Ten Days at home

We're savoring the prospect of having a full ten days here at home. This past camping/volunteer trip was a lot of hard work and we're glad it's over and done. it was a lot of fun but it was still just plain hard work. So, we're glad for a break. We consider this past trip the last of our summer camping trips. The upcoming three-nighter at Jenny Lake will be a fall camping trip. Temps are progged to be in the 50's during the day and mid-20's at night. That's clearly a FALL camping trip! (We put a discussion of this forecast on our weather blog. You can click here to read it.)

We came home yesterday via the Arco Desert. As we left Arco we noticed a teeny, tiny little snippet of smoke on the horizon. Sure enough, before our very eyes, that tiny smoke erupted into a full fledged range fire and has burned over 10,000 acres by last night. They even closed Highway 20 for a few hours shortly after we passed through the area.

As we finished up our final day paddling the Salmon River when we did 16 miles between Morgan Bar and North Fork. We could see a storm system gradually building on the southwest horizon. We kept hoping we would make it to North Fork BEFORE the storm hit. Imagine our amazement when it hit a mere 5 minutes after we pulled our boat out of the water at the North Fork access ramp. The storm hit with such ferocity that it snapped trees before out very eyes! Meanwhile, that same storm spawned lightning-sparked fires nearby. We skated out of that situation by a mere whisker! Whew, we're glad to be home safe, sound and happy.

It was another mighty fine camping trip. We were busy little bakers each night and also managed to smoke some chicken, too. We spent only $3 on a gallon of milk this trip. Once again, food and ice mgmt. really paid off. Our main expense for the trip was fuel--$194 to be exact. It's a danged good thing the gubmint is providing some mileage and per diem because we simply wouldn't cover that level of funding ourselves. We decided on this trip that Site #9 there at the Cottonwood campground is, by far, our favorite camp spot anywhere. We look forward to being back there again in July-August 2011. It's a sweet spot.

Susun will be helping Habitat for Humanity today. However, she swears she's not going to do a single thing on Sunday. Both of us plan to be real slackers for as many of the ten days as we can. We're both so tired right now it's an effort just to get up and refill a coffee cup. Now, THAT's feeling tired.

We've taken 20 ba-zillion photos in recent weeks and, hopefully, we can put up some of them here during the next ten days.

Otherwise, there's not much to report. Even though we didn't post anything on this blog all week, readership remained average. Duration of visit dropped back to near normal at about 3 minutes per visit. Here are the weekly site stats from June 19 through Thursday.

-- Site Summary ---
Visits

Total ........................ 1,129
Average per Day ................. 13
Average Visit Length .......... 3:03
This Week ....................... 89

Page Views

Total ........................ 2,126
Average per Day ................. 25
Average per Visit .............. 2.0
This Week ...................... 176

Cheers! J&S