cleaned up dir

4 files changed, 166 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/published/2017-06-07_dallas.txt b/published/2017-06-07_dallas.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4ebe7fe
--- /dev/null
+++ b/published/2017-06-07_dallas.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,58 @@
+From Austin we drifted north, toward Dallas, hitting a milestone along the way:
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-06-02_134942_fort-parker-state-park.jpg" id="image-577" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-06-03_135705_fort-parker-state-park.jpg" id="image-578" class="picwide caption" />
+
+We pulled into Fort Parker State Park on a Thursday afternoon and spent the next day watching the campground fill up. This is more or less the pattern, even in summer, the weekends are jammed full, during the week we have the campgrounds to ourselves. 
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-06-04_144933_fort-parker-state-park.jpg" id="image-576" class="picwide caption" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-06-04_082110_fort-parker-state-park.jpg" id="image-579" class="picwide caption" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-06-04_101711_fort-parker-state-park.jpg" id="image-580" class="picwide" />
+
+
+We passed a couple of days in Fort Parker State Park and then headed north to Plano, TX to visit Corrinne's sister and her family. Thanks to the bus we ended up spending an entire week in Plano. Let this be a lesson to those of you who have invited us to your homes, sometimes we way overstay to that point when the smell of rotten fish is upon us. We tried to get it off in the pool.
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-06-07_151806_plano.jpg" id="image-575" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-06-07_151820_plano.jpg" id="image-574" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-06-07_151827_plano.jpg" id="image-573" class="picwide" />
+
+
+
+Possibly worse we shipped a ton of parts, random purchases, laptops I'm reviewing and other stuff that piled up around the house. Seriously, think twice before you invite us over. It all starts out innocently enough. We show up for a couple days, make some vague plans and then. Then.
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-06-07_153310_plano.jpg" id="image-572" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-06-07_153313_plano.jpg" id="image-571" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-06-07_155201_plano.jpg" id="image-570" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-06-11_150803_plano.jpg" id="image-569" class="picwide caption" />
+
+The engine was, yet again, running hot on the way into Plano. I figured since we had a couple days and there wasn't really room to park on the street anyway, I would take it to a repair shop and get the radiator fixed and have a place to park -- two birds one stone sort of thing. 
+
+I found a tiny pinhole size leak in the back side of the radiator, but then the shop that I went to at first turned out to not be able to solder. Kids these days. But they didn't seem opposed to me leaving the bus there for a few days, so we pulled the radiator off and I drove it over to another shop that did solder (I had the first shop replace two belts, which was about the same price as paying for a week's worth of parking). 
+
+The old guy at the radiator shop -- by the way, never trust a mechanic under 50 -- took one look at the radiator and said I can't patch that. When we first got it off and I saw the back my reaction was very similar. I believe what I said was, oh shit. The pinhole leak was small enough that you could only find it when it was pressurized, but it had obviously been going for some time. And the fins were bent in at the corners which means someone had probably been in there already. 
+
+Long story short, for those that don't find engine adventures entertaining[^1], I gave him the go ahead to re-core it. Expensive, but we want to be able to get into the mountains and not worry about overheating. I even considered making it four core, but held off on that since clearance could have been an issue.
+
+Getting the new cores and having it all rebuilt added a weekend and some change to our stay. But it gave me time to install the water tank and get the solar panels on the roof. So I spent my morning in the alley behind a mechanic's wrestling a 65 gallon water tank under a bed and crimping pex. To do all that I had to empty out everything under the bed and pile it out in the alley with me. And then run back and forth to home depot ten times in two days. Oh who am I kidding, it was probably almost twice that many times. I actually didn't think much of the whole project, but then one day I just left everything outside the bus while I was at home depot and I came back around the corner and realized it looked like a small tornado had hit a dumpster and blown everything all over the alley. 
+
+In the afternoons I would eventually start sweating so much my eyebrows would fail me and I couldn't see anymore. I'd give up and pack it up. Fortunately there was a pool back at the house and I could spend some time recovering in proper fashion -- floating it all away. The kids of course spent nearly all their time in the pool playing with their cousins.
+
+Eventually I got the water tank in and the radiator back in to. Started it up, drove home, everything seemed fine. Well. Maybe it was a tad hotter than I'd like, but it was 95 that evening so I dismissed it. 
+
+We said our goodbyes and headed west, into the sunset.
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-06-13_100418_plano.jpg" id="image-567" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-06-13_100305_plano.jpg" id="image-568" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-06-13_100536_plano.jpg" id="image-566" class="picwide" />
+
+We weren't even out of the subdivision when the temperature gauge started to climb again. There was some creative swearing in the bus for a few miles. It's frustrating to fix something and realize you didn't have the right problem, but it's even more frustrating when you spent almost $1000 doing it. I stopped at an auto parts store and let the bus cool, while I contemplating trying to install a new thermostat in the parking lot. Me pulling out radiators at the side of the road, it could be a thing. The part store intervened and saved me from myself by not having the part I needed anyway.
+
+Eventually the engine cooled and I thought screw this, let's push on. Perhaps not the best choice, but I'm stubborn and I needed to get on the road. I also decided to test something hairbrained. Back when we first entered Texas I put some insulation around the engine doghouse, mostly just to cut down on the heat coming off the engine into the cabin, but also to cut down on the noise. It happened to coincide with the engine starting to run hot, so I thought well, let's crack the doghouse and see what happens, maybe that extra airflow was helping. 
+
+Crazy, I know. But. *But*. Well, no that didn't help at all, but it did reveal something interesting -- a loud clattering sound that was previously muffled enough that I assumed it was just some pans in the oven rattling. But with the engine hood open it was very clearly louder and coming from the engine. The mechanically inclined could probably put those two clues together -- rattling metal sounds and overheating engine -- and figure out the problem. It took me about 20 miles but it slowly started to dawn on me, water pumps have ball bearings in them. 
+
+We pushed it as far as Denton, which wasn't far and, very frustrated, called around looking for someone to take a look. About five different shops didn't want anything to do with it, one shop did, but couldn't get to it for another week. Finally on the advice of one of the other shops I called a place way outside of town that supposedly "did old engines". No one answered so I said screw it, let's drive out there and see. So I did and somehow convinced the shop owner, who was mainly a rat rod and custom car builder, to take a look at the bus. Well, I didn't really convince him, the bus did, the bus is cool like that.
+
+So he agreed to replace the water pump the next day. We grabbed a hotel room to wait it out. 
+
+[^1]: If engine adventures bore this is not the blog for you. Until we get everything dialed in I expect to have more engine adventures.
diff --git a/published/2017-07-17_mancos-and-mesa-verde.txt b/published/2017-07-17_mancos-and-mesa-verde.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5847690
--- /dev/null
+++ b/published/2017-07-17_mancos-and-mesa-verde.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,36 @@
+Stay anywhere to long and things start to settle in too much. The bus was made to move, its fluids pool, metal rusts, wood decays, the windows smear with dirt and rain, as Chinua Achebe put it, things fall apart. Everything. All the time. Stay too long and the world will settle down on you. The tires will lose air, the chipmunks will come for the avocados. I'm from California, messing with my avocados is messing with my emotions, I don't care if you're cute and striped.
+
+So we shook off the cobwebs, pulled out of Junction Creek for a few days, and headed up over the pass to the west, to Mancos and points beyond. 
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-15_162643-1_mancos-mesa-verde.jpg" id="image-697" class="picwide caption" />
+
+We found a nice enough campground, nearly deserted. The only downside was a little road noise -- it was up on a hill above the highway and the sound of truck engine brakes was at times annoying. Aside from that though it was much better than Junction Creek. Fewer people and Mancos was much more my speed than Durango.
+
+Mancos consists of one stop light and two paved roads. Or partly paved roads. The rest is dirt and hardly even a stop sign to be found. Still, there's a decent grocery store, a pretty good sandwich shop and a coffee roaster with the best double espresso I've had since we left Athens. There's also a library with passable internet speeds that I could work at.
+
+Mancos is also only about 20 minutes from the entrance to Mesa Verde National Park. 
+
+I knew that after Chaco Canyon Mesa Verde was going to be a let down. You just can't have crowds and retain the stillness and mystery that Chaco has. I feel strange criticizing a place for it's crowds because on the one hand if no one is going to our National Parks no one is going to fight for them to continue existing. Still, I did not enjoy Mesa Verde. I am glad that it draws crowds, glad that people are out there visiting natinal parks and I'm glad they aren't going to Chaco.
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-17_122428_mancos-mesa-verde.jpg" id="image-700" class="picwide" />
+
+
+If you know me you know I'd sooner chew my leg off than go on a guided tour. And Mesa Verde is all guided tours, you don't go into the big ruins by yourself anymore. You get a nanny. That's not for us really so we skipped that part and went to the one smaller ruin you can still explore (somewhat) on your own. 
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-17_123232_mancos-mesa-verde.jpg" id="image-701" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-17_123659-1_mancos-mesa-verde.jpg" id="image-702" class="picwide" />
+
+It was a nice stroll. It was funny to hear the rangers questioning whether our kids could do it, it was less than a mile and only 300 feet elevation change. The trail was paved. It's sad that we've created a world where it's considered amazing for five year olds to walk a mile on asphalt.
+
+We left after lunch.
+
+Just hanging around camp was more to our liking. The kids built obstacle courses, made bees out of pine cones and looked up whenever the thunder rumbled up above, somewhere high in the San Juans because after a month here they've learned that the storms come out of the high country.
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-12_181825_mancos-mesa-verde.jpg" id="image-695" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-15_084210_mancos-mesa-verde.jpg" id="image-696" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-16_144635_mancos-mesa-verde.jpg" id="image-699" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-15_193426-1_mancos-mesa-verde.jpg" id="image-698" class="picwide caption" />
+
+
+
+In the evenings we sat around the fire and listened to the nighthawks darting after food between the pines overhead. This is the Western slope of the Rockies, less water, fewer pines, more oaks, more stars to backlight the silhouettes of Ponderosa needles scratching at the wind.
diff --git a/published/2017-07-24_time-and-placement.txt b/published/2017-07-24_time-and-placement.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..07bae0d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/published/2017-07-24_time-and-placement.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,42 @@
+Every evening around 5 the thunder starts in. You could set your watch by it. Except that there's no need for a watch up here. 
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-24_211753_durango-parents.jpg" id="image-693" class="picwide" />
+
+The way it cracks high and seems to cascade down the mountains reminds me of Greek or Norse stories, the sound feels thrown by some unseen thing. This evening those thunder gods, whomever they may be, have conspired to produce something a little extra. Thor is pounding a little harder, Zeus throwing a little more than usual. A flash and then seconds later a rolling peel of sound the echoes off to the east, down the mountain side. 
+
+Around here they call this the start of the monsoon season[^1]. The rain comes soft and steady, the kind that leaves no puddles here in the forest, much to my children's disappointment. Here all the water is captured by something, held in a bed of rotting needles, leaves, and the roots of rice grass, false oats and mountain parsley. What little makes it lower ends up in the roots of gambel oak and snow willows, and finally somewhere deeper still, up to 12 meters down, the ponderosa pine roots and their attendant webs of fungi get what's left. 
+
+Nothing remains on the surface of things. 
+
+It is easy here to sink into the soil and disappear for a while, everything here is doing it, you are too. 
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-24_212533-2_durango-parents.jpg" id="image-694" class="picwide" />
+
+The valley wall opposite our camp has disappeared in a rainy mist of blue gray nothingness. The light is fading prematurely, leaving a shadowless forest where darkness fades in rather than falling as it does when the sun ducks behind the ridge. 
+
+It is silence save the soft pelting of rain and the call and response of two hardy wood peewees, seemingly unfazed by the storm. And then some storm god throws another bolt and the silence is blasted apart.
+
+I am sitting here listening to the rain, feeling the pace of my chair sinking into the soil. It is a slow but steady rain, a slow but steady sinking. 
+
+I am listening to the rain because that is what you do when it rains.
+
+In every place the rain sounds different. 
+
+Here the rain has a soft and spread out sound. The rain that reaches down here does not do so directly, not much of it anyway. Most of it has hit at least one, probably hundreds, of pine needles on its way to the earth. These drops are small and soft because they have been broken up on their way down. By the time they hit the ground they are more alike than different, every drop having been similarly, but differently bounced through the pine canopy. The result is a steady even sound, occassionally broken up by the rougher splatter of rain coming through a gap in the canopy to land on oak leaves, or the split wood of the picnic table, or the roof of the bus.
+
+Somewhere out there is a forest. It's too dark now to see more than a few feet in front of me. There are two trees at the edge of what faint light the rising moon offers tonight, locked away as it is, somewhere behind a veil of cloud. There's just enough glow that I can still make out the roughness of the tree bark. The curve of their trunks hint at the vastness of space behind them. Despite the rain it is dry here next to the trunks of the pines, whatever water has made it through the canopy is already down below the surface of the needles I'm lying on, staring up, trying to see the branches coming together above me.
+
+One of the more remarkable things about lying on your back in the forest is that you can stare up at the trees running together up into the vastness of space and you can feel the planet spinning through the heavens, but at the same time you can smell the warm fecundity of the soil, all the billions of microbes you're lying on churning their way through the seemingly endless supply of organic material of the forest, one day you. You can feel for fleeting moments the vastness of existence and the minute intimacy of existence at the same time. You find yourself in a web of life and energy that is flowing all around and through you. 
+
+It is impossible to tease apart all the links between everything micro and macro, do not even try. In one way you are you, the you you experience, in another you are the joining together of cells of that found it advantageous to become parts of a whole rather than go it alone -- which one is you? That's the wrong question. Know that all of this is you. All those solitary cells within you are now too specialized to survive without the rest of you, they gave up their individuality to all you to exist. As has already been pointed out, hundreds if not thousands of years before we had the language of microbes and devil of the details by the tail, the wiser among realized that the biggest thing is in the smallest thing. 
+
+John Muir, who spent his fair share of time lying on his back in pine forests, captures this feeling better than I can when he wrote, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."
+
+I think this is one of the principle realizations travel unpacks for you -- that there is no other. You are a part of a whole, interconnected system and joined far more intimately to everything around you than you could ever hope to understand, though attempting to understand it is worth the effort, even if it's impossible. Travel doesn't make it any easier to understand it, but sometimes when you travel you can *feel* it all around you, moving and flowing through you like an invisible wind. 
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-22_172903_durango-parents.jpg" id="image-692" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-22_174408_durango-parents.jpg" id="image-690" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-22_174428-1_durango-parents.jpg" id="image-691" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-22_155812_durango-parents.jpg" id="image-689" class="picwide" />
+
+[^1]: I can only assume no one around here has ever been in a real monsoon, because while it does rain a little more, it's hardly what most of the world would call a monsoon.
diff --git a/published/2017-07-30_mancos-days.txt b/published/2017-07-30_mancos-days.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..268a305
--- /dev/null
+++ b/published/2017-07-30_mancos-days.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,30 @@
+After my parents headed home we said goodbye to Durango -- for good this time -- and headed back over the pass to Mancos. 
+
+Our plan was to spend the weekend there and then head on, but one day I drove down to the coffee shop and instead of the quiet little town I'd been expecting streets were shut down, and there were cars and people everywhere. It turned out to be something called Mancos Days. Naturally we couldn't miss that, so we ended up staying a week longer than we intended and we got to see the Mancos days Parade.
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-29_111230_mancos-days.jpg" id="image-711" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-29_111456_mancos-days.jpg" id="image-710" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-29_111538_mancos-days.jpg" id="image-709" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-29_113035_mancos-days.jpg" id="image-708" class="picwide caption" />
+
+One day I trekked up past Mancos to Cortez to do some laundry and discovered a really good Thai restuarant. The next day we all went for Thai food and on the way back we noticed that the Montezuma County Fair started that weekend. This is how we end up spending weeks in the same place, things slowly unfold and there's always more to see and do. 
+
+You can't miss the fair. I love the fair, especially fairs that aren't all rides and entertainment, which this one was definitely not. Most of it was devoted to the display and sale of livestock. 
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-08-05_115935_montezuma-county-fair.jpg" id="image-712" class="picwide caption" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-08-05_120257_montezuma-county-fair.jpg" id="image-713" class="picwide caption" />
+
+
+The fair also had a corn shucking contest which I really think we should have entered. Next time.
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-08-05_105833_montezuma-county-fair.jpg" id="image-707" class="picwide caption" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-08-05_111958_montezuma-county-fair.jpg" id="image-706" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-08-05_113842_montezuma-county-fair.jpg" id="image-704" class="picwide" />
+
+The girls were really excited about something that I admit did sound fun: the chicken chase. After about 10 seconds in a ring with a bunch of chickens though it was painfully obvious that our kids had no idea what to do with a chicken when the chicken chase turned to the chicken caught.
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-08-05_113335_montezuma-county-fair.jpg" id="image-705" class="picwide" />
+
+Just to make sure they girls weren't the only ones with a moment of awkwardness at the fair, I got picked to join in the Ute tribe's Bear Dance. I thought I held it together okay, but when I was done Corrinne was shaking her head. "You look nothing like a bear," she said.
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-08-05_114314_montezuma-county-fair.jpg" id="image-703" class="picwide" />