Just a quick post. We have had a quiet week, but feel accomplished. We have gone through most of the cabinets and gotten rid of old towels, sheets (we have 2 twin beds in the cabin and had 12 sheets, with no closets.), and an authentic 70’s shower curtin. We also released all of the unwanted single soxs that were filling the dresser and clothes left by children who are now teenagers or adults. Oh my, we actually have some space for our clothes!

We will be hitting the road again on Saturday. After a quick visit to Bridget’s college roommate in Lyons, Co. We will be heading home till Septemper when we are going to the UP of Michigan for fall colors

We have had a quiet week or so. Lots of time spent sitting on the porch look out at the view, reading lots of books and practicing our scrabble. Every year we have a scrabble tournament with our sister-in-law, Miriam, and she usually whips our butts,or at least mine….Kathy can give her a run for her money and comes in second most tournaments. Miriam and Terry will be here in Tuesday, so the tournament will begin in Wednesday.

We drove into Salida last Friday, hoping to go to the Hartman Alpaca Farm, but the were having a veterinary emergency, so we made arrangements to come back on Wednesday (yesterday) and went off and had pedicures.

Sargents is the town that is nearest to Whitepine and everyone in town meets there on Friday night’s for dinner. Tomichi Creek Bar and Grill has become quite the hot spot. We are enjoying getting to know our neighbors better.

In addition to good food, Tomichi Creek has an ice cream counter and they have fabulous ice cream and gelato. We have probably stopped there more than we should have, but we only get one scoop!

We finally got to the Hartman Alpaca Ranch Wednesday morning. Kathy had heard about them through a knitting group to which she belongs. The Hartmans are a delightful couple who are raising these gentle beasts in their retirement. Coincidentally, they are originally from Southern California and one of their son’s actually attended the Junior High School where Kathy taught. They have a little shop that sells the yarn made from their alpacas. It’s all natural, and the color is the actual color of the alpaca. Kathy bought some yarn (each skein has the name of the alpaca who grew the yarn) and I got some dryer balls that are supposed to take the place of dryer sheets. After we shopped, we went out and met the alpacas. We got to feed them treats out of our hands, and meet the ones whose yarn we purchased. What a lovely morning!

After we left the alpaca farm, we drove up to Buena Vista and had lunch at the Buena Viking….specializing in burgers and tots, yum.

I can’t believe it. I had a great long post already to go, and my computer has crashed…not a blue screen yet, but I can’t open anything on it…..want to scream, but I’m in the Gunnison Library and I think that would be frowned upon.

Since our last post, we have been having a wildflower extravaganza! We have explored Black Sage Pass, Marshall Pass, driven along the Arkansas River to Canon City and today drove up to Gothic where the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory studies wildflowers, small wildlife and the ecology of the mountains. The flowers are unbelievable. One of the fields we drove through was so full of yellow flowers that I felt like I was in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and the gang fell asleep in the poppies.

More of our Oklahoma cousins were up last week and it was so much fun watching the next generation of Whitepiners enjoy the mountains. We now have 4 generations who love the mountains.

Last night, our neighbors Don and Verna put on a fabulous Southern shrimp boil for the whole town. Great food, yummy margaritas, and good company! So glad we were in Whitepine for it.

It’s a good year for wildlife sightings. We have seen deer, elk, marmots (also known as whistle pigs and woodchucks), cottontail rabbits and blue herons. But the biggest sighting belongs to Kathy who saw a mountain lion cross the street at the cabin above ours!

Well, Wild Wandering Women are on the move again. We left Sierra Madre this morning and are currently in Cedar City, Utah. We are on our way to our Colorado Cabin for the Month of July. Plan to be in Montrose tomorrow and hope to have a good visit with nephew Casey and his family. Wednesday we will arrive in Whitepine in time for the annual water meeting, and hope to see lots of old friends. Have not made many other plans, but hope to see wild flowers, and take a lot of day trips. Maybe even a trip to Rocky Mountain National Park and to see Joan and Rick. Joan was Bridget’s college roommate, just a few years ago.

We plan to do lots of walking in the mountains, visiting with friends and reading on the porch (this will probably be our main activity.) We also hope some of our Oklahoma cousins will be up sometime during the month. Brother, Terry and sister-in-law Miriam will be coming at the end of July so we will see them for a few days.

Kathy just participated in her 50 high school reunion, and had a wonderful weekend reconnecting with her old chums. Lots of laughs, stories and good times.

We will be posting when we can, but we have no internet connection in the mountains. Every time we get to town we will try to post. Sorry we have been so silent for the last few months. We haven’t done much traveling since our big trip. Bridget did go to Cambria with her son, Matt for a week in April, but other than that we have been homebodies. We are ready for this trip and beyond!

Before we had a chance to post this, we went out to dinner to a locally owned diner named The All American Classic Diner (#allamericandiner). OMG if you are in Cedar City or traveling on I-15 through Utah, make sure you stop here. The food was fabulous. When we walked in, the place was packed, even though it was hard to get to because of ongoing roadwork on Main Street. Almost everyone at the first few tables were eating meatloaf, so Bridget decided to try it. Kathy opted for a ground sirloin steak covered with mushrooms, onions and brown gravy. We couldn’t decide which was more delicious. Bridget is pretty picky about meatloaf and thinks she makes one of the best, but she had to admit that this one was better than hers and the fresh veggies had an herb topping of garlic, salt, red pepper and other unnamed flavors. It made the veggies extra yummy. Kathy’s meat could almost not be seen due to the number of mushrooms and onions that covered it. As good as homemade for sure. Unfortunately, we were hungry and didn’t take pics of our food until Bridget was done and Kathy just had a few bites left….oh well, you will just have to stop by.

Well the wild wandering woes began just as we got to the Canadian border.  I was not aware that the entry to Canada was over a very big bridge, and I’m not too excited about driving over bridges so I was a little nervous.  As we exited the bridge, I could only see two lanes, one said Nexus and the other Nexus, Nexus, so I just followed the crowd. As I got up to the entry, I saw the other lanes open and realized that I was probably not in the right lane. When we got to the window, I got a lecture from the custom’s agent and we had to pull over, exit the car, have it searched and explain what we were doing in Canada.  Fortunately, they didn’t make us take everything out of the car, like some other cars in the area, and they didn’t keep us too long.

We began our journey towards Niagara Falls, then on to Toronto, driving on highway 3. We got as far as Tillsonburg and stayed overnight at the local Howard Johnson’s.  Went to the local pub, Copper Mug, for a good perch dinner and then on to dreamland.

After breakfast the next morning, we continued on to Niagara Falls. It seemed that we were never going to find the Falls, then, suddenly, they were there.  We drove slowly down the road in front of the Falls, in both directions, but there were hundreds of people there, and parking was terrible, so Kathy would have had problems navigating the area.  We decided that we had seen enough and were happy to start driving to Toronto.

As we drove toward Toronto, Kathy began calling motels to get a reservation for the night.  Toronto was booked and we began to worry. She looked at the map and realized that a suburb of Toronto is Markham.  We both knew immediately that we had to stay there.  After all, Markham was the evil spirit in our grandmother’s garage. He terrorized all of the Flanagan cousins and has gone on to terrorized additional generations of children. We had no idea he was Canadian.  But of course because Markham was involved, nothing went as planned.  The first major chain that Kathy called informed us that they had a handicapped room with two queen beds, just what we needed.  We drove 1 1/2 hours out of our way to get to this unnamed motel, only to discover that they completely mislead us. They did not have a handicapped room available, and in fact had booked us on the second floor with no elevator.  I became rather upset in the lobby, so the manager called a number of other hotels in the area and was able to find us a room at the  Courtyard by Marriot down the street.  Although the price was higher than the first place, the hotel was very nice and we ended up staying two nights.

Now that we were in Toronto, we knew that we wanted to do something that was iconic to Toronto.  We decided to go to the Gardiner Museum, the national ceramics museum of Canada. So we drove to downtown Toronto…no one warned us that traffic in Toronto is about equivalent to traffic in New York City!  There was construction everywhere, one way streets that our GPS, fondly named Mavis, didn’t know about and absolutely no parking.  After 7 or 8 wrong or missed turns and passing by the museum about 5 times, we finally found an underground parking lot.  As we exited the parking lot, a gray haired gentleman with a wonderful handlebar moustache stopped to hold doors for us and we started talking to him. What an interesting man. He is a retired AP Photographer who still freelances (recently in the Sudan and Middle East) and teaches photography at the University of Toronto.  It was delightful and fascinating to meet him.  We finally made it to the museum, which we found so interesting. Both Kathy and I prefer the ancient ceramics and the very contemporary ceramics. While we are interested in the European ceramics, just not as much as the others (probably because we come from a long line of peasants who would never have been able to afford porcelain)  We stopped for a late lunch at the museum restaurant, Clay, which had just reopened, which was wonderful.  My ice tea was blue and turned purple when lemon was squeezed into it. Kathy had the rigatoni with shrimp, walnut pesto and summer peas while I had a wonderful French omelet with cheddar, mushrooms and fine herb paired with a simple salad

After we left the museum and worked our way back to Markham,  in the late afternoon,

we found a local nail shop and treated ourselves to long overdue pedicures. (I think my nails had become weapons that I was going to need to register!}.  Take out roasted chicken and salad for dinner to make up for lunch.

Bridget
Days 33, 34