We're Baaaaaack, with Our Favorite Furry Things!

OK, so apparently I can only blog for a couple of months in earnest before I take a huge long hiatus and frustrate you all to pieces.  ;)

Well, just to give away the punch line right away, we are happily parked and living in Baba G in Bandon-by-the-Sea, Oregon with two lovely people (Tammy and Bob) who are teaching us natural building, with cob (already), straw bale (soon), and the hybrid bale-cob (soon).  We've even done some foundation and plaster work!  The next several posts will get you all caught up with our journey here from Colorado, and what we've been up to since then.  But for now… 

Our Favorite Furry Things, which of course includes the kitties but also some random wild and fluffy things we have met along the way.

Tigger: truly Nate's cat, four and a half years ago, he was a neighborhood stray who only showed up at my door when Nate was over.  When we moved in together, we decided Tigger was with us to stay, and boy has his life been a whole lot more adventurous as a result!  He has pretty much become the Alpha Cat of the trio.  Here is Tigger contemplating Baba G, while it was still parked in Diana and Mike's backyard in the Keys:

 

I did NOT sign up for this!

Fink: my younger cat, who I firmly believe to be autistic.  And, no, I am not kidding.  He is the proverbial scaredy cat (except for shocking bold moments where he, for instance, strides right up to a dog and stands his ground), but he can always be soothed by throwing a blanket over his head.  He is the Gamma Cat of our trio, poor guy.  Here he is checking out the pile of tools and project stuff on the ground behind Mike and Diana's place, again before we left the Keys:

Why is our stuff all out here… and where is my blanket?

Pete: my older, fatter, lazier cat who has fallen to Beta Cat status because he is just no match for Tigger.  He can be a real sweetheart and loves Nate to pieces, even though Nate loves to torment him fairly constantly.  Here they are, taking a quick nap that, well, at least Nate deserved in the midst of the packing frenzy last July:

Zzzzzzzz…...

Before we left the Keys, the cats interacted a bit, but there was always some tension between Tigger and my guys.  Nate and I both worried that things would worsen between them in the small space of Baba G.  But, to our relief and surprise, they have bonded into a little cat pack!  There is a very real phenomenon in which people who have survived a terrible experience together become closely bonded: I guess it works on cats too.  ;-)

Pete susses out his escape plan from the Solar Ark 

(he ran away into the desert a couple of days before we ran away from the Solar Ark!)

Pete and Tigger, bonded in terror under the "grandma chair" in Baba G

Fink looks out from the safety of his favorite hammock at Trails End, in New Mexico

And now we should probably include some of the other animals we've run into along the way (furry and not), lest we seem like crazy cat people:

 Cute and curious foal often hanging out on the road to the Solar Ark

Nate does battle with a hilarious (and VERY stinky) goat in Jemez Springs, NM…

… for almost an hour!

(It took two washings to get the goat smell out of his jeans!)

 Cows checking us out at Trails End in NM...

Tigger checking out the cows.  (For the record, he is not a fan.)

 Nate rescues a snake off the highway in La Cueva, NM!

Feeding the adorable alpacas at Aspen Ridge Alpaca Farm… 

just a few minutes from where we camped at Trails End in La Cueva, NM!

Nate's best pic of an alpaca, perfectly framed.

Herd of elk hanging out near the highway at sunset (as we had been warned they would do), on the road back from Los Alamos, NM.

Gorgeous, gaudy grasshoppers (how do ya' like that alliteration?!) 

at the City of Rocks State Park in southern NM.

Nate has his hands full with a pale ale, Pete, and Fink at Blackjack Campground in Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest during the National Government Shutdown in October.  Thankfully, the rangers left the campground entrance-- and restrooms!-- open.  :-)

I cleaned up all the trash at our site, as a bit of thank you.

 More Pete and Tigger under the grandma chair again: their favorite way to travel!

Tigger's first encounter with snow… and maybe Nate's fifth in Tres Piedras, NM!

Tigger in South Fork, CO: "OK, this is too much now.  Make it go away."

Tigger toughs out the South Fork winter.  (Pete and Fink mostly watched him from the windows.  Which made them very tired.  So they slept.  A lot.)

We often saw mountain goats on the road between South Fork and Creede, CO.

Tofu-eating golden retriever who roamed our South Fork neighborhood for handouts. 

Trap we had to set for a mother mouse whose nest was built in the Civic's hood insulation!

 Here are the mouse pups!  We relocated the whole family.  :-)

And this is why you should always relocate rodents.

(Don't we have THREE cats?  Sheesh.)

Tigger to Nate: "When are we hitting the road again, daddy-o?  I wanna go surfing!"

Pete, on the other hand, did not seem eager to resume life on the road, 

and tried to eat the moving boxes before we could repack them.

It was incredible how happy the cats were, 

once we moved back into Baba G and hit the road again!

This campsite was in Saratoga, WY.

Mule deer (even a buck who had already dropped one antler) in Saratoga.

Fink scales a sheer rock wall at our free campsite in Cokeville, WY.

(I told you he has bold moments, right?)

Tigger enjoys sunset from the picnic table at our free campsite in Idaho Falls, ID.

Up Next: From Desert to Seashore, in Just 30 Days (Or, If it's Tuesday, this must be Bend)!

Road Trip Roundup (including Gunnison)

I realized that, in my effort to bring the blog up-to-date, I skipped two fabulous day trips we took in the car (from La Cueva, NM), so jumping in the time machine, back we go…

… first, all the way back to the first weekend in September, for Santa Fe's 89th Annual "Burning of Zozobra," a highlight of the Fiestas de Santa Fe (which started in 1712!).  Zozobra ("Old Man Gloom") is a giant marionette invented by a local artist (Will Shuster) back in 1924.  Meet Zozobra:

Santa Feans bring their worries (and sometimes even legal matters!) in writing to put in the "gloom box" that burns at Zozobra's feet during his fiery demise: every year, Zozobra (sporting a different hair color) burns to relieve festival participants of their troubles. 

As he burns, he waves and points at the audience, wags his head back and forth, and opens and closes his mouth in simulated agony, as shrieks, moans and groans are pumped through loudspeakers.  It is quite an awesome spectacle (and probably pretty scary to the kiddies).

Isn't he just fabulous!

And, when Zozobra is finally reduced to a smoldering heap, 

his annihilation is celebrated with a spectacular fireworks display!

Yes, indeed: Thank You, Santa Fe!

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The following weekend, we drove to Bandelier National Monument.  Bandelier is home to a spectacular set of Pueblo Indian ruins, built between 1150 and 1550 AD.

[Aside:  I just hate the erroneous term "Indian", and the fact that the name has stuck for, oh, the last 500+ years.  It also speaks to the arrogance of Christopher Columbus: I mean, if you had a bad map and ended up in, say, Nova Scotia, instead of Maine, would you persist in calling the local people "Mainers?!"  Sheesh.]

Anyway, the Pueblos settled in Bandelier because they were able to dig elaborate cave homes into the (relatively) soft volcanic ash-based rock called tuff, ejected 1.14 million years ago by the Valles Caldera Volcano eruption.  They also used the underlying, harder shales and sandstones as building materials, for additional housing and ceremonial round-houses called kivas.

Houses were built with shared walls: is this the original apartment complex?

Perhaps our favorite aspect of the park was the danger/solo factor: 
we only saw two other people the whole time we walked around… 
and no one scolded us to keep both hands on the ladder:

The view from inside the ruins was pretty fabulous too:

We also encountered some impressive flood debris.  The region had been hit by a major drought, followed by the Las Conchas forest fire in 2011, and had not yet recovered.  When a fire burns and kills trees, they are no longer around to absorb water: ironically, then, a region desperately in need of soil moisture cannot actually trap rainfall after the fire has wiped out its trees.  So, you end up with flash flooding every time there is a serious rain… and the water moves away from where it is desperately needed.  Awful.

One last dangerous bit of hiking (Nate insisted...) and that wrapped up our visit to Bandelier!

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At last, let's flash forward to the actual day trip I promised I'd write about in this post: on February 8th, we drove from South Fork to Gunnison, CO.  We'd been feeling like we'd fallen into a bit of a routine/rut, so we thought a little day trip would perk us up a bit.  Why Gunnison?  Well, we'd been told by several people that the drive (in particular, from Creede to Lake City) was one of the most spectacular in this whole part of the state… and we were absolutely starved for snow.  After hearing that we'd be regularly snowed-in for the entire winter, we'd been consistently let-down by the warm, dry conditions.  Boo, Climate Change.  Boo.

So, here's our route (not a fan of the new Google maps, which wouldn't let me customize this for you): we drove up to Gunnison on 149 (in gray at left) and back on 114-to-285-to-160 (in blue).

It really was a gorgeous drive.  Here's a bit of the scenery we thought we should share: 

After you pass Creede, you come to the headwaters of the Rio Grande:

As you can see, we definitely got the snow we were craving!

And then arrived in Lake City, CO (cute, tiny town):

Found a fabulous house with a cave below it (how cool is that?):

Saw some gorgeous mountains

(assuming these are what they call 14-ers: minimum 14,000 feet at their peaks):

And then, finally made it to Gunnison, where big flakes of snow were falling and coating the whole town in a blanket of white.  We hit a couple of thrift stores and-- miraculous!-- finally found Nate a $5 pair of cross-country ski boots.  Afterward, we ate a late lunch (or was it an early dinner?) at a great little pub that makes homemade giant, gooey cookies.  

Yeah, we had to have one.  ;)

We took a faster route back: less scenic, but we did most of the drive in the dark anyway.  It had been a very long day of driving, but we're glad we saw just a bit more of SW Colorado before we leave for Oregon… which, by the way, is happening at the end of March, not the end of April (thanks to our gracious landlord)!

Up Next: Our Favorite Furry Things