Wow what a ride.

So I was laying in bed one night and I started to think about all the places we have been in the last few years, and I decided I had to write down all the places that we have visited in that time. Wow, it was quite a list. I have included the condensed version here.

• April 13, 2006 Last day at Fisher-Price


• April to June 2006 South Wales, NY


• June and July 2006 Travel cross country to Yosemite NP work as a volunteer at Yosemite for a month


• August 2006 Drive to Denver ASAP for pre-employment physicals and training for Antarctica positions. Then drive back to South Wales for two weeks before flying back to Denver on the way to Antarctica


• August 24, 2006 Set foot on Antarctica


• February 15, 2007 Off the Ice back in New Zealand


• February and part of March travel in New Zealand


• March to June 2007 South Wales, NY


• June and July 2007 Travel cross country to Yosemite NP, work as a volunteer at Yosemite for a month


• July 2007 also a two week stint in Salt Lake City, UT for Aircraft Rescue Firefighting School


• August 2007 Travel from CA to NY via SD


• September 2007 South Wales, NY


• October 1, 2007 return to McMurdo Station, Antarctica


• March 2008 travel in New Zealand


• March to May 2008 West Falls, NY


• June 2008 Jonesborough, TN


• June and July 2008 Travel cross country to Yosemite NP, work as a volunteer at Yosemite for a month. Visit Grand Canyon, Vegas along the way


• August 2008 visit friends in San Francisco


• August to October 2008 Fort Bragg, CA camp hosts at Russian Gulch SP


• October 2008 travel to Lassen NVP, CA for a week stay


• October to November 2008 back to Yosemite NP, to volunteer for two weeks


• November to December 2009 spend a month in West Falls, NY


• December 2008 to January 2009 Jonesborough, TN


• January to March 2009 stay in Cheyenne, WY

It is crazy the length of the list. Well, now you are up to speed as to where we have been lately. We are currently residing in an apartment just a few blocks from downtown Cheyenne, WY. Downtown isn’t too big here, so we are basically next to everything. We walk past the state capital building everyday. Plus all of the county, state and federal buildings as well. That plus the rail yard is 85% of what downtown Cheyenne is. It is actually the first time that I have lived in an urban setting (unless you count McMurdo, which is all of the noise of an urban area with none of the benefits) and this is just about the perfect sized city for me. There is just about everything you need from a city, just smaller, kind of like a light city.

Here are some photos of the apartment. It is basically a scaled up version of the RV. It has two rooms, the bathroom and the living/dining/bed/kitchen/front hall room. Very cozy indeed.

We are actually close to wrapping up or stay in Cheyenne. We can’t stand all of this sunny warm weather here, so we are headed west to the coast. We will be going to Bandon, OR on April 1st. Here we will be volunteering with the Oregon State Fish and Wildlife at the Bandon fish hatchery. I really have no idea what exactly we will be doing at a fish hatchery, but I agreed to do it because I can then pick on Brian Greeson about working at a fish hatchery as much as I want. Bandon, for those of you who don’t know your Oregon geography, is about 80 miles north of the California border and it is right on the Pacific coast. Our new digs will be about a mile and a half west of town and the coast. So we won’t be right on the ocean like we were in Russian Gulch last year, but we will be very close.

That’s all for now. Time to go work on my model cars that have occupied my time lately. Till next week.

R.J.