of a common object or sight. Guess what it is and you might win a prize. Lots of fun for the whole family! Free screensaver and wallpaper too.
	Awesome Screen Savers -- Cool photographic screen savers of the highest quality, for Windows PC's. Download FREE Lite versions of them all. Some are created with photos from our travels, some are awesome photos from NASA. (Contact me to have a screen saver made with your own photos!)
	Cottonwood Software -- My shareware business site, currently featuring File-Ex: a Windows file dialog enhancement tool. Great for people who work with a lot of files.
	Free -n- Cool -- Tons of Freebies, Giveaways, and Cool Sites -- all in one! You'll find a large selection of free samples you can get mailed to you, free games, screen savers, internet services, etc., plus hundreds of contests of all types, and a unique "intensely cool sites" list.

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