You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet

May 23, 24, 25 & 26, 2024 — Days 69 – 72

Yampa River State Park, Hayden Colorado

We’re having a bit of a vacation from the travel. Partly we’re just tired of moving around. Although the last 3 stays were on the long side, the last 2 involved significant car travel to see the sights. Also, it’s Memorial Day weekend. Crowds, traffic, and drunk drivers aren’t our thing. So we’re just staying put. Here’s some short posts.

May 23, 2024

We have a few go to breakfasts when we’re on the road. Today it was hardboiled eggs, fruit, a piece of toast with guacamole (or humus) and chopped cherry tomatoes. Breakfast of champions, right?

All of a sudden Paul heard, “Yuk!”. The first egg wasn’t done. Maybe it was just an anomaly. Susan opened a second. Same thing. So we got to thinking, we’re at 6,300 feet and we know that water boils at a lower temperature at altitude. Maybe they need to steam longer. So she cooked the remaining ones for another 6 or 7 minutes more and let them sit some. They were still white liquid when opened. We switched to scrambled eggs. The scrambled eggs were a success.

So what happened? Well, you can google it, but what fun is that. Quoting Adam Savage who was quoting Alex Jason, “Remember kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.”

The rest of the day, well, we wrote a lot of blogs, a lot. You saw that word-dump a few days ago. We also played games, Ticket to Ride, Chess, and Sagrada. We stayed up super late for us.

May 24, 2024

The next morning was about the same, blogs and hanging out. We went into Steamboat Springs for groceries. What fun, right? But, Susan made a most epic dinner.

The neat trick here is that the pork was cooked in the sous-vide contraption a few days ago. She cooked up three different proteins that day. It made sense. All three cook at a temperature within 1 degree of each other and because we don’t have full hookups this week we were trying to save water. Sous vide is convient but it’s a water hog. She was able to “bank” two of the meals in the fridge and the pork loin was one of them. It just needed to be warmed up and seared on the cast iron.

After dinner we played more games.

May 25, 2024

Stop the presses! You’re getting a blog posting when the day isn’t done!

Today was moving day, just from Site 1 to Site 12 at Yampa River State Park. It’s pretty spacious and kept up very well. Highly recommend. We needed to move the RV anyway to dump tanks and fill the fresh water so it wasn’t a waste of effort or time. Site 12 was booked for yesterday but they were a no-show. This meant we could do the site shuffle well before the normal check in time. We were done by 10am and before the lousy weather really started in earnest. It’s a good day to bake and play games!

Last night in anticipation of not being able to move until about 1pm, Paul defrosted some bread dough that he made back in Keene, 70+ days ago. Usually it really rises in the fridge overnight. For some reason this one didn’t. We’re guessing that yeast doesn’t like waking up from dormancy and then being frozen! He’s done this multiple times before at home but the freeze only lasts about 10-14 days.

Susan had the great idea of an 80-ish degree water bath to coax it awake and it worked. Here we see Paul giving it its first knead.

Next it sits for 30 minutes and then into the baking pan for a second rise. Hold on, the timer just went off. He’ll be right back.

He’s back.

So we’ve caught up to now, and that’s about it. We’ll bake the bread, play games, and maybe stream a movie later on. We had planned on going into Steamboat Springs one day this week. But with the weather the way it is today it won’t be today. Nothing really to go in for because it’s all commercialized or super steep long hikes–neither of which interests us. BTW: for those of you thinking we’re luxurating in nice warm weather? It’s noon and it’s 47 degrees, drizzling, and windy. It’s not looking like it’s going to get any better. It might get exciting later as lightning is predicted!

May 26, 2024

Today was less of an exciting day than the previous ones. Laundry, movies and games. Uhhh, that it. We thought about going out for a walk but it was somewhat cold and very windy. And walking, the altitude is killing us. Walking around the coach seem to be work at times. We’ll be glad to be back at a real altitude.