This week's road to adventure

Last week I had a chance to ride the bike for a couple of hours and ended up spending all of those hours riding on a County Road (yeah, this is a county road) through one very large ranch. I couldn't wait to get home and grab Kathy and her jeep and do it again.



This, by the way, is the good part of the road.





About an hour into the ride we came across this old adobe house. There were a few houses that we could see but they were mostly modern small ranch style. We assume they are the replacements for the adobe and for the stone house we saw a few minutes later. On a ranch that is so spread out they needed (and still need) people living near the action.


This is just so beautiful!








Every week we try to find someplace new that helps us understand a bit better what we have gotten ourselves into.



Whew! Two weeks ago it snowed (not huge but it was beautiful). Since then it's been in the mid-sixties and georgeous. I was planting trees today in a T shirt. But yesterday we drove up a road on the other side of a canyon that is an easy walk from our house. Still snow on the ground. Go figure! More later.

Sorry about the weather in the east

Sorry, no photos today. The scenery is there and waiting for us but we've been so busy that the camera seems to be stuck in the wrong place every time we think of taking a shot. But I (Craig) wanted to write about yesterday. And since there are no pictures then I guess I'll need a thousand words.
I was looking west and watching the line of the sunlight as it worked its way down the Jemez Mountains and then across the Rio Grande Basin moving toward us. By 7:30 it was so clear that I could see Mount Taylor, about 120 miles away and one of the four corners of the traditional Navajo land. Temp was 45 and Kathy and I decided to take Jackson on a couple of hour hike into the Barberia Canyon which is on the other side of our ridge line. We began on foot trails about two feet wide, made a small detour down a dry stream bed and dropped about 700 ft in elevation. Then we came to a path that had evidence of some kind of four wheeler. As we followed that the Pinyon (a type of pine that is sort of a tallish bush -- big ones are maybe 20 ft. high and they cover our side of the mountain) gave way to Ponderosa Pine (40 to 50 ft. high). This side of the mountain is facing north (less evaporation means more Ponderosa) and is protected from the wind. The four wheeler trail emerged onto a dirt road that was accessed from somewhere and we began to see a couple of houses. No idea how these people get in and out when it snows because the "road" would need a 4 wheel vehicle when it's dry. In the canyon it is incredibly quiet. Just walking we felt like we were making too much noise. Anyway, two hours later we climbed back up out of the canyon and Kathy made pancakes to die for and Jackson curled up in a chair and didn't stir for several hours. By the way, when we saw the 45 degrees we both put on polar fleece. Ten minutes into the hike we realized our mistake and were in shirtsleeves the rest of the way. When there is no breeze 45 degrees is downright hot in the sun. We are still learning about living at altitude.

So I got some work done and around 1:00 (it was about 60 at this point and the sky was so clear it was nearly purple) and I haven't had much time on the bike so I decided to check out this village near here called Galisteo. Down the mountain is always a bit of a thrill but I guess I'm getting used to it and off I went. It was beautiful. Back roads to an empty main highway. Trying desperately to keep my speed somewhat close to the speed limit and then down County Road 41 toward Galisteo. The road was following the old rail bed -- still in use by Amtrak -- on the right and a "river" (mostly dry at this point but filled with cotton wood trees that are turning yellows and oranges) on the left. I came over a little ridge and dropped down into the village which was nice enough but the road in front of me was spectacular. The entire valley opened up into this huge basin and I was dropping down one side like a marble rolling into a huge saucer.In front of me I could see miles of empty road. On both sides of me was ranch land (don't think lush green grass -- think brown scrub but beautiful none the less) and beyond that, on both sides, foothills/mountains that were a couple of miles away and felt like walls containing this place and isolating it from everywhere else.

The next thing I knew I was in Moriarty, about forty miles from Galisteo. Wow! On the way down I only saw about 10 cars and 9 of them were coming toward me. The only one going my way was a pickup that came up behind me. At this point I was going 70 so he was really hauling. I watched as it caught up to me and then was thinking of slowing to let him pass and Whew! he blew by me going about 90. That got my heart pumping a bit.

When I got to Moriarty I turned around and headed back. The wind was now on my back and the cruising speed edged up a bit. It wasn't like I had a choice because there were actually cars (well, two cars) going my direction now. About half way back to Galisteo I spotted a herd of prong horned antelope on the side of the road chewing on scrub and cactus. This basin would be a wonderful horse area because the view lines are enormous and just off the road looks like it must have 100 years ago.

Enough rambling. Just wanted to say, I'm having a wonderful time.

Craig

Mountain Living

This is Kathy's new Jeep, nicknamed Rocky. It has something to do with the name of the color. We took the back seat out so Jackson has his own little den area and he seems to love getting off road. We have been a bit more thoughtful about it -- trying not to get ourselves totally lost.

This is looking up toward the Ski Basin. You can just make out one of the trails (a swath of grey in the upper left hand corner). Yeah, like we're ever going down that thing!

Here are some Aspen in full turn. Most are still about a week away so we will be heading back up next week.

This is taken from a trail head called Aspen Vista. We heard is is a spectacular hike so it is now on our list of hikes in the are above SF.

Remember when we mentioned the purple daisies? These are on the rock wall above our driveway. We wish we had a better shot but the rock wall is fifteen feet up and the wind was blowing nearly 40 mph. We were lucky it came out this well.

Kitchen shots

This is the promised kitchen series. Apparently the last blog mentioning dirt floors and privy did little to disuade folks from questioning whether it is possible to have a kitchen in the "wild west". This is sarcasm and this is our kitchen.

The window you see looks out at a 50 mile view toward the Jemez Mountains. At night we see Los Alamos in the distance and Santa Fe at the base of our hill while we wash dishes. Not too shabby!
The center island and the pantry doors are made from old reclaimed wood and the doors were created, more or less, from old doors found in Central America.

Those bowls on the floor are for Jackson our dog. We do NOT make guests eat off the floor.

The area beyond the center island is our den and this is actually where we do most of our living.

These are the doors mentioned earlier. They make getting cereal in the morning kind of fun.

This is the last shot and is meant to show the door from the kitchen to the portal. Craig's grill is just beyond the door and is getting a ton of use. The opening to the left of the painting is going to the dining area and then to the entry hall.

Tomorrow we will try to dispell the myth that all of Santa Fe is brown desert. We took a short ride up to the Santa Fe Ski Basin and the Aspen were beginning to turn. All we can say is WOW! Check in tomorrow for some color in the mountains.

some interior pics

Several people have asked for some interior photos -- we think they may want to be certain that "Santa Fe Pueblo" does not include dirt floors and a privy around back! Hmmm, this might be smart to check out before anyone volunteers a visit and short home stay in the City Different.

We will try to take a tour beginning in the living room, then working toward the dining area and entry hall, then jumping to the guest room (potential visitors take note) and ending with the master bedroom. You will be aware that we skipped the kitchen/den area. This is not because the fire pit had gone out or resulting from spending too much time hauling water from the stream. Yes, this is sarcasm. Several of you seem to think that Santa Fe is in the wilderness. We are saving the kitchen and den for the next post because we have too many photos already

These three shots are looking south at the fireplace (obviously). You will see lots of Kathy's art work around the house -- it is cool to have walls that can take on her bigger pieces.

Jackson, by the way, is doing wonderfully well. We did have our first fire on Wednesday of last week. For those of you still thinking we moved to Arizona, altitude is everything. We had our first frost on Wednesday morning. It snowed in the mountains about Santa Fe and as of yesterday, Monday, the snow still capped the higher peaks. On the other hand, the daytime temps have returned to more reasonable September levels and yesterday was brilliantly sunny with a high of 81.

Still, the fire felt wonderful.

In this shot Craig moved to the west side of the fireplace and looked back at the living room facing a bit north of east. (All of you geography freaks are going to love puzzling out the actual directions. )

In the next blog I'll try to remember to move to the other side of the living room and shoot toward the west. Since the sun was just peaking under the portal roof while taking these it was impossible to get a decent shot while looking west.

Staying in the same place as the previous shot Craig turned to his left so that he was shooting toward the north. You will see that the living room and dining room are sort of part of the larger more formal common area. Just to the left of Kathy (as you are facing her) is the beginning of the entry hall. To the left of that is the beginning of the kitchen and den that you will see more of in the next blog.

This is the entry hall

Now Craig is standing in the kitchen/den and again looking south. To the right of this photo are a series of French doors that empty out onto the portal which covers the west side of the house.

This is the guest room. Yes, you could find this comfortable for a short visit!

This is the master bedroom. We wanted to be certain that the breezes coming up the mountain would cool the bedroom. Yikes! Even during the heat of early August (nineties during the day) we needed two blankets by early morning. Mountain desert weather is really interesting.

Outside of the master bedroom is a small courtyard with a small fish pond. Kathy had the idea to take some of the scrap beam material and create this bench. At night the water splashing into the pond is better than Tylenol PM. Instant sleep!





Now that wasn't so bad, was it? Obviously we are thrilled with the house. Sometime in the next few days we will try to add the kitchen and den. In the meantime, in Sunday we took Kathy's new Jeep up into the Jemez mountains around Los Alamos. It is difficult to describe but we wandered into a burn area from probably five or six years ago. Instead of desolate wasteland we found life everywhere. Once we got off the road and down a logging trail into the Santa Fe National Forest there were enormous view lines looking back toward Santa Fe. A few Ponderosa Pines had survived and thousands of baby pines were beginning to take root. Scrub oak and Aspen were everywhere and were just beginning to turn colors (Autumn seems to come a bit early here!). A type of sage brush called Chamissa (no idea how to spell it) stands about three to four feet high and is now flowering in incredible yellows that don't look real. We had just passed out of the sunflower season (different kind of sunflowers from back east, and they grow wild on the side of the roads by the tens of thousands) and are now into some sort of small purple daisy and these are everywhere. So standing in this park we felt absolutely alone and couldn't stop looking at the colors and the immense views. It was not only the altitude that took our breath away.

Thanks for your patience. We know this blog is sort of "happens when it happens". Maybe we are falling into the Manana lifestyle. Maybe we are just too selfish because there is so much we want to do every day. We miss you all.

A bunch of exterior photos

This is a shot taken from across a small canyon (known as an arroyo). Starting at the bottom work your way up to the first house you see -- there is a car to left of it if you have good eyes. That's not ours. Continue up the hill and then to the next house which is ours. You are looking at the portal (pronounced port all with the emphasis on the first syllable). Above us is one of our neighbors whose home is about 75 yards up the hill from us. This shot is from a spot about 300 yards from our house as the raven flies. But it is two miles of winding road as the car drives or as Kathy walks it every morning.

This is from the same spot with a telephoto lens.

And this is the telephoto pulled in as tightly as it would go. Now you can see what a portal is. This covered area faces west and we have some killer sun sets.

This is a shot from the beginning of our driveway. The portal is on the left and the front entry is to the left of the garage doors.

Our dear friends, Brinck and Susie, have raised these flamingos since they were first hatched and encouraged them to fly out to greet us at our new digs. Hmmmm! Thanks guys!

I'll add some interior shots tomorrow -- now that most of the boxes are unpacked and most of the artwork is hung.

Finally some new pics

The moving van got as close as possible and then everything had to be transferred to a small truck and shuttled up the hill.

Our garage began to fill up quickly and boxes were everywhere. The garage is now filled -- yikes! Now we understand why there are so many storage facilities out here.

In the midst of all this Kathy started trying to make our first dinner.

And I kept unloading boxes, and more boxes and more boxes.

This is actually only the beginning of the pile of "to be recycled" stuff. I had to stop taking pictures because there was no time.

Once we got through most of the chaos of unpacking we spent the next two weeks with Jason (our foreman) and Lewis (lead carpenter who seems to be able to do anything) finishing out a ton of little stuff. I promised them I would mention that this was their lunch break.

Lewis with Kathy are sitting on the bench they just finished. They used a leftover piece of beam and it now sits in the "Zen Garden" next to the pond. I'll set up a series of finished house pic's in the next blog and try to remember to get the pond and bench in there.

So why did we expect it to be flawless?

The Occupancy Certificate is now scheduled for Tuesday. Our last day at the KOA is Tuesday. Do you think we are cutting it a bit fine?

The pictures are a series. They are mostly of the house and some of you have been asking for more so here you go! The first one is looking down the portal. The second is coming down the driveway. The third is of Kathy looking down on the house from the high point in the road. The fourth is what Kathy is looking at.

Tomorrow we are scheduled to get phone and a DSL line which may mean I'll have more time to add to the blog. Furniture arrives on Thursday so some interior shots will follow. We both are really looking forward to sitting down with a glass of wine and enjoying all that is coming together.

We finally have a exterior stucco shot

There will be a railing on my left installed on Wednesday. This is the corner of the portal (in the east we call this a covered deck). The mountains in the background are the Sandia. They are near Albuquerque (I think I spelled it right this time, Oh My!) about 60 miles away.

The second picture is from the same spot but pointing up to see the beam structure above my head. Pretty cool! Although the beams look brown, they are actually more gray (see the next shot). Also, the vertical wood doesn't exist. Those are actually shadows on the stucco. I guess the camera made them up as it tried to make sense of the photo. It couldn't cope with blue sky, tan stucco and gray ceiling.

The third shot is in the small "Great Room" (would that make it a "Good Room"?) again pointed up to see the beams that support the roof.

We are still hoping for a Certificate of Occupancy on Friday -- it will be tight. The final construction clean up is scheduled for Tuesday of next week and the furniture arrives on Wednesday the 26th. Right now the site looks like an anthill with everyone working on their own thing totally ignoring everyone else (including the owners who are much more of a bother than a help) and somehow the whole thing is going to come together by Friday. We can't wait to move in. Life in the trailer is getting a bit old. Jackson seems to be getting bigger. Kathy is getting FOCUSED! And Craig is getting claustrophobic.

More later,

Jackson the Helper Dog

Kathy and I are busy like crazy but the house is coming together nicely. They will put the final stucco on tomorrow (hopefully). The plumber is around today (we may have nicer place to pee once that is complete). The KOA is nice enough but it (the trailer) is a bit small for two adults and a rather largish black dog.
Speaking of Jackson -- he is the star where ever we go. Santa Fe is a very dog friendly town It's amazing how many shops leave out water bowls! But, the big chains are sometimes an issue. Yesterday we were "downtown" and needed to get something at the local REI store. Kathy asked if they allowed dogs because it was way too hot to leave him in the car.

The clerk said, "No, it's company policy unless he's a helper dog. Is he a helper dog?"
Kathy looked at him and said, "Well, he could be."
The guy said, "Might he be a helper dog in training?"
Kathy, "Yes, he might be!"

And so we got him in the door. Once in we slunk along deserted aisles trying to keep a low profile. It was all going rather smoothly until we were checking out at the register. Jack was being held by Kathy in an aisle near the check out but sort of out of visual line of sight of the clerk. Then an extended family with many children descended on Jackson with much squealing and yelling to older sisters and mom. At one point he was surrounded with kids and a five year old with some plastic toy he wanted to buy jumped into the fray, waving the plastic thing up and down about two inches from Jackson's face and Jack didn't even flinch. At that point the grandfather decided he needed to find Jackson's breeder because he'd been looking for a dog like him for seven years so he's asking for Jeannie Walcot's phone number which we are trying to look up on our cell phone. While all of this is going on, Jack is just standing there being petted by six or seven sticky hands and the check out clerk is trying to look the other way and I'm saying to the clerk, "It's all part of the helper dog training -- they need to be able to tolerate children!"

What a circus! So, today's photo is of Jackson, on the bed in the trailer. He loves the trailer because it's so small that we can't keep him off the bed and still have room to move around. Hmmm! I hope this doesn't translate into a newly learned behavior.

The Road Less Traveled

This is Double Arrow Road South -- our road. This also may explain why the homeowners were so excited when the road was closed for two days while a team layed asphalt over about one mile of the steepest and twistiest part of the road. This part, however, will remain dirt.

The second picture is a shot from that same point in the road, but I walked through some Pinyon trees to just above the point where the house was cut into the hillside. The final stucco coat is scheduled for mid-week next week. And the board leading to the roof will be sacrafice also.

We arrived in SF last night. Other than major rain storms, two separate Interstate closings due to accidents, 110 degree heat from Indiana to eastern New Mexico, and a couple of rather iffy RV camp grounds that forced us to keep moving longer than we would have liked -- other than those issues it was a lovely trip!



The photo to your left is a national grassland refuge (who knew that grass was endangered?) in Texas. It surrounds a lovely lake and was a huge relief when we found it. The iffy places had ranged from scary to desolate and we got a tip at a gas station from a very nice woman with two kids (around 8 and 13) both wearing cowboy hats bigger than our SUV pulled down so the tops of their ears stuck out like Dumbo wings. The older boy was wearing spurs that Roy Rogers would have loved although I doubt the horses shared Roy's enthusiasm. Anyway, she told us about this "Refuge" and we got off on a road that could only be described as narrow, hilly (hard to believe in Texas) and windy (that is both in the twisty sense and in the 45 knot cross wind that had been blowing in our face since Oklahoma sense). The speed limit was posted at 70. Kathy suggested 35. I split the difference. When we arrived, there was an honor system with an envelope for money and a slot to put it in. We were with four other trailers, all owned by Texas Tech University. They are grad students who are studying the area for regrowth since a major fire rolled through three years ago. We found no evidence of fire. It is a bottomland lake system and it regrew incredily fast. If it hadn't been for the "Watch for Snakes!" signs posted everywhere it might have ranked as our favorite site.



By the way, in the morning Kathy spotted our first western bird -- about 250 roosting Black Vultures. Could this have been a message? On the way back to the Interstate we took this -- it cannot do justice to the sweep of the horizon. It is just so BIG!



The house looks awesome. A few issues (they used the wrong tile in each of the two guest room bathrooms) remain but generally we are very pleased. By the time we got to Santa Fe the temps had dropped to low nineties and by the time we were on our mountain they were low eighties. The high desert is amazing. By 6 PM we had turned off the AC and by 9 we were under two blankets.



I was going to have some pic's the house today but they are paving the road so we had 15 minutes to look around and then run for it. Once they began paving the road was closed until after 5 PM. I'll try get some shots for tomorrow.

Camping by a Lake

This was taken last night. The second picture is from tonight's campsight.

Tonight will be spent in southern Illinois with a lake behind the trailer, Chickadas chirping like crazy, internet WiFi, cable TV, clothes in the washer on the way to the dryer, mediocre wine and chicken on the grill. Our first day on the road we nearly floated toward Santa Fe as the skies open up. Day two we landed at a wonderful campground that nobody seems to know about yet and we had an entire wooded back road to ourselves.

As usual, we are the youngest people in the area. But tonight we are surrounded by huge rigs -- very fancy -- kind of intimidating. But, none of them could have backed into this little site right on the lake.

Yikes! This is hard.

We have now decided to leave on Friday morning since saying goodbye to people is just plain hard to do. Our ancestors who headed west knowing they would never return and might not even be able to get mail -- well, at least they had the internet -- were definitely made out of stronger stuff.

Last night we went to Exeter, NH to have dinner with and say goodbye to Kathy's father Kelvin and his "GF", Cherry Taylor. I am sort of cheating because this picture is actually from about a month ago but it gives the right sort of impression and we didn't have the camera last night.

The only thing that keeps us moving forward is the excitement about where we are going. So I included a picture just after the tile went down in the dining/living room. It's still not done but it will give you an idea of the Santa Fe style we will be living with.