We're still here, blogging from the ranch house. Today we went for a great walk up along the irrigation canal, with wide vistas of the surrounding ranch land. We'd love to find a place up here to invest in for a weekend getaway, but the upkeep requirements might be a bit much, and maybe we should just be visiting here now and then.


An old combine up by the irrigation canal.


Clark (Mona's husband) baling hay nearby.

Yesterday we went down to Cheyenne, the state capital, where Frontier Days art underway with rodeo activity and a few hundred thousand visitors. We just walked around downtown, and left the rodeo and fairgrounds activity for a future visit.


The State Capital building with - uh... horse residue in the foreground (hey, this is the Old West...).

Tomorrow will be a day to get everything packed up again, and decide what to leave here for later retrieval. Sunday morning we'll be hitting the road early in the morning for our noon arrival at the renatl house in Denver. Pat has a list of initial house prospects, and we'll be on to that activity early next week.

We're not feeling rushed into finding jobs or taking a house that's a big compromise for us. In fact, we're already thinking about our next visit up here for the Wyoming State Fair the second or third week of August.


The Double MD ranch from the canal road.

Text © 2003-2004 Stanley J. Wolf

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The drive here was very nice - wide open spaces and big sky providing a very different perspective from the jam-packed urban life that was a background for everything happening before. There is a LOT of open space away from urban centers. What population there is calls you "Honey" a lot.


At an RV park in Winnemucca. We passed on the offer of a free shuttle to the casino with the Elvis museum.

About an hour out from Wheatland.

Life here in Wheatland is pretty good. When we finally decided what we were actually going to do and headed East for Denver with a stop at the Double MD ranch, we hoped we could have a break here from all the stress of uncertainty and change that wound up to a fever pitch over the last few weeks and months in California. And that's the way it has worked out.


Note the Buddhist prayer flags flying in the foreground.

We set up our tent in the yard next to the house here at the ranch, and use it like and extra bedroom. When you get up in the middle of the night to take a leak over by the fence, the clarity and brightness of the stars and that glowing band of the Milky Way is startling. Last night when I went out to sleep I heard a bunch of coyotes in the distance howling and yelping.


The tent next to the house.

Pat and the dog walking around the "back yard".

What we do a lot while here is cook and eat. Mona (my sister) graciously shares her Kitchen and lets me help out.

Yesterday I went to town and got a haircut at the only barbershop. Besides the haircut I expected a good experience with a local character barber, and was not disappointed. We talked about his days as a soldier in occupied Japan under General Macarthur, local ladies, flying and airplanes, the economy, and a little politics. You want to tread lightly on politics here, as this is the state Cheney held office from, and he has had lunch in the cafe where my sister waits tables.


Wheatland's only barber shop.

Today we're going to town to buy a new TV and DVD player for MOna and Clark to replace the 1960's-vintage console TV they have been watching. This is not the kind of luxury they would indulge in with all the other demands of the ranch, so it's a good place to help out.


Text © 2003-2004 Stanley J. Wolf

I seem to have left my camera USB cable in a box somewhere, so it may be a while before I can post any photos of the recent events referred to in posts.  Check back - if the cable turns up I'll edit them in...


A view of Wheatland, not unlike the ranch where we're at..."

It has been a long time since I posted anything. Maybe I just grew weary of trying to sort out what we might do from what we were going to do. So now I have a backlog of what we actually did, so I can start catching up on that.

We're in Wheatland, Wyoming - at my sister Mona's ranch. What a great place - quiet and remote, and beautiful in so many ways. It is what I imagined when I called from a payphone in Mexico near the cemetary, when I talked to Mona in tears about the realization that a move to Merida wasn't probably going to happen right away, and not the way we envisioned it.

Since that call, I went ahead and tried to figure out how to make the move to Mexico happen regardless, then after returning home we shifted gears into a Denver relocation plan, then a plan to stay and work in the Bay Area while renting for a year and hanging onto jobs (we came within an hour of signing a lease on a rental, after a brutal week and a half of disappointing house hunting), then back to the Denver plan. When we really committed to the Denver plan, I had to go in and resign to set a two-week countdown to the departure from the house. At that late stage in the sale process, this required us to rent back for a little over a week. And leave the very day after my final day at work. All the packing and loading of containers for pickup to storage and eventual shipment to our as-yet-unlocated house took place in the weekend prior to that last day in house on the 21st. Everything JUST fit in the four containers, with
enough left over that we would need short-term to fit into the Xterra and a few boxes to be shipped ahead to the tanch in Wyoming.

Oddly, when the final exit from the house occured, the stress was much less than the days and weeks prior. We hit the road with a serenity we hadn't felt for a long time.

The first night, we made it as planned to Winnemucca, Nevada. It was a beautiful evening and a nice campground, and we were able to set up the tent and rig a light for ourselves as night fell. The following night we made it to Green River, Wyoming - too bad my campground selection from the guidebook was Green River, Utah (oops). Fortunately, there was a decent campground we were only five minutes away from in the Wyoming town as that evening approached, so we were able to get set up comfortably there as well. The following afternoon, after a shorter day's drive
through places like Bitter Creek, Table Rock, and Medicine Bow we made it to Wheatland (you know, just North of Chugwater on I-25).

This abbreviated version of events brings us to the current time, where I'll try to keep up a little better now that the trauma of being uprooted is diminished.

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Text © 2003-2004 Stanley J. Wolf