Chit Chat 6

[Adventure]

Who is making who jealous????
I am clearly living in the wrong country

Shes so wants to visit the museum.

Ahh the landscapes are my favourite. If I was there I would climb the hill you see in the 2nd pic.

[Yvonne]

If it is a nice and interesting museum then I don't mind to visit it

[Frantic Freddie]

To our dismay the museum was closed Otherwise I'da got pics.

Oh yeah, we were in the Gila Wilderness

[Yvonne]

Oh, it is not nice to have a closed museum when you wanna go see it

Pff, that is a lot of reading on that Gila Wilderness page but it looks great.

[Frantic Freddie]

It's a beautiful place But, contrary to what Wiki says, you can have motorized vehicles (after all, we drove there) in the Gila, they just have to stay on the roads & trails. You also don't need a permit in the established campgrounds, you just have to pay the fees ($5 a night where we were at).

Here's a funny story about the time we were there 20 years ago:

We were on a week-long trip around the Gila & while I'd never been to Snow Lake, she had, so we headed there. Got there about 1-2 pm, set up camp (a lot faster in those days, I had a full-size Ford van set up for camping) & went down to the lake to fish.
We caught 1/2 dozen nice trout in 2-3 hours & went back to camp. A lady a couple of campsites away came over & says to us "Y'all just got here & you caught all those fish?!?"
"Yep, nice huh?"
She gets a kinda sad/frustrated look on her face & says "Please don't tell my husband, he spent $2000 on new fishing gear & he's been out on the lake (she points at him) since 5 am & hasn't caught one fish!" :LOL:

We didn't see him, so we didn't have to deal with it.

We left the next day because there was a fire nearby & wanted to beat the crowds.

Some part of the Gila is always on fire in the summer

[Yvonne]

Ouch!!! I can imagine the woman's reaction
Not good that there is always a part on fire there....me thinks me is not going there because me is probably ending up in the on fire part somehow

[Frantic Freddie]

Heck, at any given time during the summer there's fires all over the western US (sometimes Florida too), there's fires in 10 states right now.

Not so cool story:

We own, along with the wife's brother & sister, 10 acres in the foothills of the Manzano Mountains. We'd camp there on holiday weekeds, I'd take a big canopy, lots of food & drink, we'd have friends come down & camp. It was heavily wooded, huge Ponderosa pines, alligator bark cedars, piٌon.
Then in 2008 it burned It'll be 20 years before it all grows back. Probably longer,since Poderosas live a long time. My nephew cut one down (not even a big one) & we guessed it was about 60 years old.

[Yvonne]

Owwww that is so not good. I hope you can still go there although it won't be the same anymore.

[Frantic Freddie]

Ouch!!! I can imagine the woman's reaction
Not good that there is always a part on fire there....me thinks me is not going there because me is probably ending up in the on fire part somehow

Unless you've been here, I know you Europeans sometimes have a hard time visualizing just how darn big this country is. There's a lot of fires near where people live but most of them are so remote they have to helicopter the fire crews in. That is, if they don't just let it burn because it's so remote.

I read a story once about a fellow in Baltimore, his German co-workers, having recently arrived, asked him about renting a minivan for the weekend to go see the Grand Canyon.
Now any American reading that can see the problem immediately, but some of you Old World folks might think that's a reasonable question.

It might be, except for the fact that from Baltimore,Maryland (that's on the east coast) to the Grand Canyon is 2,300 miles/3700 km!

Personal story along the same lines: A young Brit friend came to visit us & we took him from our house all the way to Austin,Texas with some stops along the way. As we were driving through SE New Mexico he asked me "Freddie, how long has it been since we made a turn on this road?"

"Almost 2 hours" (traveling at 75-80 mph/120-130 kph)

[Kzin]

It might be, except for the fact that from Baltimore,Maryland (that's on the east coast) to the Grand Canyon is 2,300 miles/3700 km!

That means a 15 hour drive ony good Porsche or BMW

[Frantic Freddie]

That means a 15 hour drive ony good Porsche or BMW

I'll see your Porsche/BMW & raise you a Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8

My Brit friend had terrible trouble with our freeway exchanges, he said on his blog that Americans had mastered the 4th Dimension as far as roads

[old biker]

Ouch!!! I can imagine the woman's reaction
Not good that there is always a part on fire there....me thinks me is not going there because me is probably ending up in the on fire part somehow

that's the BBQ area

[Yvonne]

[Frantic Freddie]

That's why we have the best BBQ on Earth,everything's always on fire

[Frantic Freddie]

We just got home from The Burning of Zozobra, which also marks the beginng of the Fiestas de Santa Fe. I have pics & vid, I'll get those up in the next coupla days.

No, it has nothing to do with Burning Man except that the guy who started that claims he didn't get the idea from Zozobra, but he lived in Santa Fe in the 70s! Everybody in New Mexico knows he's full of crap