The Adventures of T&A

We’re taking it easy today, unpacking the truck and adjusting to the altitude.  Our outing for the day, we went up to the Cordillera post office to pick up Jack and Ellen’s mail.

We left Hays and drove west across the rest of Kansas and into Colorado (finally!).  It’s hard to tell eastern Colorado from Kansas, lots of flat plains and nothing.  Our entertainment was watching tumbleweeds commit suicide by running in front of the truck.  Continue through Denver and into the mountains.  We drove up into the mountains and, at first, caught a few wisps of snow flurries.  We stopped in Idaho Springs, CO for some groceries and head toward Loveland Pass.  We’re running right into a snow storm.  We’ve seen several vehicles on the sides of the road where they’ve slid on patches of ice.  Andrew puts the truck into four wheel drive and slows down, along with all the traffic.  White-out, no visibility.  US 6 is closed due to conditions, so all the bigs trucks that are usually diverted that way are here with us, along with thousands of others, inching our way through the blinding snow to Eisenhower Tunnel at Loveland Pass.  We are stuck in this traffic, inching forward, for well over an hour.  Just before the tunnel, Andrew couldn’t stand it anymore… he had to pee. We pulled off at an exit ramp and he ran out to pee next to the truck.  By the time we left, six or more other cars had pulled off for the same reason.  When we went through the tunnel, we saw four more cars pulled off peeing on this side, mostly women this time, dropping to pee without care of being in public.  After Loveland Pass we dropped down into Dillion-Silverthorn valley and got off to rest a minute and get a bite to eat at Wendy’s.  Andrew said he felt ok about going on and really didn’t want to spend another night in a hotel (and a ski resort hotel in season wasn’t in our budget!).  The weather conditions over Vail Pass were even worse, but much of the traffic stayed in the Dillion-Silverthorn Valley.  We drove really slow, it took hours to go just a few miles.  After we left Vail Pass and entered the towns below, the snow stopped and the roads were clear.  We made it up to the Koransky house in Cordillera by 9:30 (mountain time), had one beer and went to bed. 

We stepped outside this morning to get something out of the truck and were surprised to see an ambulance in front of the hotel office with it’s lights on!  We were holing it wasn’t the nice older lady that checked us in last night.  We talked to the guy at the Rest Inn Cafe next door and found out is wasn’t her, it was a hotel guest that was having chest pains with an anxiety attack.  We stopped in at the Rest Inn Cafe for coffee and a biscuit and we were on our way.  We went down a number of back roads and gravel roads to reach Mike and Melissa’s property.  Along the way we had to stop and back up to take a picture of “Big ***’s Halfway Inn” Resort, just for fun. When we got to what we think might be their property, we found it far more developed than we expected.  Lots of the places looked like summer lake houses, but rural, some looked more like a fishing shack.  Some of the places looked pretty trashy.  Some vacant lots had trash dumped directly under a “No Dumping” sign.  We took a few pictures (of nothing) and headed out.  We stopped for lunch at some small town park.  We made it out of Missouri and into Kansas.  We stopped and made dinner off the tailgate at a really nice highway rest stop in Kansas.  We stopped in the town of Hays, KS and stayed the night at the Midway Motel.  We saw signs for a local brewery and had to find it.  We stopped at The Liquid Bread Brewery in Hays, Kansas had a pretty good beer sampler.

We are leaving Birmingham, heading to Missouri.  Our friends Mike and Melissa Andreason have property in Missouri that they haven’t visited, so we are going to check it out for them.  We drove north on the famed Corridor X, from Birmingham, AL through Mississippi and around Memphis.  We continued through Arkansas and into Missouri.  We made it to West Plains, MO and stopped at The Rest Inn Motel for the night, a $40.00 a night, independently owned hotel.  We’ve found these “mom & pop” owned places are much cheaper, but the quality can vary widely.  We’re always up for an adventure!  We couldn’t camp in the truck on this leg of the trip because we had the back full of stuff heading for Colorado. 

We have packed the truck with our road bikes and stuff we are taking to Colorado, our stuff that is going on the trip with us and the additional stuff we are storing in Birmingham.  We left Atlanta and got to Birmingham in time to meet Anita and Phil for dinner.  We unloaded a few boxes into the attic, sat back with a glass of wine and relaxed. 

While in Atlanta, we toured the Sweetwater Brewery.   We’ve toured a few breweries while traveling, and plan to tour more, we felt we should really tour one in our own backyard while we are here.

We’re spending several days in Atlanta installing and formatting hard drives, updating our website, running errands and visiting friends.  The Adventures of T & A will continue shortly….

Well, we planned for ALMOST everything… We did not, however, plan for a serious hard drive crash while on the road. Shortly after our last Blog update we had one laptop crash and our removable hard drive for back up was limping. Andrew was concerned about the problems with the corrosive salt air in Florida, so we tried to use what computer we had sparingly. We are currently in Atlanta while Andrew is working on two laptops and a removable hard drive for back ups. Stay tuned! The Adventures of T & A will continue!

And for now a pretty picture.

Sunset Happy Hour at Cape San Blas with friends Gautam and Donna

Again, the traps are empty.  It looks like I won’t be skinning an animal on this trip.  They suggested if we found a fresh road kill animal I could pick it up for practice, but that picking up road kill required a permit in some states.  I’d be able to salt it to dry the hide and tan it later.  I was looking real hard at several of the squirrels that were playing nearby…

Don has a degree in horticulture and was quite knowledgeable on many of the local plants.  He came in with a load of fresh oyster mushrooms which we battered in cornmeal and fried for breakfast.  Colbert and Don brought out some topo maps and showed us several places we should look into in Idaho, Arizona and New Mexico. 

I went down to the river to wash up for the drive back to Atlanta and Colbert came through and got the motorboat and headed up to the other cabin.  When he got back, he had a critter for me to skin… a river rat!  It had made a nest in Colbert’s other cabin and he had set a trap for it a few days ago.  It was much smaller than an beaver or raccoon, but the skinning principles were the same.  I skinned it in a few minutes and whittled a chunk of firewood as a hide stretcher.  So I got to skin a critter after all!

Before we left, Colbert gave me some cypress knees. He sold a bunch of them to a buyer a few years ago.  The guy came and picked up a couple of orders of them, but never picked up the last order.  I’ll clean them up and polish them after we settle down somewhere.  We’re heading back to Atlanta for a bit of computer maintenance and to get together with some friends.  We have some things we need to pick up to take to Colorado and a few things to drop off in Birmingham on the way.  We’ve had pretty good weather up until we head into Atlanta when we hit a cold winter rain.

Don checked our traps this morning but they were empty.  One of the things I wanted to do while here was to have some hands on experience skinning and cleaning an animal.  Maybe tomorrow.  We all went up river in the canoes to do some tracking and set traps for otter and beaver.  Colbert is an expert tracker and trapper, reading information from the land that Andrew and I couldn’t see. 

Colbert wanted to do some additional urban foraging by harvesting a telephone pole that was no longer in use.  We piled into the truck towing the empty boat trailer to an area where they are replacing old poles with new ones.  He had asked someone earlier about them and was told that it would save them the cost of removing them.  He brought out his chainsaw and cut the pole at it’s base, then winched it up into the boat trailer and off we went.  When we got back to camp, he dropped it off the trailer into the river to float it up stream to his second cabin for future use.  Andrew and Colbert took the motorboat and drug the newly acquired pole upstream.  Later that afternoon, we went out to set three more traps for raccoon.