Not much going on, just trucking along

 Things have been quite routine lately, and as such there's been a dearth of things to write about, but here goes.

We typically drive down the canyon and into town for a shop-up once a week. This keeps us in fresh fruits and vegetables plus our dairy & eggs - we eat well 🥭🍒🍓🍍and love our morning fruit bowl. I keep a selection of fruits all cut up and ready to pour into a bowl, but it's hard not to get carried away and end up with too much. (1st world problem I know. God is good!)

The neighbor next door has a big raspberry patch under the tongue
of his 5th wheel. Occasionally, I pick a few, lol. 😉

The roads down the canyon(s) are very pretty and offer a nice change of scenery. Here's a shot from one we took the other day.

This road comes out into the south end of town by the Horsetooth reservoir. There's always a lot of cyclists out enjoying the ups and downs of the road, especially in July with the Tour de France underway. Speaking of which, this year the coverage is on Peacock rather than on the network station. That means we have to get our news & highlights via Youtube, and only get an abbreviated look at the action and the scenery. 😢😠 Man, I hope it's not like that next year - I guess that will depend on the ratings. It's a bummer that they put the coverage on a subscription channel.

It's been a crazy cottonwood season - I thought I'd throw in a shot of a tree branch that fell down. It looks like snowflakes when the wind catches it and it gets blown around.

Cottonwood branch

I bought a big bag of Yukon gold potatoes the other day, as we use them for homefries, put them into stews and of course, make our Italian sausage and potato soup. It's a favorite combined with a small salad for a lighter supper. I thought I'd try mashing some of the cubes up then putting them flat in a baggie and freezing them. It worked out well when after a couple of weeks I got them out and made the soup, saved a lot of time/effort. I use some beef stock granules when cooking the potatoes.

I almost always have cooked, cubed pot's handy,
just add the mashed and cooked sausage, plus milk,
stock and a few more ingredients and you've got soup.

See, I told you nothing much is going on, haha. Our big excitement in the past week was a huge, intense thunderstorm with hail! Luckily, none of the hail was bigger than a good-sized pea. The ground definitely got a good soaking, but the flowers took a beating, especially the petunia's. We've thought about making a pool noodle car cover, lol, seriously!!

That was a lot of hail!

The weather otherwise has been great, quite cool in the morning's but warming up nicely. We debated taking the electric blanket off the bed but decided to wait. Last night it went down to 39° and there's more of that in the offing. I'm OK with cooler weather, we have our electric fireplace and heater for the mornings and our A/C for the afternoons, lol. At 7200' the sun gets hot and intense on a summer day.

So that's about it for now, hopefully I'll have something a little more exciting, or at least more interesting, next time out. Thanks for dropping by and I hope the weather where you are is decent. There have been a lot of vicious storms and floods and stuff out there, whew! Take care and see you later. 😊☀️

Cool mornings, picnics, flowers and fabrics

 We have no complaints about the weather here lately, sure, we've had a few HOT days that required some A/C but the mornings have typically been cool to chilly with low's in the high 40's to 50's. Aahhh. Many of our family, friends and neighbors are singing the summertime blues - hang in there guys.

We've taken some time to get the yard and flower garden fixed up but have also made it on 1 auto-touring picnic lunch up towards Dowdy Lake and some of the surrounding areas. When we leave the Resort, we turn right then immediately turn left onto route 69 which, while a dirt road, isn't too bad and goes through some pretty spots.

Overview looking south towards the Poudre Canyon

I'm always on the lookout for some pretty flowers and good photo ops. There is one variety of yellow flowers, very prolific I might add, that retain their color after being dried. I cut a small bunch from a roadside a few years back that still looks wonderful. BTW, I definitely don't make that a habit!

Found a patch, lol.

Here's how they look in situ - zillions of them around.

One of the places we passed by was the reflecting pond - I had a pic of it from a season or two ago and it's much fuller this year - lots of rain and snow melt.

The area is now being used for cattle grazing, they are just off camera, lol.

One limited picture doesn't always tell the story.

Lots of pretty rock outcroppings. Some are steep and tricky looking and some look so inviting for climbing.

A great place to wander - just watch out for snakes sunning themselves.

A small bit of snow left on the mountains near us, but I'll bet there's plenty more south of us in Rocky Mtn Natl Park.

I'm always on the lookout for horses, and spotted a small herd which included 3 foals - I made all the brrrrrpp noises/clicks to try to get their attention but they weren't interested in me.

A dramatic sky means the rain's falling somewhere - some of our neighbors who live in Ft. Collins or parts east have told us some horror stories about hail this spring. I mean like hail punching holes in the roof! Holy hail-bombs, Batman! Luckily only pea-sized up here so far.

Looks like a storm's brewing.

We made it up to the lakes area and stopped in for a gander.

Lunch in the car by Letitia Lake

Below is a shot of Bellaire Lake, just off 69 and a local favorite for fishing. They have a paved path around part of it for handicapped access and it seems quite popular.

Bellaire Lake Picnic Area

This bird (swallow?) made it's nest right over the door of a vault toilet, I'll spare you the shot of the door handle - haha.

On the cooking front, since fruit is so prolific right now, I made a small batch of strawberry/cherry jam. No pectin handy, and not a ton of sugar either (by choice), so it ended up being medium jell, in other words it could do passable duty as a syrup on french toast or pancakes. It's sure tasty though.

Strawberry/cherry jam. One jar for the freezer and one for the table.

I also have been taking the leftover bananas and peaches and making half batches of the banana bread recipe (on the Dreamtime website) in the Ninja Foodi on the bake setting. With it being handy on our outside table, I can use it and it doesn't heat up the RV. So far we've had banana/peach and peach/cherry - what's next I wonder? Meatloaf. It turned out I baked 2 mini meatloafs in it later in the week.

On the craft front, I've been doing some triveting (is that a word?) while watching the Tour de France. We love watching the Tour and have been for many, many years. Some really spectacular scenery over in Basque, France, & Switzerland and some amazing athletes getting out on that grueling course for 3 weeks! Kudos.

Thanks google

Here are the completed trivets, a couple of smaller ones and a larger one with flourishes.

Love the way the swirly one came out.

Well, that's about it for now, thanks for visiting.