Tumbleweed

In what has become an annual tradition with my friends Paul, Kevin and Joel, we all met up in Salt Lake City, UT on October 24 to go backpacking. Kevin flew in from Michigan, Joel flew in from Seattle, Paul drove down from Montana and I had driven from Denver with Ginny. This was later in the season than we typically go and we were a little concerned about cooler weather as a snowstorm had just blown through the region the day before. Fortunately we were heading about six hours south of SLC to Glen Canyon National Recreation Area where we hoped the temperatures would be a little higher. My friends had done a similar trip eight years ago but I missed that trip as we were living in New Zealand then. But I had heard all about the red rocks, the massive canyon walls and those arches… “Sam, you just gotta see these arches!” So you could say that I was pretty jazzed about the trip and knew that it was going to be quite different than pretty much every other backpacking trip that I’ve done. ...

It had been nearly a year since we left New England in our newly converted van so we were excited for a trip home to visit family and friends. After visiting some friends around Boulder, CO and storing our van in an industrial lot in Aurora (let’s hope it’s still there!), we flew east for a month long visit to New England.  After brief stops in Boston and New Hampshire, we headed up to Vermont which has been on our short list of places we might consider settling down in someday. Ginny had only visited Vermont a couple times for weddings and I hadn’t spent much time there since I was a kid. So we planned a four day whirlwind visit to see covered bridges, eat Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and buy copious amounts of maple syrup. The trip was great and we especially enjoyed visiting the Ben and Jerry’s factory and the flavor graveyard (see photo below). The covered bridges are incredibly picturesque (see photos below) and we also loved visiting Burlington and the whole Lake Champlain regio...

As a slight departure from my normal posts, this blog post will be more of a race report from my first 100 mile trail race which I just ran in Steamboat Springs, CO September 16-17. It was hands down one of the hardest things that I've ever done which I think is why many runners keep coming back to the 100 mile distance, i.e. ultra runners are gluttons for punishment and seem to believe that if it's not hard, it's not worth doing. Let's be honest - 100 miles is a ridiculously long distance to run so why would you do it? My hometown of Northampton, MA is roughly 100 miles from Boston, MA and I never dreamed of running that distance. New York City to Philadelphia, by the way, isn't even 100 miles (it's 95 miles). Yet I ran 102 miles yesterday through the Rocky Mountains which included more than 20,000 feet of elevation gain. The race is called Run Rabbit Run 100 and this was the 10th annual running of the event. See map and elevation profile below for more informa...

Greetings from Estes Park, gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park. I've been a little slack the past couple weeks in blogging so I'm cramming the past three weeks into one post. We've spent very little time in our van as we've had a series of housesitting gigs in Fort Collins, Nederland and Estes Park. We've loved housesitting as we feel a bit more connected to the community as we're staying in someone's house and taking care of their pets. Housesitting also provides a window into other people's lives and we've learned so much from meeting new people and seeing how they live. Roy and Jane, who we housesat for outside of Nederland, built their own off-grid home way up in the mountains and live off the land by growing much of their own food and raising chickens. Someday we may build an off-grid home as well so it was inspirational to be in their house and get ideas for our future home.  Ginny had a birthday last month so we had a lot to celebrate. I b...