The Toadstools......

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8:21 am - Wednesday - November 1st - Lone Rock - 51º F, humidity 56%, wind 8 mph out of the west.....forecast high for today is 74º F in paradise.....clear blue skies.  Woke up this morning to a 90% state of charge on our house batteries!

We were up a little later than normal Tuesday, but that's okay, right?  We're retired....we have no schedule.....at least for another week (we begin working our new job November 7th).  We have kept ourselves on Utah, or Mountain Time even though we are less than 1 mile from the Arizona border.  That means sunrise is not until after 8 am, which, in turn, means we usually don't get out of bed until after 8 am.  So, you might be wondering why we don't just switch out clocks over to Arizona time and get it over with.  Well, we have been living under Mountain time since mid June and we just hate having to adjust our internal clocks any sooner than we must.  We will be moving the Newell into Page, AZ on Wednesday, and driving the VW to SoCal on Thursday for the wedding I wrote about yesterday, so until then we are still on Mountain time baby!

Driving south on US-89 a week ago we passed a turnout called the 'Toadstools Trailhead'....I remarked to TLE that we should drive back there later in our Lone Rock stay and do the hike and see what the 'Toadstools' were all about.  Well, Tuesday became that day.  The trailhead is about 17 miles north of Lone Rock, and we arrived there in less than 20 minutes.

The Toadstools Trailhead is part of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.  According the trailhead sign the round trip hike to the Toadstools is 1.6 miles.....essentially an 'out and back' hike.  

Within minutes of entering the trail you notice the stratification in the surrounding hills....rarely do we see stratification like this......all the layers are pretty much parallel to the surrounding terrain.....usually we see it on the diagonal......

.....basically, after the first 100 yards the trail mostly seems to follow a dry wash as it twists and turns through the canyon gradually gaining altitude.....our total elevation gain was about 150'.  The other thing we noticed almost immediately is it was very hard to follow the trail.  It appears that people just walk wherever they wish making it very difficult to figure out which trail was 'THE' trail.  All that being said, no matter which trail you followed you would end up at the same place eventually.  

Within 20 minute we arrived at the 'Toadstools'........

.....yup, they do look sort of like 'toadstools'.   Here's my take on this hike.....if we hadn't just spent 3 days hiking in Bryce Canyon I think we would have appreciated this hike more, but frankly, Bryce Canyon is chock full of 'hoodoo' features just like these.  Nonetheless, it was an enjoyable hike, and the weather was perfect.  My Strava program showed we hiked just over 1.7 miles round trip.....no doubt we were off 'THE' trail on a few occasions....:-)

We arrived back at the coach around 1:30 where we both sat down to do some more reading.  Around 4 pm we decided to take our 'out and back' hike out to US-89, but limited it to just 3.3 miles since we had already hiked 1.7 miles earlier.  We tried to time our hike to arrive back at the coach in time for our 'happy hour' fire, but by the time we returned the wind had picked up nixing that idea.

After watching Game 5 of the World Series until almost midnight Sunday night I decided to not watch game 6, but keep track of the game on my smart phone.  As it turned out the Dodgers prevailed 3-1 and have sent this years 'Series' to game 7 Wednesday night.  It was much less stressful not watching game 6, but I am sure I will be tuned in Wednesday night for game 7....winner take all!

We watched more 'Mad Men' episodes until about 11 pm before heading to bed.....Wednesday is moving day!

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The daily reader......

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8:58 am - Tuesday - October 31st - Lone Rock - 59º F, humidity 33%, wind 3 mph out of the west by northwest.....partly cloudy with a forecast high of 75º F.  State of battery charge was 87% at 8:40 am this morning.

After the marathon game 5 of the World Series which had our TV on until almost midnight our batteries were at 88% to begin Monday.....the lowest they've been since we arrived at Lone Rock.  On top of that the forecast, for the first time, was for partly cloudy skies meaning that getting back to 100% on our house batteries would be iffy.  Now, even when there is total overcast our solar panels will still put some charge into our batteries, but getting back to 100% is not going to happen under those circumstances.  Nonetheless, we did get back to 97% by 3:30 pm, and that is as far as they got.

For a change we did not take a walk, and we did not go into town......we just sat home reading all day long.....well, let me revise that a little.....TLE read all day long.....I spent the morning cleaning our bug spattered windshield, cleaning bugs off our air horn 'trumpets' and our front cap, greasing the wheel bearings on our 26' enclosed car hauler trailer, vacuuming out the back seat of the VW (we hauled 4 bundles of firewood from the local gas station the other day), checking the oil and coolant levels in the VW for our upcoming trip back to SoCal for the wedding of our dear friend Amanda, and finished by sweeping out the trailer.  By that time it was around 1:30 and then I spent the rest of the day reading. 

It's the end of October and the National Park Service folk are beginning to winterize the facilities here at Lone Rock, which means turning off the water very soon.....we are hoping the water stays on at the dump station until after we depart on Wednesday, November 1st.  If it is turned off before we leave then there is a place in Page we can dump, but it's not nearly as convenient, obviously.

We were outside enjoying happy hour by the fire by 5:15 pm.......with the cloudiness there was not the usual light show, but we thoroughly enjoyed the view, nevertheless........

.....we got a little bit of color just after 7 pm, but that was the extent of the light show for the evening......

......since I no longer watch the NFL, and the only thing on Monday nights that we would, in the past, have watched was Monday Night Football, so we decided to spend the evening watching a few more episodes of 'Mad Men' Season 3......I love 'Unlimited Data'!

We were in bed before 11 pm.....thanks for stopping by!

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"The world has moved on......"

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8:29 am - Monday - October 30th, Lone Rock - 54º F, humidity 29%, wind 3 mph out of the west by northwest.......partly cloudy at sunrise.  Forecast high for today is 74º F, with partly cloudy skies.....charging the batteries via sun power will be interesting today.

Once again, upon awaking, I checked the state of charge for our house batteries on our Blue Sky monitoring system to find them at 89%......by 1 pm they were at 100%.  The combination of having the four solar panels now, and the ideal weather conditions (not too cold at night, and not too hot during the day) make for a perfect solar charging scenario.  Low temps in the 40's at night means the battery discharge will not be great (cold temps cause any batteries to discharge more quickly), and moderate daily temps in the 70's means there will not be too much heat which tends to inhibit the charging efficiency of solar panels.  Of course, what we are always chasing in this life style is the perfect weather......t-shirt, shorts and flip flop weather.......how nice that it is also the perfect weather for solar panels and boondocking!

We had no big aspirations for Sunday.....there is no NFL football being watched, so once again I had Sunday free.  I chose to finish Book 5 of Steven King's 'The Dark Tower' 7 book series.  I first discovered this series back in 2004, or 5.....I was sitting in an airport waiting for a flight.  Back then I always made sure I had a book to read on the plane as I really hate flying.....it's not that I'm afraid of flying, but I get bored, and reading helps pass the time more quickly.  Anyway, there I am needing a book before it's time to board our flight to Wisconsin and I spy a small store across the concourse which has newspapers and books, so I walk over to see what they have that might interest me.  I like reading westerns, and I immediately saw a book entitled 'The Gunslinger' with a cover picture of a cowboy with a gun in his hand.....okay, who it the author?  I turn the book over and it says Stephen King and there is a picture of Stephen King.  I am not a fan of Stephen King, but I was intrigued.....he wrote a western?  Well, I bought book and began to read it on the flight to Wisconsin......as one might expect with Stephen King involved, this is not really a 'Western' in the 'Western Genre' sense.    I also quickly discovered that it was not just an isolated book, but the first book in a seven book series called 'The Dark Tower'.  As the flight progressed I became captivated by the premise of the book, and series.  I finished the book within a day of landing in Wisconsin......I had to find the next two, or three books to keep reading so I drove over to the local Barnes and Noble and found they had books 2, 3 and 4 in paperback so I bought them on the spot.  To make long story a little shorter I finished reading book 6 just after we returned home from our Wisconsin visit, and found out that Book 7 had just been released in hardback (how timely for me, no?)......I found a copy at a local SoCal Barnes and Noble and purchased it for $60.....I had to see how it ended, right?  Well, that is the tale of my 3 week obsession with the 'Dark Tower' series back in 2004.  

So, fast forward to late last year when I heard the Dark Tower series was being made into a movie/TV series, and then I found out my grandson, Elijah (Kate's son), was reading the series, so I decided to read them again so he and I could talk about them when we were in town periodically.  I've been re-reading them quite slowly, and feel like I am getting more out of them this time around.....Kate says he is in the middle of Book 5 - 'Wolves of the Calla', which is the book I just finished.  I started to ready Book 6 - Song of Susannah around 2 pm when TLE said......"we need to take our walk"......uh, oh yeah!  So we changed our clothes and set out on a 4.2 mile walk at a fast pace....I think we averaged around 16 minutes, 23 seconds a mile for that distance, or about 3.7 mph.....WOW, no wonder I was a tad beat when we got back!

By the time we returned, and cooled down it was closing in on 3:30 pm......TLE had mentioned earlier that we should go out for dinner, which we have not done in quite a while, so around 4 pm we jumped in the VW and headed into Page to El Tapatio (4 stars on 483 reviews) Mexican Restaurant for an early dinner.....what a great decision that was.....

....we both ordered their Jumbo 'Original' House Margarita......and to accompany that wonderful Margarita I ordered a combo plate with two Chile Relleños.  TLE ordered their Pollo de Diablo.......

TLE's Pollo de Diablo and my dish in the background

......it's good to be back in Arizona where it is easy to find very good Mexican food!  We would wholeheartedly agree with the 4 star rating.  By the time we finished we were stuffed!  We were home by 5:45 pm putting on looser fitting clothing and, for me, taking a nice long nap!

We watched game 5 of the World Series in which the Dodgers blew a 4 run lead, a 3 run lead, and a 1 run lead.  They entered their last at bat (top of the 9th) trailing the Astros 12-9, but managed to score three to tie the game at 12-12.  The Astros ultimately won the game in the bottom of the 10th 13-12......the pitching for both teams was abysmal, as one might expect with 25 runs being scored, and 7 home runs.  Naturally I was an unhappy camper at just before midnight when the game finally ended.  But, as I have said before, it's only sports, not real life.

Going back to 'no NFL football being watched'.....it has been about a month since I stopped watching the NFL, and cancelled my 'NFL Sunday Ticket' (DirecTV) due to the disrespect being shown by NFL players for our flag, our country and military entirely based on a false premise.  I have not watched a game since September 25th, and I am gradually getting used to having my Sunday's back to do other things.  Life is good, and the 'world has moved on' as Roland Deschain (Dark Tower Series main character) would say.

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