Continuing on our way home from Wisconsin, Darlene and I came across Colorado National Monument just outside of Grand Junction and decided to have a look. I’d never heard of this place but the scenery was gorgeous and there were fantastic views and rock formations in every direction throughout the park. We ended up spending a couple of days to check it out and do a little hiking – click through for the full gallery:
On our return trip from Wisconsin, Darlene and I made our way down through Iowa and Missouri and across Kansas with one overnight stop and then into Colorado stopping off in Denver but failing to find anywhere nearby to grab a campsite. (Ended up in a motel parking lot north of Boulder.) We stayed a couple of nights in Rocky Mountain National Park to do some hiking. The long views weren’t all that great because the smoke from the huge California wildfires were filling the skies even in Colorado.
Heading south, we found a spot to camp for a couple of nights in national forest land outside of Winter Park and got in some high altitude (10,000′) mountain biking. We visited Dave and Martha at their new home in Evergreen before continuing west on I-70. We camped out a couple of nights and did some trail riding in the hills above Eagle and had to wait out the mud in the morning in order to get the Traveling Cat Adventure Vehicle™ safely down the mountain again.
We also took some time to ride along Glenwood Canyon and tried to hike up to Hanging Lake late in the evening but ran out of time. We came across a mama bear and her two cubs climbing in the trees near the trail though:
Continuing our road trip out to Darlene’s mom, we hit up a bunch of different parks in Minnesota and Wisconsin – some on my own (with Pan and Hera) while Darlene helped her mom during her hip surgery recovery and some together both before and after. We got in some mountain biking, kayaking and sightseeing all around as well as a two-day photo shoot for Carlyn’s high school graduation. However, I forgot to take any pictures while camped out with the cats in her mom’s driveway for a couple of weeks!
Continuing our trek out to Wisconsin along I-90 and across South Dakota, we visited and hiked around a bit in the Badlands National Park and encountered some bighorn sheep. The park campgrounds were full but we found dispersed camping (with lots of other folks) just outside the northwest entrance.
We weren’t able to visit some of the other interesting sites in the nearby Black Hills area (like Jewel Cave or Wind Cave National Park) because a severe thunderstorm and hail warning drove us north out of the way. The next day I dropped Darlene off at the Rapid City airport so she could fly home to make her doctor’s appointment (she’s currently on medical leave due to a hip injury).
I continued on with Pan and Hera and visited the Minuteman Historic National Monument, which was well worth the stop.
Click through for the full gallery:
After stopping over in Portland to visit Glenn and Michele and make a couple of repairs (as well as visit Outside Van), we finally turned east to truly head for Wisconsin. Two of the few tourist stops we made along the way was the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana and the Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming. The Museum of the Rockies has a few rotating exhibits but its showcase is its dinosaur collection which includes “some thirty-five thousand specimens, including the world’s largest collection of Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops, along with America’s largest collection of dinosaur eggs, embryos, and babies”.
Continuing on but before we came upon Devils Tower, I had to sit Darlene down the night before our arrival to watch “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. We arrived early the next morning (before 7 am) to beat the crowds. (Apparently it gets crazy busy there everyday from 10 am to late in the afternoon.) Darlene slept in on the early morning drive and awoke to this view out the campervan window:
Click through for the full gallery:
We made a bit of detour starting our road trip out to Wisconsin by swinging up through Oregon, but I finally got to visit Crater Lake after having passed nearby so many times over the years. We stayed a couple of nights, did a little bit of hiking (Darlene’s still recovering from an injury) while circumnavigating the lake and we took one of the ranger-led boat tours around the lake. Very nice!
Click through for the full gallery:
I haven’t been skiing at Mammoth since the early nineties, after college, but it’s where I learned to ski in high school from nearby Bishop. And I had forgotten what a great big and diverse ski mountain it is – though I’m sure I also wasn’t skiing as much of any mountain’s terrain back then either. Anyway, driving to Mammoth from Santa Cruz/San Jose in the winter isn’t very convenient (given all the Sierra passes are closed) and you have to essentially drive by many other great ski resorts to do it. However, with an extended stay at our new place in Tahoe last week, it was easy to hop down to Mammoth for a couple of days (just a three hour drive) and make use of our Mountain Collective passes.
We got some nice, typical spring skiing conditions: overnight frozen snow, following the sun as the slopes softened up from east to west to north. Plus Mammoth is so high (peaking at 11,000 ft), it was easy to avoid any sticky slush that would develop lower down.
Click through for the full gallery:
On Tuesday, February 6th, SpaceX successfully launched their Falcon Heavy rocket on its inaugural flight, sending Elon Musk’s original Tesla Roadster and “StarMan” on a far reaching orbit around the sun as a test payload. Happily, I was able to fly out to Florida and experience the launch firsthand from the Kennedy Space Center’s closest available viewing location for the general public – just 3.9 miles away from the launch platform! (It’s just too bad they haven’t removed the historic-but-no-longer-needed launch tower at LC-39A, as it was sitting between us and the Falcon Heavy.) Still, it was quite the show with essentially three of their Falcon 9’s strapped together and all twenty-seven engines firing simultaneously! Not to mention the amazing, never-seen-before, simultaneous return of the two outer boosters back to the nearby landing zone!
I’ve made a video of what it was like to watch (and hear) from our vantage point:
This viewing location is part of Kennedy Space Center’s “Feel the Heat” ticket package which takes you to the Apollo/Saturn V Center to view a launch and includes a buffet, some commemorative items, and return entrance to the Kennedy Space Center on a later date to enjoy the rest of the exhibits.
You’re given an assigned arrival time some 5-6 hours before the launch to catch your bus (and told not to come earlier) but for this historic event, there were so many people that it took hours to get through the security gates, boarded on a bus (really? loading the buses serially??) and delivered to the viewing area. By the time we unloaded from the buses at the viewing area, there was slim-pickings for anywhere on the grounds to set up a tripod with a good, unobstructed view because apparently many folks had shown up an hour or more earlier. Anyway, I staked out a spot between others some three hours before the scheduled launch but had to skip the buffet to keep watch over all my gear.
The launch ended up being delayed several times due to high altitude wind shear and we were all getting a little nervous that they’d miss their launch window for the day (1:30 pm – 4 pm) as they rescheduled all the way up to 3:45 pm. But then, about an hour before that, they made the call to go ahead and start fueling the liquid oxygen – meaning a go for launch! Hurrah!
And then 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, …. and great clouds of steam erupted with 27 engines firing – quite the sight! We couldn’t see the rocket until it cleared that annoying (and unneeded!) tower, but afterwards the light intensity of the exhaust was incredible as it climbed into the sky. You hardly notice the absence of sound from the rocket with the cheers of the crowd around you, but a few seconds later it starts to come across – and it’s an amazing, stuttering roar.
Then you get to watch it climb and roll and, higher up, begin to build a beautiful column of vapor – which it eventually disappeared into. After a bit, it reappeared further east as a faint set of exhaust plumes still coursing away. On the monitor, we could watch and hear announcements of each successful milestone and cheers would erupt each time – like with the separation of the side boosters and their retro-firing to return to Cape Canaveral.
Minutes later the two side boosters appeared in our sky coming down at incredible speed. We all lost track of them though when they cut their engines again and unfortunately many of us weren’t in a position to see them again when they reignited for their final deceleration over their landing targets. We could of course see the video feed on the monitors, perfectly landing themselves (vertically!), like something out of science fiction – but it wasn’t until after they had landed that their twin sonic booms reached us. We all of course learned later that the center core didn’t fare so well because two of the three needed engines were unable to restart (not enough ignition fuel) and it crashed into the ocean close enough and hard enough to damage the autonomous drone ship that was waiting for it. But hey, this was a test flight!
The Falcon Heavy is now the most powerful rocket in the world, with the most lifting capability – though it will soon be surpassed by NASA’s upcoming “SLS” rocket as well as SpaceX’s own future “BFR”.
Meanwhile, “Starman” continues his/her epic journey in space:
Click through for my full photo gallery from the launch and my follow-up visit to the Kennedy Space Center:
Here are links to more videos of the first Falcon Heavy launch: