Friday, June 29, 2007

Goodbye Denver, we’re off to “Basalt, where the beer flows like wine.”

Basalt, Aspen; whatever. I don’t have to be 100% accurate when quoting Dumb and Dumber, do I? Basalt, CO is the location of our latest adventure. Basalt is where Holly Gingles resides. Holly worked in the VMF last season with us on the Ice. She worked in supply, better known as the parts department. It was very nice to stop in and visit with Holly, catch up on some laundry, take a good shower, steal some ice, and sleep on a bed that isn’t attached to wheels.

(Ok, I just re-read that last statement and we are real freeloaders aren’t we?)

((Wait, we are homeless and out of work, so we have to make ends meet however we can. Disregard the last statement.))

We took a nice bicycle ride up the valley towards Aspen, helped around the house some and mostly sat by the river and caught up on our time since we left the Ice. And I can’t forget the tour of downtown Aspen. Talk about a fancy tourist town. You could walk around town for days and just look at the architecture.

It was a great stop and we will miss you this year on the Ice Holly.



Here is Holly with the ‘Urban Penguin’ in McMurdo.

On our way west out of CO we stopped at Storm King Mountain. Some of you might not recognize that name, but it should ring a bell with many. Storm King Mountain is the site where on July 6, 1994 fourteen firefighters lost their lives battling a forest fire. I would have never thought that this site was right along a major highway and adjacent to a fair size town. My impression was always that this was a remote mountain peak deep within the Rockies.

There is a very nice memorial to the 14 in a small park just off of I-70. It has a large bronze statue in the center and memorial plaques for all fourteen of the firefighters around the outside. It is a very moving memorial.



Storm King Mountain is shown in the background.

I just have a few other photos from the trip. These first ones are from the continental divide in CO. The Eisenhower Tunnel is the highest point that we crossed at about 11,000 feet. The truck ramp is for those who can’t stop on the way back down from 11,000’. Not a fun looking ride.






Then after the state of Colorado, you get to see allot of this….


And in this photo you can see that steering wheels are optional in the state of Nevada. If you look really close, you can almost see that the road goes to the left near the horizon. That is about 50 miles away.


But there is one really good thing about the dessert. That is the sunsets. This is our view from a truck stop that we spent the night at in Scipio, UT. There are some very nice views to be seen.


That’s all for this update. I will write again soon. This time will be from the Valley in Yosemite.R.J.

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Westward to Colorado

Well after our very nice stop in Kentucky our next objective to this trip was to get to Denver to Raytheon Polar Services and sign our contracts for our ’07-’08 Ice jobs. It is a two day trip from Lexington to Denver, so we drove a little further on Day 1 so that we could arrive in CO before the RPSC offices closed for the day.

Tuesday – Lexington, KY to Topeka, KS (well it actually was Junction City, KS but how many of you would know where that was??? Wait a minute, with a show of hands, how many of you even know where Topeka is????) Back to the story.

The trip across KY, IN, and IL was uneventful and we arrived in St. Louis, MO around noon. So we decided to take a small detour to the St. Louis Arch. The arch is located right on the Mississippi River in the heart of the city. So we got two milestones done at once. We didn’t go up in the Arch, but we toured the museum and walked around in the park outside. And then on our walk back to the car I took a moment to stick my hand in the Mississippi River. So now I have seen it and touched it. It resembles the consistence of a farm pond on Vermont Hill Road. Very muddy and murky. But I have now done that.


And FYI it is really hard to get a photo of the Arch unless you are a mile away. So I went for the Artsy look. I thought Beth would like that.



And again with a show of hands, how many people thought the Arch was made of concrete? Well it isn’t, it is stainless steel plate welded together. So this thing will be around allot longer than Lavocat’s or Ralph’s Ford’s will!!!


We then jumped back on I-70 and drove across MO with a nice stop at Hardees for dinner. Did you know that with just air conditioning that you can cool the inside of a building to -27F? These people in Hardees were tough, and we have both done a stint in Antarctica and we couldn’t handle it inside of there. As we drove west towards KS we got to watch a beautiful sunset on the horizon. The photos don’t do it any justice but it was spectacular.





Wednesday – Junction City to Denver. After a short stay at the Junction City Wal-Mart we picked up and were off to Denver. We made good time and we arrived at the office at about 4:30. We met with HR and they had our contracts to sign and a stack of paperwork to fill out for each of us. We immediately knew that we would not be able to complete out medical PQ process while we were in town. Which is really annoying, but I will get to that later. After leaving the office we decided to stay at Cherry Creek State Park for the night. This is a nice State Park that is right in the metropolitan area. It is a large man made lake with several square miles of wilderness surrounding it. It was a nice convenient place to stay due to it’s proximity to RPSC and it had showers. Showers are good.

Thursday – Denver. We slept in a little before we made our trip to Labcorp for our drug test. You quickly learn not to drive during prime time in the Denver area, so sleeping in was a good thing. After our Pee Test we went back to RSPC to meet with whomever would talk to us. I had a good meeting with Andre, a fellow Lieutenant in the Fire Department. He help me finalize my airfare and trip to Salt Lake City for training next month. And he also introduced me to the new Fire Chief for the Antarctic Fire Department which also went well. Paula met with Pauleen, the supervisor for Crary Lab where she will be working this year. She also got to meet several other new co-workers and they showed her the secret handshake and password. You all know about those Science types, they have a little secret club that they don’t allow us simple people in, and they won’t even admit that the club exists. But I am on to them, and I will expose the club someday.

So after meeting our new co-workers we had free lunch on Raytheon. We know how to pick the right days to show up at the office. They were having a luncheon for all of the employees and my years of drafter training taught me how to sniff out free food. So we stuffed our faces and snuck out the back, Whittmeyer style.

Today we are in Basalt, CO, near Aspen, CO, visiting a friend from the Ice. But that is a store for the next installment of ‘The Three Hour Tour’.

Stay Tuned.R.J.

Monday, June 18, 2007

What happens in Kentucky stays in Kentucky.

Well, not really. So I will tell you what has been happening in KY. We arrived safely last night in not so down town Versailles, KY where we had dinner with the Congleton's and the other RJ. That is the Congleton's that didn't skip town as soon as they heard that Paula was coming. But don't worry Sarah Beth and Tanner, she will find you sometime.

We spent Monday eating, mixing liquid manure, eating, playing with dogs, loading freezer beef, eating, and playing Corn Hole. So a very typical day in KY I would say. We had a nice tour of the RJ estate; where he expertly prepared us pizza for dinner in his new kitchen. After a year of remodeling it is a very nice place to order Domino's from. This is when the evening went south. RJ got out the world famous Cornhole game. When I say world famous, I mean Central KY and 6 guys from southern Ohio know about it. Also all of the veterans of the Lot 3 work detail have seen it in all fairness to the game.

Checkout: http://www.playcornhole.org/index.shtml it is the official website of the America Cornhole Association. Checkout the links on the left side. The fact that there is an association for this game is strange, but the fact that they have a President's message is just Scary. So I would skip down to "How to Play Cornhole" or "Official Cornhole Rules". These links will give you a good idea of how the game is played. I will give it credit, it is an entertaining little game if you have; patients, no where to be, and maybe Beer.

So we had ourselves a nice evening in RJ's back yard with RJ, Tom, Johnny, Hunter, Jullian, Pharpee, and Farm Dude. There was now clear winner to the games as I saw it, so we will just call it a draw at this time.

And since I mentioned Lot 3, we had a meeting of the Lot 3 associtation via phone during the tournament. Nice office Pharpee.


We will packup the Teardrop in the morning and head west on I-70. We will likely be spending our next evening in the Kansas City area in a Wal-Mart parking lot. This will be followed up with a day driving to Denver.
So stay tuned, TTHT the sequel will continue.
R.J.

Sunday, June 10, 2007

Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.

Ah, Dean Wormer was so correct in that statement, but I am starting to think that Homeless and Unemployed is a good way to go through life. At least it is for now.

Well everyone, consider this your two minute warning. We will be back on the road in another week headed for the Left Coast (or close to it). We will be returning to Yosemite National Park (yosemite, big granite walls; not yellowstone, geysers and buffalo) for a month of volunteering and falling off of the walls. Our trip out to CA should take us through KY to visit family and then onto Denver to try to wrestle jobs from Raytheon for the upcoming season in Antarctica. And then finally to Yosemite.

This year we are a little more technically competent, we have a laptop and we should be able to get a little more internet time along our route to the park. Once in the park we should have the dial up connection again, but we should also have a way to load photos to the blog right away this year.

So stay tuned to this same bat channel for further updates and hopefully you will soon see photos of Paula knawing on corn stalks in the middle of Kansas. And please as always share your comments and tell your friends to look at "The Three Hour Tour"

R.J.