Days and Nights

Not a lot of exciting stuff happening today. The weather cooled off a little. It is more comfortable for Brenda for sure, but it portends a trend that I fear might be hard to stop. For a kid from north of the Medicine Line coooling trends to bring up that ancestral fear of WINTER, so there is that. Let's just hope whomever is controlling our climate conspiracies these days doesn't get carried away with this cooling phase to quickly. All things in moderation. I continued my morning visit with the desert today, so got a few shots that I will share with you on that ramble.

I head out early, usually just before sunrise and it is all about the way the light plays on the landscape that makes the place so beautiful.

Well, that and seeing new places, or the same old places from a new perspective.

I have taken to just carrying my phone with me on my wanderings, getting old I guess, and the big old lens are heavy and cumbersome, and the new phones take pretty decent pictures, especially for this format, where size doesn't really matter. But curiousity drove me to crack out my Canon and tripod last evening and shoot a little bit of the Milky Way. Now the Canon still does a better job for full size images but that little iPhone does a pretty decent job even of night shooting for sharing here on the interwebs.

The image above was shot with my iPhone 15, while the one below was with my Canon R5, both with similar post processing although not identical.

Although you can't really see it here the Canon image survives enlarging it better than the iPhone, but how many of us blow up our shots and hang them anymore anyway. Oh by the way, those little specks of light you see, our sun is just another one of them, not even a significant one, and we are just standing on a little rock traveling around that tiny speck. to lend a little perspective to the whole thing.

A little Picturin' a little Desert Rambling

Today was another great day here down the road from Dogpound. We had a beautiful sunrise to greet us as we stepped out of the door this morning.

I was off for another wander through the desert, it is a beautiful spot, that never gets the appreciation that it deserves if you just fly by on the pavement. It's beauty is in the cracks and crannies that make up what from a distance looks like a flat featureless expanse. The play of the light on those washes and valleys is wonderful to see as I ramble my way along. Every day I strike out in a different direction from camp so the light plays different each day as well.

The shot above is what I call TV Hill, not sure what others call it, but when we first came here a dozen or so years ago there was the remainder of an old TV relay station up on the side of it, all gone now. Satellites have made it surplus. Thinking back to those days a lot has changed. I can remember how excited we were when Rollie found a internet supplier who would offer us an aircard that gave us a whopping 5 gigabits of data each and every month for a not to dear a price. Now we are packing a Star-link system that is for all intents and purposes unlimited and has speeds which were only dreamed about a few years back.

Our motorhome back then had a pretty state of the art solar system onboard so that hasn't changed a lot, although what we have now works it is about 6 or 7 years old. But it still runs our new fancy Ninja Air Fryer thingy, and that allows us to make pizza just like at home out here in the back of beyond. No more satellite TV, although we still have the dish we stream most everything through the internet now, and of course searching for a spot with cell service is a lost art, we can communicate through the Stars as well.

All these shots are from my phone and all but the first which was actually taken from the door of the RV, were taken on my desert walk.

You gotta Love the Desert

Off on my morning hike today, years ago when we were first to this place I spent a lot of time hiking around the desert, put on a couple of hundred miles back then with my old dog Meg wandering the trails here, and then some years later I had our Can-Am here and drove most of those trails again. One thing about hiking is you can really kind of wander, while with the side by side you are staying on the old existing trails. I kind of prefer the freestyle hiking method, truth be known.

Once I got back from my walkabout we decided to run into town(s) for supplies. Brenda uses some CBD cream that they have at the local pot store to deal with some of the nerve issues with her CRPS and we needed to resupply that stuff so ran into Quartzsite for that, and to drop our trash at the local transfer station, as well as fill a propane bottle at the Pit Stop there in town.

Then it was back on the Highway for a run up to Parker. The "Q" doesn't have much in the way of grocery stores so we do most of our reprovisioning in Parker. We decided to not shop on an empty stomach so stop at a local pizza place we have visited before to fill our stomachs. Then it was off to Walmart for supplies, followed by a dash back down the highway to our spot near Bouse. It was 34C today in the neighbourhood so HOT, HOT, HOT again.

Hot, Hot, Hot

And that is the reason most folks come to the desert. But if you have CRPS, as Brenda does, it is not always a good thing. CRPS reacts to cold, and to hot, both causing flares so finding a happy medium is sometimes a challenge. And hot weather like it is here today is nowhere near that zone of comfort. Now we can move around the site and find cooler places with the breeze, but sometimes even that doesn't work that well. Our rig can deal with cold a lot better than it deals with heat. Our solar system runs the furnace quite handily but Air Conditioning is another matter entirely, not to mention the fact that another trigger is noise, and anyone who uses RV Air Conditioners knows that if you want it to cool things off, it is going to be roaring away up on the roof.

I have missed my time in the swimming pool for the past couple of months, September is a maintenance month for the Spray Lakes pool I usually swim in and that last until just days before we pulled out on our southward migration this year. And laziness has taken care of the rest of the days since, but today I harkened back to a time a dozen or so years ago when we first came to this spot. Back in those times walking was my exercise of choice so I thought I would go for a little walkabout this morning. The desert is a great place to walk, you can basically go where you want, and change course whenever you like. I wandered about the desert for an hour or so and covered about 3 miles, so we will see how my old knees hold up over time. Some shots from my walkabout.

And today was the final day of the Canadian Finals Rodeo so that occupied most of my afternoon, I found a shady spot in the cool to enjoy a little outdoor rodeo time.

Just Another Desert Day

Weather is great, sun is shining, enough shade to keep it cool. The Canadian Finals Rodeo is happening back north of the Medicine Line in Red Deer, Alberta. It is a six performance show and Saturday is two performance day so this afternoon I sat in the shade watching the perf and then this evening I was sitting out watching the sunset and the rodeo. Both pretty decent. Our Starlink is working great bringing the outside world to us here a couple of miles from the middle of nowhere, Arizona.

Chillin'

We have just been chillin' here in the Sonoran desert. Nothing exciting to report so that is exactly what I am reporting. We have our morning tea fire as per usual and then it is just a matter of moving our chairs on a regular basis to stay in the shade. Our temps are hovering around 28-29C hereand for us northerners that is just a bit on the warm side. The nights cool off so it is all good here.

Today....we did absolutely NOTHING.

Not a single thing, we started the day with a morning fire which is our tradition here at Dogpound Anywhere (DPA). And from there it got lazy, I wandered about seeing if I could find a picture to share, and Brenda cleaned some windows, but aside from that we didn't do much of anything.

So I will leave you with this shot of the sun going down this evening.