Author: harrylange

Vacation – Zion Narrows – Saturday September 18, 2010

Saturday September 18 Tanya and I went on a Zion Institute guided walk up the Zion Narrows.

We got on the 8:00 a.m. tram for the 40 minute ride to the end of the tram road and the beginning of the River Walk which leads to the starting point of the Zion Narrows river trail. There is tons ofinformation about the Zion Narrows (plan a visit) already on the net so I’ll skip most of the Narrows details. We started the day’s walk at 9:00 am and returned at 3:45 pm. Went up river to the first Y, turned right and up Orderville Canyon to the turn around point, returned to the Y and up main river to Wall Street. At Wall Street we turned around and headed down river. I’d say about 80% of the time is spend walking in the river.

It was a great day with a really nice group of people. I scheduled the hike with the Zion Institute so we’d have the opportunity to learn something and I thought it would be more enjoyable going with someone who knew what they were actually doing. We could have walked up river on our own however going with someone who had done this a couple of hundred times was much more enjoyable. Gene could read the river and picked the easiest and fastest route up and across the river 99% of the time. I didn’t see how really good Gene was until the trip down river. We didn’t encounter many people early in the morning however on the trip down river we saw hundred’s of people. Watching them stuggle to pick the route up river showed Gene’s understanding of the river.

Our Zion Institute guide was Gene (as I mentioned above). He is in his 70’s and volunteers to lead programs for the institute all year round. Gene said his wife’s father was actually born at the same location as the current Zion Museum.

We had a great day. I’ll include a couple of pictures now and maybe some more later.

This is one of the 191 pictures I took during the day.

This is most of the group.
Have a Great day, Harry

 

Vacation – Friday September 17, 2010

It’s Friday and vacation is a great thing. We should do this more often.

It is warm as in the lower 90’s and Hank is uncomfortable. He’s not grouchy as he was the first couple of years he’s just can not get comfortable. He’ll lay in one place for about 10 minutes and then he has to move.

It’s the couch

chair

floor

under the table

different spot on the floor

chair

couch

he’s a warm puppy

In as much as Hank is a warm puppy Jean is ecstatic. She loves the heat and it’s actually quite nice this sunny and warm in September.

On a non vacation topic since I got this new laptop I’ve been working with OpenOffice for word processing and spreadsheets. MsOffice is just to expensive for a non work related activities. I think I’ll continue use OpenOffice for a while. One of the driving forces is my version of Office is Office 97 and it will not work with 64 bit Windows 7, at least I don’t know how to make it work.

OpenOffice wants to save text as ODF whatever that is however I’ve been saving text documents as rtf’s. Not really sure how odf’s will paste into wordpress blogs so I’ll stay with rft’s for now, may try odf’s later.

Got to go get a picture or two for today.
Our campsite for the week.

View of the west rim valley about half way up to the rim.

Vacation Update – Monday September 13, 2010

It is Monday evening and I’m going to get caught up on our vacation.

We are at Utah Lake State Park on Utah Lake just west of Provo. Here’s what has happened:

Left home Thursday at 6:00 pm and drove until 11:00 pm., got to Wilsonville rest stop just south of Portland. 194 miles

Friday morning we were on the road at 5:30, got to Grants Pass at 10:00 a.m. And Richards at 7:40 p.m. 709 miles.

Saturday we went for a drive up into the mountain. Pretty much a paved logging road the sign at the bottom said up to 24% grade. It was a pretty drive. Had lunch at the top of the hill and returned to Richards.
Richard and I went to the rifle range which is just a couple of miles from his house to check the sighting on two of his rifles. He’s going hunt over the next couple weekends. They were both just fine. He let me shoot his .243 rifle. It’s been almost 40 years since I fired a rifle and I think I did pretty good. I’ll insert of picture of the 3 rounds I put into the target at 100 yards.

We then moved over to Vicki’s in Sparks. This will put us closer to Reno for the Sunday morning balloon races.

Sunday morning we left Vicki’s at 5:45 to go the the balloon races. I’ll attach some pictures, I took 493 all together. I’ll also put some into my google pictures later.

Sunday after noon Richard and I built a rack which attaches to the ceiling of Vicki’s garage so she can store her window sun shades during the winter.

Monday morning Jean and I left at 6:30 a.m and got to Utah Lake State Park just south of Salt Lake at 6:15 p.m. 562 miles for the day. This will leave us with 264 miles to get to Zion on tomorrow.

Night will do more later this week.

Tomorrow is Day 0.25 of Vacation – Wednesday September 8, 2010

Tomorrow September 9, 2010 we start our fall birthday vacation.  This is my 60th birthday present to myself, 2 count them 2 – two week vacations.  We took 2 weeks in May June and now two weeks in September.  I get to work until about 5:00 pm tomorrow.  I have a meeting that starts at 4:00 p.m..   We should hit the road at 5:45 or 6:00 heading south to Carson City to spend the weekend with my brother.

Well that’s all you need to know as of right now.  I’ll update you as we move south.

Holiday Weekend / Vacation Monday September 6, 2010

We spent the holiday weekend at home playing and getting ready for VACATION.

Got a new computer and I’m spending time getting it all set up for the vacation south.  Also added a D-Link DIR-615 wireless router replacing the wired D-Link Brian bought when he was home from college.  That was a long time ago (and I still miss him).

I want to use the laptop to do more photo editing and getting better at taking pictures.  I hope to post more pictures while we are on vacation than I did last spring.  In the spring I could only post picture took on my cell phone.  The last couple of years I have been downloading pictures from my camera to either my ipod or later Jean’s ipod, Jean has the 80 gig drive and I have a 30.  When we got home I’d then transfer the pictures to my computer.  On this trip I’ll download to the laptop and than be able to upload to the website or google site.   I’ve set up the computer to tether to my Droid for internet connection.   Should be fun.

Any way it was another great weekend with a 3 day work week.