After two weeks in Salida we have moved north to the outskirts of Rocky Mountain National Park. Our campground is one of those wonderful old ones built by the CCC 80 or so years ago. It is a Forest Service park, and while not free, Camp Dick (in the Roosevelt National Forest) costs only $9.50 a night with your Senior Pass. In addition to huge campsites, many wildflowers, and the lovely climate that comes with a conifer forest at 8,500 feet, we have drinking water, dumpsters, vault toilets, and a cold spring-fed creek running right through it. You can hear the water from anywhere in the campground.

Yesterday we caught an afternoon hailstorm that came and went for half an hour. I would have liked more thunder, but there was some, and believe it or not, Kat found surviving hailstones fifteen hours later alongside the road a mile to the east of us. There’s another campground there, which was nearly empty this morning; they took much more of a beating from the ice than we did. This is the monsoon season in Colorado. Weather as we know it is turned on its head. Mornings are sunny and too warm, then the clouds roll in and the afternoons are cool and breezy. We have had two out of two park ranger programs cut short by lightning (they cancel them at the first rumble because two visitors have been killed and twelve injured by lightning in RMNP so far this month).

Our long travel season is winding down. We hope to chill for another week here in high Colorado, and then detour to College Station to visit our son, Bomba the Jungle Boy for a few days.  There we’ll enjoy his company and his air conditioning. There we also hope to see our webmaster, website designer, and daughter, Stephanie. If she can get to Texas we’ll celebrate her birthday with gourmet cupcakes and French 75’s. Kat is scheduled to start work at Amazon in Kentucky on August 26. I will then resume my career as a house husband and dog walker in Campbellsville. We have 2,000 miles to roll before then, and Lord have mercy, that’s a lot of trailer pulling. Next year we hope to make it all the way to Oregon and Washington, then return through parts of the Upper Peninsula before Cincinnati and Campbellsville. Whoa, that’s gonna be a lot of diesel!

Speaking of Amazon, they have graciously agreed to sponsorLife on the Blue Highways. You may have noticed a little ad alongside our blog – I have no idea how they decide what to feature there, yesterday it was USB cables – but they sell everything under the sun, often at very good prices. If on occasion you shop on-line, I hope you’ll try Amazon and use the Blue Highways link to get there. They throw us a cookie (think vanilla wafer, not macadamia chocolate chip) for every sale made through our website.

Hey, it’s like NPR’s Pledge Week, minus the badgering!