Summer Vacation: Day 2

	This morning we made our way toward Devils Postpile National Monument. Wow. The entrance to the place was VERY high in altitude and very chilly for summer. I believe it was somewhere around 9,000 ft. At this point there is a Minaret viewpoint where I shot these two pictures. I never feel natural posing for the camera. I suppose that is why I like being behind the lens.
	Devils Postpile is seriously one cool place to visit. I was not sure if it was going to be worth the extra driving to get there but in retrospect it was worth it all. I mentioned that at the overlook it was chilly and windy. To get to the postpile from there you have to descend about 2000 feet down mostly a narrow one-way road with steep drop-offs. The weather was nice. It was not windy and warm. What a different a little elevation makes. I need to tell you a little about this formation. It is one of the finest examples of columnar basalt formations because of how many columns have 6-sides (hexigons). We took many more pictures but these will suffice to tell the story. Notice the cool arrowhead like formation where the columns are lateral on the left and vertical on the right. That's cool to see. Then we took a close up of the column debris at the foot of the formation. Tracy loves this stuff because she took geology in school and can recognize volcanic things like this. The other pictures don't really give you scale of the formation so I took a panoramic picture that lets you see the whole thing. We'll talk about the top of the formation in just a second but first let's talk people. On our way up to the top of the formation (they let you walk on it) Ryan posed for me through this decaying tree. What a cute kid. Tracy and Ryan showed their cuteness in this pose. If you look closely you can see the formation in the background. The walk up to the top is short but very interesting. You walk through an area that has a lot of fire damage and it's a bit like a forest graveyard of sorts. Ryan just loved all of the dirt and dirty things; the more the better. When we got to the top of the formation I'm not sure what I expected to say but I did not expect to see a tile looking floor. The picture I selected doesn't show that feature off very well. Looking down, the ground looks like a bunch of hexagonal tiles. They were smoothed by ancient glaciers and as as you can tell from the included picture it is curved. The curve is not all that noticeable from on top but the camera sure picks it up. All in all we enjoyed this part of the national monument. We were not sure what else there was to do but we did know we needed lunch.
	I had to fight every temptation to keep the table out of this picture. The scenary around this lake near the Postpile was enticing. However, I realized I wanted to capture what our view was as we munched on lunch. There were ducks, fly-fisherman, etc. Ahhhh. Relaxing!
	I guess I had really no idea that this national monument had a big waterfall attraction. It does and it's called Rainbow Falls. It is about a 1 mile hike from the trailhead to the the falls. Just a few steps in, Ryan conked out. He did that a lot in his child carrier. Like the postpile trail, this one was marred by fire. This fire in the 1990s was apparently a very big deal for the area. Huh? The waterfall only looks about 3 feet high in this picture with Tracy. However it is really about 100 feet hight; darn optical illusions. This was a fun place to shoot. On this one photo of the trees and roots winding through the rocks you can see me camouflaged. Tracy likes to shoot me taking photos. (grin) We hung out at the falls for about an hour as Ryan continued to sleep and I found new angles to take photographs from. We liked this waterfall. It was definitely the most impressive one we saw on the trip. Actually it was just about the only one that had water so I guess that is not hard to award a winner (smile). We closed out the day by going back toward the postpile and try to find the soda springs which was proof of volcanic activity. They were okay, but I liked the bridge we had to cross better.
	When we go back to the hotel, Ryan cooked us up some dinner and made sure we had good plumbing. Every pipe checked out and no leaks.

Summer Vacation: Day 1

Over 2000 miles in a car with a toddler. What were we thinking? Ryan was probably wondering that same thing by the time we made it to Delta. It was one of the many planned stops along the way to our first destination in California. We picked Delta because we knew they would have a park that Ryan could run around in. He is just at that stage where he can walk around fairly freely and we knew that sitting in a car for a day would be challenging. Surprisingly he handled it quite well. He loved it so much that when we got to the park he wanted to look at the plexiglass on the playground equipment to simulate looking out the car window. Crazy kid...

Next we stopped in Ely, Nevada. I have nothing to say about Ely. We just stopped and got gas. It was cool and windy and we were not feeling the love so onward we went to mysterious Tonopah, Nevada. I was not really sure what to expect. A co-worker of mine, Nick, mentioned that his dad almost detests Tonopah when he has had to visit there for his job. One thing is for certain and that is there really is not much going around in the region. It's really isolated. The drive across Nevada to get to Tonopah was more scenic than we thought. Tonopah is apparently one of the best places to gaze at stars. I wish we could have seen that. I miss seeing all of the stars in the sky that I used to see when we sleep outside at night for sleepovers with friends. We saw a few interesting things in town. The high school mascot is the "Mucker." Click on the photo to find more of what that means. There is a classic McDonald's there. It looks like it was stuck in the 60's or 70's. Those both interesting and disturbing at the same time. There is a cool cemetery in the heart of town. Tracy snapped this photo. You can tell life is harder here. We snapped this picture of the liquor store next to the gambling establishment. All we need now is a payday loan place . This is the strangest gas fill-up I ever had. Usually prices are pretty close with gas stations but here one gas station was like $4.29/gallon and the other was $3.70. That was a head scratcher. We went with the cheaper gas and made it to our next location so WHEW. There is not much vegetation in Tonopah. I guess only getting 6 inches a year of rain helps promote desolation. The scenery was interesting. Even this little neighborhood park that we found was interesting and Ryan enjoyed it. As we left the sun was setting and we snapped a picture of the beautiful sunset while driving down the road on our way to Mammoth Lakes. Since the sun went down, Ryan got a chance to play with Daddy's sunglasses. Anything to entertain....anything to entertain...

Ryan is An Animal...errrr...Well He Saw Animals

All the planning in the world can be thwarted so very easily. Ryan celebrated the night before his birthday by awaking several times. Needless to say, we were all tired as this day of celebration began.

Thankfully, Ryan had slept for a little bit on the journey to the zoo. However, you can see he had not quite worked out all of his sleepies as he awoke to strange creatures like a barn owl.

We spent the morning at Hogle Zoo and the evening at a nearby park. The zoo has really made some improvements since the last time I was there (about 20 or so years ago). Back then me and my Mom would go to the Zoo and then after we would go to the Red Barn Hamburgers on North Temple and 9th West. Red Barn is long gone, but their legacy and pictures live on the internet (barnbuster.net Wikipedia article)

He wasn't really sure what he thought of the merry-go-round (carrousel) but his cousins enjoyed the ride. If Ryan had his choice he would rather play in the dirt and mulch around the zoo than look at the animals. By noon he was exhausted and running short on sleep and the albino alligator/crocodile (I don't know how to tell the difference) sealed the deal and he crashed.

Six hours later he was ready to go again for the next party. He enjoyed the cake but was not as messy as I wanted him to be. He enjoyed opening the gifts that were given to him and he is surprisingly good at opening things. It's a little scary truly.

Birthdays provide a good time for reflection and Tracy and I comment about how rewarding this year has been as we are learning to be parents and have greatly increased the gratitude we have for our own parents and how they raised us.

Here is to many more birthdays and loved ones to share them with....

Son Chips

Ryan is in a phase of life where he wants to imitate *EVERYTHING* we do. Recently I grabbed a bag of Sun Chips (my favorite chip) and started eating. Over my left shoulder I caught sight of Ryan staring me down. He was intrigued by the crunch the bag made and the crunch my mouth made. Being a typical man, I thought nothing more of it, finished the bag of chips and threw it away.

A few minutes later I again looked over my shoulder and Ryan had retrieved the bag from the garbage. He managed to find some crumbs in the bag and was eating them just as I had done. I know think of that bag of Sun Chips as "Son Chips."

The Power of the Many

This is a before and after picture (about 5 hour time difference) of putting up fence slats. What's the significance of that?

The addage of many hands make light work is true. Over the last few weeks, my wife and I and several siblings have been helping my in-laws rebuild their wooden fence. In the matter of a maybe 5 work-days we took the existing fence down, put in new posts, treated the slats and attached them to the fence frame. Working on this with one or two people and this project could have gone on for months because of lack of dedicated time or paralysis of where to begin.

It's more than just putting more people at a problem to get it done faster. What makes us all unique is our set of strengths and weakneses. In combination, it makes the work go faster because chances are that someone else's strength is one of your weaknesses. I'm just an office worker so I'm not very good at building things--especially wood things. However, I can use a drill and I can screw in many of the 1200+ screws (12 lbs) to hold all of the fence slats. Lesson learned. Working together on an endeavor is a good thing.