Storrie Lake SP, Las Vegas, NM

We rose early and started to prepare to leave. We weren't sure how long we would be staying when we arrived and it ended being a week. That's good because we got the 7th day free. How nice. This is a very nice park with the best location in Denver. We'll be returning in the future.

We returned to the Apple Ridge Cafe for breakfast. We shared a breakfast burrito and a slice of apple pie. What a way to start the day.

We dashed over to Vicky's house and finished fixing her front door latch with an appropriate screw. After a quick goodbye, we returned to get the RV.

On our way out we settled the bill and dumped the holding tanks. We're now ready for some boondocking again, fully emptied, charged and filled as appropriate. Wee caught I25 South.


We stopped in Las Vegas, NM at Storrie Lake SP just NW of town for the night.

More Of Denver Area

Monday:

We moved from Wal-Mart's this morning. It's going to snow tonight and having a power hookup will be nice. In addition, we've been out for a week now and those tanks were getting full and empty as is inappropriate. We dumped the holding tanks and filled the water and LPG tanks. Since it's freezing were not hooking up to water and sewer. Who wants to play with frozen and/or broken hoses. Were amateurs at cold weather camping and have a older California type RV, as in compartments and holding tanks not insulated or heated. and single pane windows. To top that, our electric heater has gone bad. This time it goes in the trash.

It's rained all day, heavier into the early evening. Supposed to snow before morning?

We headed over to the hospital to visit with Virginia but I got ill and Lou went up by her self. Vicky was ill today as well. Not sure what it was but best guess is Boca de Beppo's food.

Lou did our laundry in the parks laundry room. This park has a nice laundry and shower rooms. It's kind of unusual in that you get a key to one of the many shower/bathrooms. The room is shared with other sites but the campers only have access to one room. That means serial showers for each site. Unusual but does control access.

There are lots of bunnys hanging around the RV spaces.

The RV park is also next door to Prospect Park, one of the many nice parks in the area. There is a nice lake there.

Tuesday:

I felt worst today. Full force of food poisoning. What fun! I just lounged around all day.
Lou went over to see Virginia at the hospital. She's much better. The respirator is gone and she got to eat again finally.
On her way back, she got a good dose of thrift store shopping.

Wednesday:

Pretty much the same as yesterday. Lou did more shopping and visiting.

In the evening, I finally got to have a little chicken noodle soup.

Thursday:

Feeling better this morning. Lou and I took a walk around the lake in Prospect Park next door. Lots of geese there. About noon, we went to breakfast at the Apple Ridge Cafe nearby. A full parking lot each time Lou passed by, tipped her off to a very good restaurant. We shared a nice chicken fried steak breakfast. This is the first real solid food I've eaten in 3 days. We saw a great looking breakfast burrito pass by while we were waiting to be seated but opted for a more bland breakfast.

We visited Virginia at the hospital. I haven't seen her since I've been ill. What a difference. It's good to hear her talk again.


We went over to Golden to look around. In Golden, at the General Store, there are a lot of metal enamel plate pictures. One of them includes a picture of my nephew John's Chevy. He's very proud of that car.
We did some more laundry and relaxed around home most of the rest of the day.

Friday:

Another breakfast at the same great Apple Ridge Cafe. This time, we shared an outstanding wet Breakfast Burrito.

After a visit to Virgina we went by the Mint to see if we could get a tour. Nope, tours all full. So we toured the capitol building. Colorado has one of the nicest capitol buildings we've toured. We had a nice tour guide, an 81 year young lady that was a fountain of information, and energy.


The Marble in the building is unique. All the marble from the quarry used was consumed to build the capitol building. There are some images in the marble if you look closely. This one shows George Washington.


Denver is another town with oddly painted fiberglas art figures. Here, they have a lot of Cows downtown. This fiberglass art is almost as ubiquious as , say, Starbuck Coffee Houses. Here is the required picture of where we are staying at Prospect RV Park.

After the tour we were hungry so we dropped by the Cheesecake Factory for dinner. We shared a pork chop dinner and a piece of chocolate tower cake. Then off to home.

Saturday:

After our morning visit to Virginia we went to the Zoo. Denver has one of the nicest zoos we've been to. The animals were well displayed, looked healthier than most zoos and the animals seemed to be interested in being seen. All this made for a nice visit.


The Denver Zoo has a new Gorilla baby. Daddy doesn't seem worried.


There are lots of nice animals at this zoo. I wonder if they'd be good house pets?

We stopped by a Qudobo Mexican restaurant for dinner and then a visit to Virginia. We then dropped by Vicky's house for a short visit. Her front door lock wasn't working right so I fixed it. We then stopped by the market for some items before heading home. It started to rain fairly heavily just after we were inside. It had been dry all day until then. Nice day.

Sunday:

We wanted to get an early start today, and did! Wow.

We headed downtown to Virginia's after breakfast at home. We ran into roadblocks due to a marathon race and a police officer who evidently wasn't paying attention at his traffic control training sessions. We had to cross the route twice. At the first, the officer let cars through between runners. at the second, the inattentive officer didn't. So, we parked the car and walked the remaining three blocks to the hospital. When we returned, the race was almost over, there were several blocks between straggler runners and we were allowed through.

We went to the the Denver Nature and Science Museum which took us all day for a quick look. They have really great panorama displays of stuffed specimens of all sorts. There is also a great view of the downtown Denver skyline with the mountains behind from the 4th floor observation deck.


A nice view of downtown Denver with the Rockies beyond from the Denver Nature and Science Museum.
We plan on leaving Denver tomorrow morning heading toward Santa Fe, New Mexico. We ant to get out before the next storm on Wednesday.

Denver

Thursday:

We left Rock Springs a little before 9am. The sky is overcast but the roads are dry. At Laramie we took Hwy 287 toward Fort Collins. It looks like a town we'll have to return to. We arrived in Denver around 3pm. We contacted Don's niece Vicky and we all dropped by for an evening visit to Don's sister Virginia at the hospital. She is making progress to recovery from recent surgery. We were very low on gas so stopped by a Conoco station. It took nearly 30 minutes to fill the tank, about 2 gallons per minute. How slow can you go? We stopped by our neighborly Wal-Marts for the night in Wheatridge, West of Denver. We'll be hanging around for a couple of days.

Friday:


Don's nephew Larry and niece Vicky at Vicky's house in Arvada. Larry, from Cheyenne, is a recent retiree from the railroad, a novice still. We had dinner at the Boca de Beppo restaurant downtown. Nice food. Be careful not to over order as we did.

Saturday:

I made an attempt to repair the broken driverside windshield. The crack is 10-12 inches but below the driver's view. The crack was contaminated by all the rain so it isn't invisible. Hopefully it is stopped.

I went to Wal-Mart's photo center and made some prints from pictures of our get together. First time I've used the photo kiosk. Worked great, took about 10 minutes. Sure beats printing them on the printer.

Our afternoon was a visit to Hobby Town for a look around and dinner at a nearby Hofbrau where we all had fajitas. Odd menu there. Not like the cafeteria like hofbrau's I'm used to. More like a Colorado/Mexican food restaurant.

Sunday:

We lounged around all morning. We went over to the hospital about 1230. Later, nephew John, his wife Judy, daughter Angie and her son Kegan came over. Niece Vicky and her son Mike also came over. Lots of visitors for sister Virginia. We wore her out.

John and family headed back to Cheyenne, Vicky and Mike to there home and we headed downtown.

We walked the 16th Street Mall, shared a wonderful slice of taramuso cheesecake at The Cheesecake Factory and then went over to Vicky's for dinner of homemade chili. (Yes, we are learning to eat desert first. Wisdom comes with age, or at least I hope so.) Vicky had also made a delightful blackberry cobbler. (Yes, two deserts. See what I said about wisdom.)

We were the only RV at Walmart's tonight. Everyone else must be smarter, so they left town.

Across Utah

We left West Wendover, the gambling side, after a nice buffet breakfast at the Rainbow Casino. We had parked by the casino rather than across the street in the truck and RV parking because it was more level, quieter, and because there weren't many other people using the lot. Business must be way off. We had about four neighbor RVs, all of which were on the road before we left about 9am.


This was supposed to be desert as we approached Salt Lake City. Crossing Utah was OK. Not much truck traffic heading eastbound for some reason.


We arrived in Salt Lake City a little before 11am. I put up the dish to check on the location of Zim's crafts. Lou has loved to visit there in past visits but it seems to be shrinking. It used to be the best source for crafts. They have a warehouse store a few miles away but we'll have to put that off for another visit. May it is bigger. We saw the piece of "art', above left, on our walk about Salt Lake City. This cow had a better idea of how to get over the moon. Fall is arriving in SLC. This side walk by Pioneer park is quite nice. Look at the end to see our RV and toad at the end of the sidewalk.
We headed out again just as it was starting to rain. It rained fairly hard all the way to Rock Springs where we stopped for the night. We spotted the Wal-Mart store so that's our current address. We should make Denver tomorrow evening.

Across Nevada

I updated the blog. We then shared a nice breakfast at the Nugget.
We were on the road about 10 am. The weather is really nice.


On the way East from Sparks, we saw many coyote that had been killed on the side of the road. There must be an awful lot of them here in the desert. While Lou was driving, one casually walked across the freeway which she almost hit. Evidently they are not too traffic savy.

We stopped a couple of times in Winnemucca and Elko to stretch the legs. Not too much exciting today.

We're staying the night in Wendover in the Rainbow Casino Lot.

Sparks Fly

Lou took Dawn home and had a couple of meetings. I did some minor cleanup of leaves scattered when I cleaned the gutters last night and then cleaned the downspouts. Enough! I pulled out the RV and hooked up the toad, made the final checks. When checking the oil I found the hood latch was broken so I repaired it.

The roofers were working on the neighbors, so that provided some entertainment and the usual morning chat with the neighbors. Before too long Lou had returned and it was lunch time. We walked to Mr Chau's fast Chinese food nearby. We got the low carb meal with vegetables deluxe, barbq ribs, five flavor chicken and hot and sour soup. very good. We can get one order and share and be stuffed.

We were on the road at 1:45 pm. We headed up Hwy 101 to Hwy 92 crossing the San Mateo bridge to Hwy 880. The Hwy 238 to Hwy 580. Traffic was good, though starting to pick up over by Livermore. We caught Hwy 205, then Hwy 5, and finally caught 80. We tried to stop for a break in Rocklin east of Sacramento. They have camping world and some other interesting shops that might have been interesting, but there was no place to park so we got back on the highway. Traffic was heavy passing through Sacramento but eased up after Rocklin. Weather was nice, overcast but nothing wet. We arrived in Reno about 6:45 pm. We parked on the street near the Circus-Circus. We walked around. Lots of places closed, just the big boys left. The new train underpass through town looks nice. We had dinner at Cal-Neva and then headed out. Didn't go far. We saw a nice parking lot at the Nugget with RV's stopped for the night so we added ours to the lot. It was 9pm. We went inside for a short visit losing 23 cents at the slots. Big spenders.

This is a nice place to stay, but may be to loud for some being set between Hwy 80 and the train tracks. We like the sound of trains, ourselves.

On OurMark

Where did the day go. Seems like We didn't do much today and the day is gone.


I did a little weeding behind the fountain area and pruned the boysenberry bushes as well. I washed the RV and filled the water and drained the holding tanks. We're packed and ready to go. Lou secured some of the stuff in the yard and cleaned up the RV.
It's overcast and sprinkled a bit in the afternoon. The roofers dropped by the neighbors and put plastic over their roof. It's not supposed to rain until Tuesday. I hope Hwy 80 stays open.
Finally, I cleaned our rain gutters.
I still have to clean up a bit of that debris while Lou has her doctor appointment, then we're off.