I wanted to write this earlier this week, but internet up here is a little sketchy so it has been a chore to upload pictures and get the blog site to work for writing. It has been such a great week! We got the camper set up on Saturday with lots of help from Grandpa Fletcher, Uncle Steve, and my parents. We have water from our well and then we created a temporary septic tank for black water. G and G Fletcher gave us a ton of dishes and cooking pots and stuff for the camper. It is a little rustic but it's luxury compared to tent camping which is what I've always done before. And our property is beautiful. I am going to sink into clinical depression when we have to leave here and go back to Dallas.
Our first full day out here, which was Sunday, was really eventful. We visited a church close to our house in the morning. It was ok. We will check out a different church this Sunday I think. We came back to the camper, had some lunch, and then decided to walk across the property. When we go to the other end, we saw this thing slinking through the meadow. It went and laid down in the shade of a tree. Aaron said maybe a fox at first but I said I thought it was walking like a cat. It was definitely not a house cat though. Aaron ran back to the camper to get the binoculars. Sure enough it was a cat like thing. It was pretty far away so it was hard to get a super clear view with the binoculars. Aaron looked at it first. When it was my turn, I looked and I saw it look right at us so I knew that it knew we were there. Aaron decided to run back to the camper again and get my camera to see if we could get a picture. When he got back, it was gone. Aaron took the girls down to where it had been and found out that there is a little arroyo that comes up into the meadow. We think it walked up the arroyo and that is how it snuck away without us seeing it leave. We googled pictures of bobcats and mountain lions and we are pretty sure between seeing it's tail while it was walking and then just what we could see with binoculars that is was a mountain lion and probably about a year old.
We got back to the camper. Went inside to get some water, etc. Then we heard a crash. The tarp we'd set up had fallen down and one of the poles fell against the door trapping us in the camper. Aaron had
to go out the emergency window exit. That was pretty wild because he just basically had to fall out on to the ground to get out. After that we went out to work on getting the tarp set up. Kelsay was in the camper alone and locked herself in along with the camper keys. So after trying to get her to push the lock, see if we could get in a window, etc., we finally thought of going through the storage compartment under the dining table seat. There is a door to the compartment outside the camper and the bench under the seat lifts up. Neither Aaron or I could have fit, but Maddy was perfect for the job. She was a little scared to do it at first but we told her that she would be like
The Rescuers. She crawled through and Aaron held the bench seat cover up for her. She got in and unlocked the door. We told her she was a super hero. She started yelling, "I'm a ninja turtle!" It was great. The best thing about it was that a couple of days before she had been kind of complaining about always being the smallest in her classes. It was a great opportunity to show her that being small is good and everyone is the size they are for a reason.
On Monday we went out to the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument. It is about 10-15 minutes from our place. When/if we move here I want to get season passes. They have tons of great hiking trails and the fossils are truly amazing. These are a few examples of the fossils they had on display in the visitor's center. I took a lot of pics of these because I'd love to get some shale rock and somehow create "fossils" with ink or paint that I could use as art in my house. I will have to do some experimenting and research to figure out how to do it. Anyway, the fossils were so interesting and they had a huge variety of different types and species.
We then went on the petrified forest loop which is about a mile hike. This loop had petrified stumps of sequoia trees that used to live in this area once upon a time. I think they had 6 or 7 stumps along the trail.
This is big stump. They estimate that the trees were 500-750 years old and about 230 feet tall before they became fossilized.
Kelsay took a nice nap on the walk. We headed back to the camper for lunch. We had kind of a late lunch. By the time we were done, it was raining so we decided to go to the Dinosaur Resource Center in Woodland Park. Maddy had been begging to go to it. It was ok. The price for adults is way over priced. They have some neat exhibits with dinosaur bones that you can actually touch and they have a lot of original fossils. The couple who owns the museum are paleontologists who do digs all over the world and they live in Woodland Park so that is why the museum is there.
This was probably the cheesiest exhibit in the museum, but it made a fun picture. This megalodon is pure speculation because they've found teeth here and there across the globe so they decided that the creature that had these teeth was a huge prehistoric shark.
This is the set up we've had all week. Super fun and functional once we got the tarp issues worked out. We have a hummingbird feeder to the left out of picture. We've had a couple of Calliope hummingbirds (male and female) and male Rufous visit the feeder.
More to come on our super fun week of camping on our land!!!
Comments
brittany