fall colors at night...

light painting the trees above the trucks. love the stars.

"want to come back here at night with flashlights and light paint these trucks" you know i said yes.

until our next adventure - my favorite picture of tld and me. the bike ride was tld's idea and came with too many incentives to possibly miss. an eight hour drive through the rockies from farmington new mexico to a home made cabin in the poudre canyon outside fort collins colorado. free lodging at said home made cabin with tld and his always entertaining family. a full day bike ride up the big thompson canyon to the stanley hotel. and encouragement like this even before we hit the road - "you might want to consult your drivers license and consider an adjustment or two" (in regard to my plan to just get on a bike and making the ride without any training)

after traveling 29 miles and climbing 2600 feet from loveland to the stanley hotel, i gave my bike its much deserved break.

having helped on a smaller scale dry stack wall project i have tremendous respect and admiration for this effort.

if i could wave a wand and create my ideal back yard it would look a lot like this. what you can't see is the ski hill that would be to the right and the vast meadow with a garden on the left. as for the house on this magical land i haven't given that any thought because with a yard like this who would be indoors?

on october 6th later this year during their oktoberfest celebration the town of ouray (you-ray) colorado is going to pick up the phone and call a lucky entrant to let them know they won a shiny new orange jeep in raffle. i don't really think i'm going to win - but it was fun to walk by the jeep every day and say it was ours and to plan our winter trip to pick it up. check back on october 7th and i'll be sure to let you know if i won or not...

we woke logan from a short twenty minute nap when we arrived at the four corners of arizona, colorado, new mexico and utah. it must have been about forty minutes too early because logan woke up grumpy and insisted she wouldn't pose on the four corners and if we made her, she wasn't going to be smiling. so, i got this photo assuming the family photos were going to be fouled by the foul mood of our daughter. but as luck would have it, the line was long enough, and her mother's arms comforting enough that the charming logan returned by the time we got to stand in four states at once.

we were the last car to get pass the fire, the fire department closed the road right behind us. judging by how fast the fire spread as we approached it and how much had already burned, i'm surprised we even got by...

the best way to calm your children's fears after a forest fire burns near their house is to come across a second, larger fire the next day. the day after we had a fire next door to our house, we saw this fire on the horizon directly in our path back home.

a tradition of our travels is to splurge at least once and stay somewhere really nice. we usually do this at the end of the trip to punctuate the experience and so that all subsequent lodging doesn't isn't measured against the 'luxury stay'. however, our summer in new mexico has started with the 'luxury stay' ironically because the first place natalie landed in was so bad she simply had to get out. this place is on twenty seven acres, has a pond out front we cross over on a bridge to reach the front door and has golf course quality lawns as far as the eye can see - a literal oasis in the desert of new mexico.

we were able to walk from our beachfront villa to the ruins of tulum. tulum was the smallest ruin we visited but if you were mayan i can't think of a better location.

this picture is of el castillo taken from the torre de guardia with the carribean sea in the background.

me enjoying a book on the porch of our villa at papaya playa. photo by natalie and included at her insistence.

the view from our villa's porch. and since the beaches were mostly deserted we took advantage of the clothing optional policies.

the last three days of our trip we spent relaxing in our villa at papaya playa 2km south of tulum. this wonderful thatched roof villa came with an ocean view (to be shown later), front porch with authentic yucatán hammock, two mosquito net covered beds, private toilet and shower (pumping well water at an impressive one gallon per millennium).

before leaving chitchén itzá we visited grutas de balankanché 6km east of the ruins. grutas de balankanché is a cave where mayan ceremonial treasures were discovered and every hour they have a guided tour where the guide never speaks but does hit the play button on a silly cave sound system.

this picture has natalie standing at the grutas bus station - or side of the road as we call it in the states. dusk is approaching, we haven't caught a single bus that adhered to the published schedule, a thunderstorm rolled through while we were in the grutas and more appear to be on the way...

i was pretty sure we'd be spending the night here.

closer to the grupo de las mil columnas (group of the thousand columns) you can see the intricate carvings that were on each and every column.

later when we came back here it was so hot that i thought the place should be renamed grupo de las mil degrees.