I guess that I have gotten into the habit of providing a little statistical review the first of each year. I promise to make it brief. Continue reading 2009 in Review
Tag Archives: hiking
Mitchell Caverns:
Today we joined some friends and toured Mitchell Caverns and the Mojave National Preserve a little east of Needles California. Ed and Sarah are good friends from Portland Oregon. They have traveled to the area to visit Ed’s sister Jo, for Thanksgiving and they all came to Needles to meet with us and do a little spelunking. We drove up onto the Providence Mountains in time to catch the 10 am tour through the Tecopa and El Pakiva caves.
Triathlon
Sometimes we are just at the right spot and at the right time. We are currently camping at Millerton Lake State Recreation Area near Fresno, CA. This morning the nearby boat ramp was invaded by a couple hundred triathletes and we had front row seats for the Millerton Lake Triathlon. These folks swam 400 yards, bicycled twelve miles and ran three miles. Six of the fastest men did the whole route in under an hour.
Mittry Lake
Sometimes our life is one long campout. This has been one of those weeks. We joined up with a small group of friends near Yuma, AZ. We were camped on the desert on the shores of a small backwater off of the Colorado River called Mittry Lake. We were almost roughing it. We had no electric, no running water, no cable TV, no cell phone and no internet. We did have sparkling clear skies and a full moon each night. We sang songs around the campfire, had pot luck meals and coyotes yelping right under our windows in the middle of the night.
2008 in Review
We relocated 116 times in 2008. This is about average for us. For 2007 it was 125 times and 2006, 118 times. Total distance driven was 10,465, bicycled 2,097 and hiked 236 miles for a grand total of 12,798 miles in 2008. That works out to 108 miles per move. Our big event for the year was the big Dinsmore-Cook family reunion in Colville Washington. It was really fun having all the children, grandchildren, cousins, nieces and nephews together. We were glad that we made our big trip to Alaska in 2007, but my records show that we did not substantially curtail our travels in 2008. We never have enjoyed driving long days. We have developed a style of travel where we pick a monument or battlefield along the way for a mid day break. We either hike or break out the bicycle for an hour of exploring; then we then get back on the road and complete the day’s route. We were more careful planning our stops this year and we are getting better at staying put for at least two or three days.