Another "Last Saturday"

How quickly do these months seem to pass?  FAR too quickly!  That cliche phrase "it's seems only yesterday" rings once again in my brain.  Ah, June 1st, we remember it well at The Mystic Canyon Ranch near Mountain Home and, gee, wasn't it REALLY only yesterday?  All my life I've heard old people say, "Time passes faster when you get older."   I am finally beginning to understand what the heck they were talking about.  They were telling the truth!  Who knew?  Heck, at this rate, I can blink six times and it will be Christmas.  (Even though this is the 26th of the month, it's actually 182 days until Christmas.)

It's great to be back home.  Both Susun and I dearly love camping.  We're lucky that we both love is as much as we do.  If either one of us didn't love camping so much, well, one of us would have a Big Problem!  So, we're lucky.  You can flip those words to "We're SO Lucky."  Either way, it works.  Our camping lives have ebbed and flowed and taken us through many incarnations and permutations.  LBRs have a pretty good idea of our current "State of Camping."  One thing that hasn't been explained is an evolving idea of the "duration" of camping.  We're into weekday camping now--leave on a Monday and return mid-day Friday.  We want to enjoy all the stuff Idaho Falls has to offer on the weekends.

Idaho Falls is a "working city."  Pretty much every family that isn't retired has at least one family member who's tied to a Monday through Friday job.  Unemployment is much lower here than almost any place in America because practically everybody works.  This reality creates a "Weekend Warrior" mentality and the region's recreational resources are maxed out on Friday-Saturday and Sunday.  Meanwhile, there's tons of fun stuff to do each weekend INSIDE the city of Idaho Falls.  Every weekend is jam packed with stuff to entertain the "stay-at-home" families who don't have ATV's, dirt bikes, fishing gear, boats, toy haulers, 5th wheels, or whatever.  We love Idaho Falls for many reasons.  One such reason is the weekly summertime smorgasbord of things to do here.  It's great to be back home with a full weekend ahead.

Today is the annual Bluegrass on The Greenbelt event from noon to 9 pm.  There's quite a story behind the scenes of that totally FREE event. (Click here to visit the event's website and be sure to check out the websites of the various bluegrass bands.  Pretty awesome lineup.) There's another nice event going on at Snake River Landing.  It's called Breakfast on The Bank.  Click here to check it out.  Of course, the two Farmers Markets are well worth a visit.  If that's not enough, there's 106 yard and garage sales in this morning's paper, too.

This past week was our first true opportunity to test out the Monday thru Friday Camping Plan.  We were sorely tempted to stay near Dubois, WY for another 2-3 days.  We actually talked ourselves into staying there during Thursday night's Happy Hour.  Luckily, we awoke yesterday and decided to pack it up and head over the hill and down the river back to Grand Ma's little bungalow on 12th Street.  We're danged glad we did.

Speaking of camping, LBRs know I have a proclivity to devote entire blog posts to arcane descriptions of various camping techniques.  Well, progress happens.  I'm taking all of those types of posts away from this blog and putting them on a new blog I created this morning.  The new blog is entitled "Camping Tips" and it's actual address is camptip.blogspot.com.  It's a newborn blog. (We posted the first post on Sunday.)

I know some LBRs roll their eyes and hold their noses when a I start rambling on and on and ON about some arcane camping technique.  Now, I will get to write ad infinitum about everything I'd like to discuss about camping.  Meanwhile, I will spare the bulk of this blog's readership from terminal boredom.  It's a win-win situation.

Hey, Magic Happens!  Remember that great soon-to-be-bumper-sticker-phrase?  OK, this one goes way back in the WAAY BAACK time machine.  Only a few LBRs have been reading this blog long enough to remember this episode.  Way back not long after the birth of this blog, I agonized over whether to go to Coeur D'Alene for a late February conference.  Much angst was aired on this blog.  I finally decided to go and it was the final event of my position as RSVP Director since I retired precisely five work days after my return from the conference.  OK, the State of Idaho promised to pay transportation and lodging expenses.  Lodging was no problem but I had to pay upfront for four flights to get there and back.  State Staff said reimbursement would be no problem.  WRONG!  I turned in all the required paperwork--that in itself was quite a chore--before departing from the job March 5.  Well, the check never showed up.  The check got vaporized by the Post Office.  The check was actually cut on March 11, the day after we arrived in Arizona.  But it simply disappeared.  Poof, gone, never to be seen again.  Now, folks, we're talking real money here--it ain't cheap to fly from Idaho Falls to Coeur D'Alene!  Loss of this check was a serious "owie."  I contacted my State contact and she then contacted some obscure finance dept. deep within the bowels of state gubmint.  Eventually, I rec'd a form to fill out.  It had to be notarized and it took a long time to finally get all the eyes dotted and the tees crossed.  That whole process started in early April.  Well, I sent in the form maybe sometime in early May, I've forgotten.  No check.  Not only no check, no word whatsoever.  This was very discouraging, as you might understand.  Finally, on this camping trip, I mentally came to terms with the fact I would never see the check and would have to eat the high costs of travel to and from Coeur D'Alene.  I actually finally "let go" of the process and decided it was simply a footnote in the 2.5 year history of that RSVP position.  No problem.

So, imagine my delight to return yesterday find the check in the mail!  HA!  Give it up and here it comes.  It's several hundred dollars that will come in real handy for paying off the credit card upon which I charged the flights in the first place!  That's a real nice bonus for the last Friday in June, eh?

Don't worry, we have forgotten about writing up a summary of our Dubois trip.  We'll get 'round to that sometime soon.  This week, as you noted, we posted in the afternoons.  We will now be going back to a morning schedule.

Have a great day and Many Cheers!  jp