HOT

103.1 degrees at 11:34am today.

New Friend

Karen made a new friend while we
were in Vegas.

Back In Mesa

We're now back in Mesa, AZ for the winter.

BIG WIN IN VEGAS!!

No, your eyes aren't playing tricks on
you. That's $4.00 we won on video
poker! We're on east street now!

Lunch At Times Square

In New York (New York) on the Vegas
Strip.

Las Vegas

We're now in Vegas for a few days
before heading to Mesa for the winter.
We're staying at the Sam's Town RV
park.

Springdale, UT

Right outside the entrance to Zion
National Park.

Postings

We just noticed that the number of postings to our blog has very roughly doubled each year since we started in 2006:

2006 = 9 postings
2007 = 16 postings
2008 = 27 postings
2009 = 58 postings

Ross whipped up a quick C program on his Mac to project what would happen if that trend continues. Here are the results:

year = 2009, postings = 58, per day = 0.2
year = 2010, postings = 116, per day = 0.3
year = 2011, postings = 232, per day = 0.6
year = 2012, postings = 464, per day = 1.3
year = 2013, postings = 928, per day = 2.5
year = 2014, postings = 1856, per day = 5.1
year = 2015, postings = 3712, per day = 10.2
year = 2016, postings = 7424, per day = 20.3
year = 2017, postings = 14848, per day = 40.7
year = 2018, postings = 29696, per day = 81.4
year = 2019, postings = 59392, per day = 162.7

As you can see by 2019, a short 10 years from now, we'll be making over 160 postings to this blog PER DAY. We'll be very busy posting - but you'll be very busy reading too. :-)

Zion National Park

We're now at Zion National Park after spending 5 days at Bryce National Park. It's less than a 2 hour drive between the parks. This is our second time at Zion; we were here last year at the end of September. We're staying at the park's Watchman campground and got here early in the afternoon. We were told that we couldn't go into our reserved site because someone else was in it. Turns out that those people were supposed to move to another site today but the site they were going into was occupied, so they decided to just go hiking all day! They finally got back around 3:30pm, moved and we were able to setup in our site. Takes all kinds... Tonight we attended the Ranger Program at the campground's auditorium which is a 30 second walk from our site. This talk was on fossils. Not too bad. After the talk I took some time exposure pictures of the mountains and the sky. Here's one of the resulting pictures.

Zion National Park at night.

Ruby's Inn

We're staying at Ruby's Inn RV park
just outside of Bryce Canyon NP.
Here's a picture of home for the next
5 nights.

Bryce Canyon NP

Inspiration Point - Wow!!

Fillmore, UT

We're spending the night at the KOA
here in Fillmore. The county is named
Millard - really!

On The Road Again

Rest break off I80 in northeast Utah on
our way to Bryce Canyon National
Park.

Summer's Over

Yesterday was our last working day of the 2009 summer season here at the Bear Lake KOA. We are, like almost everyone else who works here, exhausted. We're sad to be leaving the new friends that we made but we're really looking forward to getting back to Mesa. We'll be taking about 2 weeks to get back there. We're going to spend some time in Bryce National Park, Zion Nation Park and Las Vegas. Today we'll be packing up the Casita and Xterra and tomorrow morning we hit the road.

	The outside of the campground's office (duh) where we spent most of our time this summer.
	On the left side of this picture is the registration desk. The 2 computers are where we would check in arriving campers. Over the course of the summer we became VERY familiar with KOA's software, Kampsight.
	A group of our fellow workers in the backroom of the store. In front is Elise, in the back (left to right) are Tashina, Shelby, Tawai, Alicia, Brandon and Parker. These are just a few of the large crew we worked with this summer.

Stuck Skidster

A few weeks ago Curtis (one of the owners of the KOA) decided to use the campground's new Case skidster to dig up 3 bushes next to our Casita. That would create a nice parking space for a vehicle next to us. When he went in for the middle bush the skidster's wheels dug into the soft ground and it got stuck. He used the campground's Farm All tractor to pull it out. So what did we learn?

1) Don't use heavy machinery on soft ground.
2) Have a rescue plan ready.
3) This campground has some REALLY COOL machines!!

	Curtis in the stuck skidster. The main concern was not damaging the water supply pipe (which we use for our Casita!) right next to it. Happily it didn't get hurt.
	Pulling out the skidster with the Farm All tractor.