Basalt

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From: Steve Taylor [mailto:spt@thetaylorcompany.net]
Sent: Saturday, July 14, 2007 11:15 PM
To: Bill Taylor (Bill Taylor); David Taylor (David Taylor); Tom Taylor (Tom Taylor)
Subject: basalt

Camp Hale. A getaway from the summer heat. High seventies yesterday. Not much atmosphere to hold the heat. A forty degree swing overnight. Got to sleep with the windows open and the fan on. Woke to the calls of vesper sparrows. Got to turn the furnaces on to take the chill off while the people in tents over on the other side of the meadow walked out to the sunny side until the sun rose enough to hit their camp site.

Dry camped. This coach is such an electron-hog through the inverter; it appears to be drawing twenty or thirty amps at rest. I wondered if it would make it through the night on the batteries without turning the inverter off so I could run a fan. It did. Maybe I have more battery storage that I thought. Maybe it is not really drawing twenty or thirty amps when it says it is. Don’t know. I needed a new mystery. I do know that when I turned the coffee maker on this morning everything shut off. Not enough electrons left to run an electric coffeemaker. No-one around. A few minutes with the generator running took care of the power problem.

Took Annie along on my exercise walk. Wide open spaces. Didn’t need a leash. She struggled to keep up the first mile through the grassy meadow. Poor little dog. The pace was too much for her. I didn’t think she was going to make it the whole way. Then, we popped out of the north end of the meadow onto an old road and followed that back. Everything changed. Annie was suddenly young again. She would stop to investigate, then roar effortlessly past. She was a monster. I guess it all comes down to whether you think you might get a sticker in your little princess paw or not.

Judy left Erie, two hundred miles to go. I left Camp Hale, a hundred miles to go. Our routes converged on Interstate 70, seventy five miles from Basalt. Wouldn’t you know…. we each arrived at that spot within a few minutes of each other. Met up at the next rest stop and caravanned in the rest of the way.

Home sweet summer home. Basalt. Caught some brown trout in the Roaring Fork.