A Great Week!

It has been another fine week up here in the Idaho Sawtooths! The weather, overall has been outstanding!  I was able to have a couple of fires and enjoy being up here in these beautiful mountains! I just hope I will be able to share this place in person with some of you in the coming years!

Had a neat group here.... (l to r) Bob, Joel, Karen (the b'day girl!) & Stephanie. They were a great group and always had a smile on their faces...even in the mornings...when it has been very nice and cool!

This is the 3rd or 4th van that is set up as a small camper by a company out of Utah that had this small awning mounted over the side sliding door. I had to get a pic of the company name of the awning so that I can check out their site. It is light and small and perfect for adding to Bertha. Going to check this week and see just what they have to offer. I think this will be the best solution for me to add to Bertha for additional shade.

I had a camper that his trailer wire had gotten pulled into the receiver on the trailer and it had "eaten" 4 of the wires. l broke out my electrical kit and went to work on his wires. Got it all pieced  back together and still didn't have have brake or turn signals on the trailer!?!?!?  Soooo....started looking thru the owners manual, and in today's vehicles, apparently, they have wired in a separate circuit for the trailer lights (so you don't have to add a box like I had to on the Sprinter), and it is fused right in the main fuse panel. So when it shorted out, it blew the two fuses for the signals/brakes...got new fuses and he was good to go!  They just had to do something for me....so....as you can see in the pic....I have chips to last me for the next month or so!!!  LOL!  I love my campers!!!  :-)

It is a beautiful morning here again! Clear skies and great temperatures! I couldn't ask for a better office!!!  And I am having the time of my life when you get right down to it! The only "hard" part to this "job" is keeping the toilets cleaned up and the ladies with plenty of toilet tissue!  LOL!  The rest of the time it is more play than work....and what a work place!!

If you look close at Bertha below, you will see that thin brown wire...my "FM antenna"!  I finally thought about putting one up for my classic SW radio and now I have almost crystal clear reception....even when both inverters are up and going! So I am a happy camper!!  LOL!

This is Carolina & Karre (pronounced Core) from Denmark! They are a cool couple! Had them over for dinner on their last night here. I enjoyed them here and look forward to having them back!

This about brings you up to date with Sunny Gulch and The Frog!  I've got 2 more months here, should be leaving around the 30th of September. Plan on taking 2 weeks to make it back to Texas.  Not sure just what exactly where or what I'll be doing this winter, but I will be "south" where it is warmer!

Take care and have a great week!!!

A Quiet Saturday! And Monday Too!

This has been a VERYquiet Saturday here in Sunny Gulch! In fact, it is almost as quiet as when I first got here! And I needed the break. It has been crazy for the past week!

Above is the view from behind my Day Use Pavilion at Sunny. It looks different each time I go to look at it, depending on the time of day and the "cloud" issue!!  :-)

And when you look around the campground, depending on where you stand, it is sometimes difficult to tell that you are even in a campground! It can really have the feel that you are out in the middle of the wilderness without a soul around for miles and miles...those are the times when this "job" is well worth the time here and the times I have to put on my "Daddy" hat to keep things in order with some of the "weekend warrior campers"....

....but early morning and late evening when it is basically silent....that is when it is worth it!

I just like the pine tree above...it just stands at the edge of the "gorge" down to the river....like a timeless sentinel watching over the river and keeping it in its place!!

The family below were great campers....from Costa Rica!  Heather & Andy and their son Ryder ( & Tiger!).  They were here for several days, Heather's family used to come to the Sunny Gulch area in the summers and they are carrying on the tradition.  Andy works from home (wherever that happens to be) which is why they are able to live in Costa Rica.

Meet the "re-newlyweds"....Tom and Leann...they were here this past weekend for a wedding....theirs!!  Had a great time with them, and the weather was kind and rained a lot right up to their wedding time...and cleared up for the ceremony! Congrats to them!!  :-)  

As I keep saying, I'm working steadily on Bertha! It might still look like a "mess"....but if you have/had seen the insides in months past....this is a major improvement!  I'm still getting rid of things that I don't use or need any longer...so it is starting to actually look like a "home" on the inside! 

My little nest of blue birds!!  I had tried to get a pic of them before they flew the coop....but, alas...I was a day or two late!  But I did get this shot of the nest full of fledglings!

I hope you guys don't get too tired of seeing "my mountains" here...but each day and each different light gives a different view of them.  This shot was on Sunday, a couple of hours afternoon after our morning full of good old southern style thunderstorms!! 

And my children are getting more and more attached to each other!  Keeping a hand on her buddy, Snickers and Abbiegail catch a nap between wrestling bouts!!

Everyone have a great week and stay safe! I'll have more to post as the week goes along. There is a big Arts & Crafts show this coming weekend in Stanley, and they say that it will be packed and crazy around here...we shall see!!!

Take care til later!  C'ya!!

Amazingly Quiet Week!!

It has been an amazingly quiet week here! I had expected to be full by today, and I'm not even half full and have campers leaving today. And the reason is probably the weather and the next 7 day forcast....every day is calling for "chance of storms/thunderstorms". But I'm not complaining!  It is overcast, breezy and 59* here right now. It is grand!

                     

And I've had a great bunch of campers here all week. It has been peaceful and quiet. There a a number of kids here, and they are wearing out their bikes running around here! It has been great!

I have a wedding group camping with me for the weekend. They are having their rehearsal dinner here at the pavilion this evening, getting married tomorrow, and leaving Sunday. So tonight I will be having pulled pork b-b-q for supper!  B-)  And they have been a blast!

I have thrown out some more stuff that I have no need for, so space is getting better in here. But there is still a ways to go getting myself totally settled into my rolling tiny house! And there are still things that will go out the door in the coming days! But it is getting better each day!

I'll be redoing my bed again today. One of my campers that was in here last week left me a large sheet of the egg crate type foam padding, so it will be going into my sleeping/sofa bed....should make sleeping a bit better.

Had John over for pancakes the other evening, and the mix worked very well. In fact, the pancakes came out just great. Did up one of my rice concoctions yesterday while I had the generator running. That fed me yesterday and will probably feed me today and tomorrow.

I got a suprise yesterday....a Winnebago trailer came into the camp! I had not even known that Winnebago was building trailers! The gentleman told me that they had bought a trailer company about 2-3 years ago and were turning out a small line of them now. John told me that he had seen them in red, blue, green, orange, brown, etc. The couple invited me to come over later today and have a looksey inside of it. Can't wait to see how the inside is, the craftmanship of it!

Still working on Bertha. I now have a two burner stove "mounted" on the stove in here thanks to Tom & Joy. So I'm able to cook inside now, which makes it nice. And the stove seems to use propane slower than the little one burner that I had been using!

That about covers it for today. I'll get myself back to work on a little more straightening inside Bertha for the day. And I'll have some more pics to upload in a day or two. Have a "care package" that is supposed to be here today from Josh. We'll see if the P.O. keeps up to day with "fast delivery"!!

Later!!  :-)

Survived The 4th!

I have survived the 4th of July.....just barely!!!  LOL!!  So now comes the rest of the summer! And it will get and stay busier for the next 5-6 weeks, then it will settle down for a week or so before I get hit for Labor Day Weekend!  But after that....ahhhhhh....my little piece of heaven will be returned to me!!  Heheheh! But overall, this weekend went pretty well....only had a couple of "probelm children"!  Overall there were a great bunch of campers here...and all went as well as you could expect with folks here that were not real campers and wanted to get away from the city/heat/hectic pace of the cities....and be under the stars and near a cool lake and river and nice cool nights!

I'm doing this from Bertha and the campground, and I have checked and this Blogger app really packs down the pic files, so I can sit here and do a full update without having used too much of my roaming data! Which is great!!

It was a full moon right before and during the 4th....and it was just flat beautiful!  This is a shot from my site looking down the first loop road towards the East.

I just couldn't miss trying to get the shot of what I saw from the fire as I sat there at night.....a really nice little fire in the pit with the moon thru the trees!

I had dinner guests over for the evening of July 3rd. From left to right are Paul & Karen (a sweet couple that had lately been in China teaching English at a University there), then Harry & Coty (from the Netherlands, they come over every summer or so and travel the U.S. on motorcycle, which they own and keep at a friends in CO.), then it's John & Rosanna (John is our maintenance man & Rosanna comes up weekends & helps him manage the Chinook Bay campground a mile down the road). We had a great time and I so enjoyed listening to them all talk...I had a blast listening to the stories and questions and "tales" that flowed around the table!

Next is a shot showing about a third of the Chinese families that were here for 2 nights. They were actually fun, after I had a ka-nip-tion-fit!!! on the morning of the 4th when I looked out my window and say 4 of their 5 firepits with smoke coming out of them and not a single soul around!! After I calmed down and figured out that they had probably never camped, we got the fires out (John came over with his truck and water tank) I had a "camping basics/camping ethics & safety" class with most of the fathers & some of the kids....there were 10 families here. And only one of them had done any camping.....one time last year.....and it went real well. I'm looking forward to having them back later this summer....we'll see how much sunk in and stayed with them!  LOL

I was really pounding -politely pounding!- on the safety issues! Such as you don't leave a fire burning without either someone being left in the camp...or you douse it completely when you go out for the day! And adding to the fact that it a person could be cited for it and fined anywhere from $250 to $2,500....it definitely got their attention! And the fact that we are in bear and wolf and lion country and leaving food out and trash around the campsite could make for a very unpleasant upclose encounter with on of those creatures!  LOL! About 2 hours after our "class" one of my other campers came by on their evening stroll and stopped and asked "How did the class go? From the looks of it, very well....their campsites are so clean now!!"  LOL!

This is a better pic of Tom & Joy, the couple from the Keys. They came over for supper the night before they left to go home. They were a real great couple, and I look forward to seeing them in 2 years...maybe less!!  LOL... in the Keys! I plan on going that way in 2 winters and spending a month or so down there. It is one of the places that is on my list of places to go to and spend time at that I have not gotten to and really want to see! Especially the Keys Deer!

This is Bob & Betty from MO. They were a great couple and stayed with me for longer than they had planned....they liked it here and it was back when the temps in the "lowlands" were hitting 100+. I look forward to having them back one day!

Now this is just sad....I can't remember "mom & dad's" names....but the little blonde is Bailyn..."just like bailing hay!"  LOL! And the day that they had to leave, she made them come by so that she could tell Frog bye!! She was a doll!

This couple ended up being really neat folks, from Chico, CA....Buck and Janine! Their visit got off to a rocky start....someone had decided to remove some of my reservation placards...and I had 5 sites totally screwed up...and one of them was their's!!! Buck is a CalFire guy, and after about a half hour of "talking" things got better and we ended up becoming pretty good friends. They spent basically a week with me and one of these days I'm going to end up knoncking on their front door and saying hi!  Can't wait...have a valid reason to go back into CA now for a visit!!  LOL!

I know I repeat myself....but I have some really great campers...a couple and their daughter were leaving out today, and they gave me a bag of fresh fruit! How they guessed red grapes and cantalope were my favorites?!?!?!?  

This should be a pretty well full update for life up here in Sunny Gulch!! The heat wave has finally broken, the LOW pressure that has been sitting over us has finally moved away to somewhere...thanfully!!! And the temps are now getting back to where they should be in this gorgeous counttry!

Right now, outside, it is 69* here and thundering, lightening and raining! It is just glorious!!! As long as the lightening doesn't start any fires in the area. It has just gotten very pleasant! 

John was coming over later to burn hotdogs again with me, but I do believe that I will be making pancakes in the house instead and then we're probably going to watch a movie....got to relax sometime!

That's the latest from Sunny Gulch Campground in Idaho....I'm hoping that one of these summers everyone will be able to come up here and spend a few days with me and see just how great this Sawtooth National Wilderness/Forest/Recreation Area is!!

Until the next update....God Bless and try to stay out of trouble!!