Home!

Trite as it may sound, it's good to be home! Walking Scooby Doo at 5 a.m. under a full moon at 30 dry, cool degrees, seeing the fresh snow on the La Platas reflecting in the moonlight, having slept the night in our own bed with fresh air coming in the slightly open windows at the head ... it feels good!

After about 4,400 miles in the tin can on wheels, we still love each other deeply, but it's nice to have more space! ;-}

And it's nice to be back with the varmints. Our renters took care of them beautifully. Sophie, fat as ever, greeted us with the usual disdain ... "Oh, you're back?" Fifi, the crippled black cat that wasn't expected to live long after a car hit her, is as athletic as ever and looking fine (I think the renter groomed her; she looks less like a Ragg Mopp!). And Scooby Doo is well-fed and needy as ever! A little retraining will be necessary ... she went into her nighttime cage readily, but then whined till told to knock it off. And she started whining again a little after 4 a.m. And, after I got up and walked her, she parked herself at the bedroom door and whined for Sandy. So, I'm doing this post on the laptop with the wiener dog glued to my side on the love seat. Gotta move her ear when I need to hit the return key or delete.

We got an early start from Santa Rosa, NM, yesterday, still getting our body clocks reset after changing two time zones. As we headed up I-40 toward Albuquerque, the weather was generally dingy and rainy and steadily colder. Although the TV weather maps had shown winter weather warnings north of Albuquerque, that was actually one of the drier sections of the drive. We did hit a few snow flakes around Cuba. 

Just south of Farmington, we drove out from under the cloud and enjoyed beautiful Four Corners sunshine the rest of the way home. The temp was up in the high 50s when we pulled into Mancos. The kind of weather we've come to enjoy!

The color is mostly gone here. Cottonwoods in the lowlands coming up from Farmington had all their leaves turned, but they were dull ... none of the glitter of full fall color. I don't know if they went straight to dull because of the dryness, or if we just missed it. Anyway, we're probably spoiled by the wider color spectrum of the eastern woodlands, such as this example from the observation tower at Timm's Hill, the highest point in Wisconsin (west of Tomahawk).

We got in early enough to get through many of the "we're back" chores yesterday: Phone messages, litter box-tending, junk mail, bills, newspapers and magazines, etc. More re-entry work today ... downloading the trip's pictures, follow-up e-mails, groceries, water the plants, pay bills and start to catch up on the things we're involved with here. Sandy is now a director of the Mancos Valley Chamber of Commerce. We each have three photos in a show in Cortez that we haven't seen yet and we have a bunch of FeVa Fotos tasks to get started on. There's a museum association meeting this afternoon and evening (with dinner at the Metate Room, which ain't bad at all!) and one in Durango next week. Workshop at SWOS Friday morning and other SWOS activities to get back into. Phone volunteering for KSJD on Monday morning. And, somewhere along the way, start exercising to work off the stiffness in my knee from all the driving and riding ... and get rid of the five pounds the trip added to my weight!

While it's good to be getting back into the normal routines of life at home, it's with good memories of the last two weeks. We had wonderful shared photo ops across southern Colorado and the dawn was beautiful on the high plains. The upper Midwest was beautiful (and no mosquitoes!) and my 50th high school reunion was worth going to. We had good visits with relatives on both sides of my family, and it's always interesting to tour the area I grew up in ... SO much has changed! There were good times, too, with Sandy's friends in the UP and with the Feutz family in lower Michigan. Though our time in Oklahoma was limited, we enjoyed getting together with Sandy's daughter and her family, dining together and taking in a grandson's football game. 

Still, it will be nice to settle in for a while and enjoy being home, with no travel! tv