Fulltiming Road Runners

This weekend was what we’d expected Memorial Weekend to be before the weather decided to be cold and rainy for Mem. Weekend…. people coming in, parking at 9:48 P.M., and registering at 10:15… people parking in a double site not knowing it was double the price of a single and only having enough money for a single, and no checks, having to move their tent trailer to a single at 9:15 at night… thinking we were all caught up with registering, collecting money, etc. until Thom takes a “last turn” around the grounds and finding new campers we have to register and collect from… Thom having to go out at 11:35 p.m. to ask a couple of the campers to turn down their music. Actually everyone was very well behaved considering the beer that was consumed in various camp sites.

We had several people leave today after having spent 1 or 2 nights here, and several more people come in. I haven’t updated my spreadsheet yet, but I’m thinking we’re near full again. Last night we only had 2 empties in each campground, tonight maybe 3 or 4 each.

Today was beautiful… another shorts day from 11 a.m. until 6:30 p.m. Tomorrow is supposed to be the same.

All in all, this is a wonderful way to spend our summer. I’m seeing lots of new critters and flowers, Thom is NOT becoming a couch potato. He loves yard work, and believe me, here in the campgrounds he has plenty of “yard” to take care of… as well as bathrooms, fire pits, and so on.

We learned on Thursday that we have had cows coming into the campground thru a break in the fence between the rancher’s property and our campground. We haven’t seen them in here yet, but sure have seen “sign” of them.

Everyone is saying that now that the river is slowing down a wee bit and things are drying up on the hills above us, the moose will start coming down. Thom saw a big bull moose yesterday coming out of a group of aspen and starting to walk down towards us. I feel the same about moose as I do rattlesnakes only a little less apprehensive. Moose are unpredictable and if I run into one I’m not sure what it or I would do. Snakes are a bit more predictable… still scary though.

I got an email this evening from my son. He and Tiffany and my grandson, Coen are coming up tomorrow. It’s been over 3 weeks since I’ve seen Coen and Tiff, so I’m really excited. Mike says Coen is really getting personality and growing. I can’t wait! I’ll take pics if I’m not too busy playing with the darling. (of course I’ll share them with ya’ll! I love ta brag)

Now I have to go tend the campfire before it goes out. Thom is up checking the Upper Meadows Campground for new campers, etc.

Toodles ya’ll!

It’s been quiet since last Monday.  Thom’s caught up with cleaning all the used sites and the bathrooms.  I’ve been walking and taking photos.  The light was very nice for taking a few shots of our campsites… empty.  This is one of the most popular sites.  There’s room for several tents and the river is at the back of the site.

We fully expect to have our campground empty during the work week, but today we’ve had two check-ins for the night.  It’s kind of nice.

Tonight we were treated to taco dinner at the American Legion by our managers.  All the canyon hosts were treated.  It was lots of fun with very good food.

It’s 9:30 p.m. and I want to get to bed early tonight.

Toodles!

Before I tell you more about our campgrounds I have to mention the surprise we had yesterday. I had gone to the Upper Meadows to check for new campers and Thom had a knock on our door. It was a couple who follow our blog. I understand they visited our friends last winter & Ron couldn’t remember their names. Ron luv, their names are Marvin & Debbie from Utah. They mentioned they’d be up to camp later this summer. We look forward to visiting with them again.

Our campgrounds are Forest Service campgrounds run by American Land & Leisure. We have 9 sites in Upper Meadows and 23 sites in Lower Meadows. 6 of the 23 sites are doubles. We have no hookups at all in the sites. We do have 1 vault toilet in the Upper and 3 of them in the lower. We also have water spigots for fresh water at each of the bathrooms and scattered throughout the campground. This picture is the back of our trailer, but all the sites have this lovely concrete pad with extra long table and concrete firepit.

This is a photo of a site from the front. The cone is there because they came in, paid, then took their camper to go fishing for the day.

This is just a photo of a tent set up across the way from us.

This is taken from the upper road between the two campgrounds. It’s a photo of the Ogden River. You can barely see the roof of the vault toilet in our Lower Meadows Campground. Several sites have the river flowing right by with easy access to the river. It’s WAY full right now with runoff from melted snow, but is lovely fishing later in the summer.

This is a shot of our backyard showing the view we have to the southwest. Our weather station to the left and bird feeder to right… which brings me to the unhappy news our Dave & Barb, our managers, brought us yesterday when they came to collect the money.

A year ago, in the Uinta (pronounced You in tah) mountains a bear pulled a young boy out if his tent (tore into the side of the tent) and drug him off and killed him. The parents of this boy have decided to sue the Forest Service. Keep in mind this happened in the Uintas. We are located in the Wasatch mountains. We been told there are no bears in our canyon. In spite of no bears here, the USFS has decided we can no longer have bird/critter feeders in our campgrounds, not even hummingbird feeders. Where bears exist, they have been known to pull down seed & hummingbird feeders to get the seed/sugar water. I haven’t taken down my feeders yet, but they are all empty and waiting for me to pull them down.

Shhhhh… this is a secret, don’t tell anyone… (she says as she writes in her very public blog)

I still have a whole bunch of seed so there’s a good chance I’ll still toss out seed on the ground for the ground feeders - birds, squirrels, wood chucks, chipmunks. I will also probably buy some plants that will attract the hummers to hang on the feeder hooks.

This has been a fun weekend with people coming in and going out. We’ve managed to keep up with them quite well. We have one family here with children and the little girl, who is about 4 or 5 years old, says hi every time Thom and I or just Thom go by in our cart. Her greeting is unique and really cute… “Hi Santa Claus! I’m still being a good girl.” Last night I was by myself in the cart and she stopped me and said “Hi Mrs. Claus. Will you please tell Santa Claus I’m still being a good girl”
You can see in this pic why she calls him Santa Claus.

I’m off to do dishes & mop floors. Ya’ll behave and have fun!

Toodles.

I mentioned the last time I blogged… two days ago… that I would share a photo of the currant flowers.  In the past I’ve seen currant bushes and berries many many times, but seeing the bush with the flowers totally baffled me.  It no longer really looked like a currant bush to me.  Thanks to Hale, the botanist, I was reassured it was truly a currant bush.

This is another plant he identified for me, but I quickly forgot what he told me it is called.  I just think it is a very dainty, pretty plant.

Joe and Sherry sent a comment and asked for pictures of the surrounding area.  For tonight I’ll give you this photo of the entrance to our campground.  I think it’s very pretty here and I can see why they say we will be totally full for the Memorial Weekend in spite of the unseasonably cool weather.  I’ve taken more shots from the campground looking out and hope to share them this weekend.

Today is Thursday and our campgrounds are about 1/2 full already for the weekend.  We anticipate being completely full by the end of the day tomorrow.  So far, the people here all seem to be the quiet type who are interested in enjoying the peace and tranquility of the area.  Of course, it follows that those who plan ahead and get where they’re going early are those who are basically safe & sane.  We’ll see what tomorrow brings with the last minute peoples.

Dang… it’s 10:00 p.m. (quiet time), gotta turn off the generator and go.  More soon.

Toodles!

Instead of giving you the same ol’, same ol’ stuff about how we’re getting ready for Memorial Weekend, etc. I have to tell you about the guy who stopped by looking for directions.

I’m sure everyone reading our blog realizes I’m an avid amateur photographer and love all critters and plants in their natural settings. Today I had a knock on the door. It was a gentleman looking for a church camp just the other side of the hill from us. He said he’d been asked to take a group of girl scouts on a 3 mile hike and they were supposed to start at that camp. He mentioned he was a botanist and was looking for natural plants to share with them on the hike. As the local Mormons would say… Oh my heck!!! I was in heaven. I had this guy who could answer all my questions about all these plants growing in my current front and back yards!

When we first got here I saw these plants that looked like they may become wild gladiolas or iris, but as time went on I decided they were just a type of bamboo. He told me they are a lily… Camas Lily and we should have fields of lilies by June. He identified a plant I wasn’t sure about. It is a currant bush. I’ll share a photo of it tomorrow. I also learned we will have wild geranium, & cow parsnips blooming. Cow Parsnips sound kinda clumsy, but they are really pretty flowers. So are the geranium.

I told the gentleman I felt totally privileged he stopped by and I appreciated the info more than he could imagine… and that he was more than welcome to march his girl scouts thru our campgrounds and if the wild strawberries in Upper Meadows were ripe, they could partake.

Poor Thom spent a large part of the day today getting the campsites spit-spot for the Memorial Weekend. The stoopid blower quit working today, which took up a lot of his time, so people are going to have to put up with tree droppings (not bird) unless we can get it fixed tomorrow. We don’t have walkie talkies yet to let them know we need work done on the blower! (*whine*)

We expect the campers to start coming in tomorrow. I was hoping to get down to a store tomorrow, but might not be able to.

Nuff ramblin’. Toodles.

We’re getting pretty used to doing what we’re supposed to be doing.  We have most of our equipment now which helps us in the doing.  The weed whacker still isn’t right so Dave took it back to maintenance and we should have it back before next weekend.  We also should have our walkie talkie before next weekend.  I sure hope so.  I don’t want to be without communications during Memorial Weekend.  They will only be giving us one walkie talkie so we ordered a pair from Costco so Thom and I can communicate between campgrounds when one is in Upper and the other is in Lower Meadows.  They’ve been plugged in since this morning charging so we can test them tomorrow.  Initial charge has to be 24 hours.  Good thing we have a generator and the solar panels and inverter.

Yesterday and today were wonderfully warm days.  The lows didn’t even get down below freezing last night.. it did get down TO freezing though.  It stayed nice and cozy in the trailer though.  Only got down to 52F.  For as cold as it gets in the early mornings it warms up quickly when the sun comes up.

Spring flowers are finally opening.  I’ve been watching some promising plants wondering what they were going to have in the way of flowers.  This one was a wonderful surprise to me.  It’s a Mountain Blue Bell.  The flowers just started opening today.

This is a photo of the Oregon Grape flower.  The fruit will look like tiny frosted purple grapes.

I finally got a shot of the Male Calliope Hummingbird.  It’s not great, but at least I got it.  The Calliope is the smallest of hummingbirds.  He’s only about 3-1/2″ from head to tip of tail.

And finally, this Wood Chuck.  She is quite friendly and will come up and eat out of our hands.  We’ve only hand fed her once.  We’re not sure we should encourage her lack of fear for humans.  This photo was taken from only about 3 feet away.

I’ve got less than 1/2 hour to write this. It’s 9:35 now and quiet time is 10:00 p.m. We have to turn off the generator then. We wouldn’t worry about it except we have campers in the campground tonight and want to set a good example.

We have a couple in a 5th wheel, a group of boy scouts practicing for a 15 mile hike, a man and his teenage son and a group of 11 young people partying. I think things will be okay with the party group. I was out in the cart and saw a bundle of twigs in the middle of the road, so I stopped and tossed them back into the brush. Then I saw two of the party guys come out from behind a downed tree and realized the bundle was their gathered firewood. Boy did I feel “DUH!!”. I told them what I did, apologized to them, went home quickly and gathered 3 large chunks of our firewood and drove it down to their campsite… I redeemed myself. Then one of the guys told us they had friends coming in maybe a bit after we lock the gates. Thom went down and told them he would wait until their friends got here before he locked the gates. I think we’ve gotten into their good graces enuff for them to want to not make us unhappy.

Today was a beautiful (with a capital B) day! It was warm, but not too; sunny; clear; and I even got to wear my shorts for several hours. I had time to sit out front with my camera and take photos of birds and wood chucks (don’t know yet if they turned out okay). We have one pregnant female wood chuck who is very friendly (read that tame) and who will come right up to Thom and take food from his hands. I’m sure the people here last year fed her too. Her eyes are so pretty and innocent, but we’re being careful.

For those of you who read our blog for thoughts on workamping and fulltiming, etc. The Workamping is working out okay so far even though we are given equipment that looks like it came out of the dump and the attempt to refurbish was minimal. Thom tried to use the weed-eater we got today and it took him 1/2 a day to do 1 hour’s worth of work. I guess this is to be expected when a company is contracted to the landowner (BLM, USFS, State, County, etc) to manage the property. They have to cut corners where they can so they can make a profit.

Uh oh… It looks like I’m rambling again. I guess I ought to wrap this up, finish up my paperwork and start getting ready for tomorrow. Will write more later. It’s getting interesting here.

Toodles!

As well as doing the normal cleaning of the campgrounds yesterday, we had to drive down to Anderson Cove to use the fax machine to fax forms to our Tire Warranty company so we can get refunded for the tire we had to replace on the trailer. We also had to call the manufacturer of our trailer to straighten things out so we can be reimbursed for the pump we had to pay for in Quartzsite because the factory installed pump quit working. I’m certainly learning how much we take the ability to pick up the phone and call whenever we want. Hopefully we’ve got things taken care of so we can pay off our credit card.

Mom and I email back and forth now, but it sure isn’t the same as phoning. I miss having a thought and being able to grab my phone and call Mom to share it with her.

I cooked a pork picnic roast on the barbecue last night… along with sweet potatoes cooked with butter & a bit of brown sugar in aluminum foil. It tasted soooo good. Eat your heart out Mike ‘n Tiff…. that’s what I was going to cook last weekend when you were here if you could stay for dinner.

Today was a better day weather-wise. It was warmer and only cloudy half the day. It’s supposed to continue to get warmer through the weekend. There’s a good chance we’ll have several campers this weekend. YAY!!

Today was a very productive day for both of us. Thom went through both campgrounds and used the blower on all the junk the trees dropped on the campsite pads. He also did more maintenance work on the Upper Meadow’s bathroom. It was finally warm enough for me to get wet doing a thorough cleaning of our bird’s cages. Since last fall when we left for Quartzsite I’ve only been able to change papers in the cages and do cursory wipe downs. They were in dire need of cleaning. Both the boys (birds) and I are in much better moods with the clean cages.

Of course, completely cleaning cages means moving all the furniture the cages were on and vacuuming under, around and behind. Scrubbing walls behind the cages (Lymon is a poop shooter) and making sure there isn’t a single place that smells from the birds. Living in an RV where everything is close quarters makes enterprises such as this quite a challenge.

Thom got our weather station set up on the tripod so we now have wind speed and direction. Did I mention I ordered the insulated cover for the temperature guage so we get accurate “shade” temps. Now I can share our info with the Salt Lake City news station so they can report Ogden Canyon weather as well. With the info they gather from us, we may get predictions for the canyon. Who knows?

Here’s a couple of photos I took today.  Not new birds, but interesting shots none-the-less.

This is  another “color” shot of our feeder stump.  ID’g the birds from Top Left… Female House Finch.  Center… Male House Finch.  Top Right… White Crowned Sparrow.  Center Right… Female & Male Lazuli Buntings.  Bottom Right… Male Lazuli Bunting.  Bottom Center… female Lazuli Bunting, and Left Bottom… 2 male Lazuli Buntings.

We get dozens of Brown headed  Cowbirds here… mixed in with the Brewer’s Blackbird and the Redwing Blackbird.  This is a stump full of Cowbirds with one of the males being very assertive “Don’t come near my seed pile!”.

I’ve said all I can think of to say. So I’ll just say … TOODLES

Until this evening today was a pretty uneventful day. No campers, just a few hours of work for Thom, only 1/2 hr for me.

Man! Was it cold this morning! Our low was 19F early this morning and poor Thom had to go out at 7 a.m. and unlock gates. I did what I could tho, and laid on his side of the bed so when he came back he’d have a warm spot to crawl into.

Night before last we had a critter (racoon? skunk? something else?) get the lid off our bird seed bucket and dump it over and empty it out. The birds are eating the seed so fast we had already decided to only fill feeders every other day even if they were empty. The birds hang around even if there isn’t any seed in the feeders.

Yesterday the feeders went empty so I filled the feeders today. The blackbirds (redwing blackbirds, brewers blackbirds, and cowbirds) were here by the dozens. I can’t believe the numbers we get.

Tonight, just before dinner we all of a sudden had a few dozen blackbirds frantically take wing, several of them hitting the windows of the trailer. Both of us quickly looked out the windows and I saw a medium/large sized brownish bird flying low through the brush with a black bird in it’s talons. I wish I’d had a camera in my hand, but I still doubt I’d've gotten a photo, it all happened so fast. I can’t say it upset me. It was a natural happening. I have to admit that if it had been a Lazuli Bunting or a Goldfinch or an Oriole or Flicker, I might have been a bit upset, but whatever kind of bird it was, it is the way of nature and I feel privileged to experience this part of nature.

Hey! I baked bread today. More or less. I forgot that altitude can be an issue in baking. In the normal amount of rising time, my bread rose to over twice the normal size. I punched it down, formed loafs, and set them off to rise. Thom & I took off to look for missing keys for about 25 minutes and came back to loafs that were about to burst. I did get 2 loafs of bread and they taste okay, but they’re shaped odd. Next time I’ll remember that bread at elevations 5,000′ & up raise at twice the rate and need extra attention.

I don’t think I shared this new visitor with ya’ll. It’s not a great photo, but I have no guarantee I’ll get a better one. This is a Sandhill Crane in a field just above our campground. We pass this field on our way to Upper Meadows campground. Normally, the Sandhill Crane is a gray color. I suspect this guy has been spending time at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge (just north of here near Brigham City) which has red dirt/mud. The crane gets the red mud on his beak when he dips to catch his prey. It’s natural for a bird to preen after eating. The mud on his beak spreads thru his feathers while preening, turning them a reddish brown color. You can see the upper part of his neck is still gray. He can’t reach it with his beak.

Wow! Here it is 10:30 and Thom just got back from closing gates and doing rounds… we have campers in one unit in the Upper Meadows. He collected the money, gathered info and all I had to do was sit here in the trailer, fill out the ticket, and give it to him to take back to the campers. Do I have an easy life or what??!

Speaking of which (easy life)…. I’m going to go to bed.

Toodles

I get frustrated when I go to the blogs I follow and see they haven’t posted for several days, & here I am….. it’s been 5 days since I’ve posted. My apologies. I could use the excuse that we’ve been really busy, but the actual truth is that by evenings I’m quite tired and I can’t think of the things I wanted to share… my mind is mush.

Today was our day off. We woke up to a skiff of snow on the ground and dreary cloudy skies.

We’ve had some really cold mornings over the weekend. 27F one morning and 20F another. That’s a bit chilly for me, but it warms up fast when the sun comes up.

We opened on May 9th and had two campers come in. One was a group of 8 young men who were there to listen to the Jazz/Laker’s game and just have fun. They didn’t drink and were a tremendous first group for us. Perfect campers! They even left their site clean when they left. The second was a man with his two young sons. They stayed two nights while Mom had time off in the casino’s in Wendover, NV. They too were perfect campers. The children were very well behaved and the site was left very clean and ready for the next campers. Our first weekend was a very good experience and makes us look forward to next weekend.

We are getting a bunch of people driving through checking out sites for Memorial Weekend. I’m thinking we’ll be full that weekend.

Workamping isn’t for everyone. It’s definitely not for those who want to be paid for every hour worked. We have a contract for 30 - 35 combined hours/week. That means we each get paid for 17-1/2 hours a week. We are expected to perform many varied duties which take many more hours than 17.5 each per week. We love doing this. We love living where we’re living in the life style we’re living. We figure that having the site provided at no charge and being given the opportunity to see this gorgeous country and beautiful wildlife is more than worth the extra hours we put in. If you can’t feel that way, then you probably don’t want to be a workamper.

I had the most wonderful Mother’s Day. Mike, Tiffany and Coen came up for the day to visit & wish me a happy Mother’s Day. I had such a great time sharing our home/location with Tiffany. She’s a wildlife lover like me and is so appreciative of all the birds, etc.

We’ve been here 10 days now and I see a new bird or critter every single day so far. I don’t expect it to continue, but I’m sure loving it now. I took my camera out back to the far hummingbird feeder and was able to get some very nice shots of a male and a female Broadtail Hummingbird. Here is the back of the female. I took it this way because the color is such a beautiful sparkely emerald.

and this is the male with his rosy throat

and this is my new bird for the day, the Western Tanager, he’s fluffy here because it was early morning and COLD!

I mentioned today was our day off. We had to make some phone calls and buy a few things. It looks like we have to drive back down the hill to call DirecTV again because it appears they didn’t change our zip code area so we can get the local Utah channels. We will definitely let them know this is quite costly for us with Diesel at $4.39/gal and we use two gallons each trip to use the phone. Since it appears we’re going to get rain off and on during the season, we bought Thom a rain suit. I don’t go out as much as he does, so I can make do with a rain pancho. I bought another pair of jeans (I found I’m down another size in jeans… YAYYYYYYYYY!). Since my tennis shoes are 3 years old and falling apart I also bought a pair of those. We managed to find everything on sale and saved as much money as we spent.

Even though this day was a day off, we’ve found that these campgrounds are “ours” and driving on our roads, through our campgrounds, when we saw a piece of litter, we couldn’t pass it by, we had to stop and pick it up. We don’t just see the campground as a beautiful place to stop and enjoy, we see things that we could do to make it even more attractive. It sure doesn’t take long to take ownership!