Gettin' ready to travel again!

Yep, this time I'm going fishing in California at Lake Shasta. I'm leaving next Thursday and will be there for a couple of weeks all told. Last year I only went fishing one time all year so a week of fishing will be nice. Of course seeing my buddy's Bob and Dennis will be making it a good trip, no doubt. I always like getting together with those guys and we always have a lot of fun. It used to be that we had a lot of fun together at work but now all of us are retired and living in different parts of the country.

Another good thing about my upcoming trip is that I get to see my daughter Tracey and my grand kids. In fact, I'm going to try and make the rounds and see Colleen, Sue and Bill all on that same trip.

The weather here in Idaho has moderated some, it snowed yesterday but there have been some warm sunny days since we got back last Saturday and most of the snow on the ground is gone now from the winter. There is still a small pile at the edge of the driveway where I piled it up when I was shoveling. Karen's pond was frozen over for too long and she lost all her fish, which is a shame since she had some sizable koi in there and they are quite expensive to replace. I keep waiting for global warming to kick in but I think another ice age is upon us instead. To be honest about it, human kind would do much better under a global warming scenario than they would under an ice age one.

Mengel Pass

Here is a little video of us going through Mengel Pass.

It was in pretty good shape compared to other video's I have seen of it.

Back from the warm desert

Well, we got back from the desert on Saturday evening after a nice 2 week trip. Unfortunately the weather could have been much better for both of us but it wasn't bad all the time. The first night it snowed on us and the first picture is what it looked like in the morning when we woke up. I was really hoping that wasn't going to set the pace for the rest of the trip and it didn't so that was good. It actually warmed up later in the day and I was even able to walk into Darwin Falls with my shirt off to get some sun.


I was planning on doing a blog update from Furnace Creek Visitor's Center since they have free wifi but the laptop had a battery issue and we didn't have enough juice to be able to do much of anything. Oh well, that's the way it goes. We did some pretty gnarly 4-wheeling and we got some video of it that I might post here next time. The Jeep was great and the short wheel base really helped maneuvering around the many rocks and other obstacles. Like I told Karen, we took the worst roads I knew of in the park on this trip and never had a problem.

One funny thing was that we ran into a guy in a campground in Death Valley that looked familiar to Karen and indeed he should have since he was the guy who drilled her well in Greenville. Talk about a small world, huh? We finished the trip in Saline Valley at the hot springs where we stayed for 3 nights but Karen wasn't too thrilled about the nudity there. The weather in Saline was in the 80's and that was nice but the last night a storm blew through with the worst winds I have ever seen out there. The drive out Steel Pass was uneventful and the road was like I remember it, not too bad.