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For now we are living in our 100 year old house next to the town square in Blanco.

The Blanco River runs through town, and is a great place to jog and walk Sarai.

Here are some shots taken on our 25 acres.

The heat is up above 100 degrees -- pretty hot for those of us used to Oregon's cool cloudy weather. The truck containing all our stuff arrived in Austin ahead of us and has been sitting in storage waiting for us. U-Pack doesn't deliver to Blanco, so we hired a truck and some guys to help us move it. Les met them at the U-Pack station in Austin this morning. When the bulkhead was removed, he was faced with devastation! Les and Garrett had build plywood platforms in the truck in order to use as much vertical space as possible. Apparently the truck had vibrated so much that the bolts had backed out!

After spending a wonderful night in the Bell Cottage at Blanco Landing, Les and I were up early eager to check the horses and to see the house we had rented.

We drove by the horses to count poop (an experienced horse hauler will understand this) before going over to our new house. The horses were casually munching breakfast, and looked more contented than I have seen them so far on the trip. Even their skin looks relaxed. It's as though they know they are home.

Sharon, our new landlord had told us that she would leave the house open and the keys on the kitchen counter. After having lived in Portland, that seemed amazing, but I remember what small towns in Texas are like -- mostly break-in free because burglers tend to get shot! Gun ownership definitely cuts down on crime, and everyone in small rural communities has hunting rifles and shotguns. Years ago, I moved to Beckett Road in Austin, which was part of a community of small acreages. The neighbors told us that they never locked their doors, but that recently there had been some breakins (Austin was expanding in that direction) and all the guys had agreed to sit up at hight, shotguns on their laps just in case. That night the intruder was shot (and killed) and there were no more breakins for the rest of the 9 years I lived there! Word gets around. After living next to Quatama Crossing Apartments in Beaverton, Oregon, an apartment with such a high crime rate that the police department put an office in the apartment itself, it was a comfort to be back in rural Texas.

Up to find that the satellite modem seems to be up and working but isn’t passing traffic. The process is to power cycle it and go through the registration process again. We got a message that it can’t connect to the DNS server. After 10 minutes, it succeeded. The quality of service provided by Direcway is slow and unreliable! ARGHH! It came back and said that it authenticated the terminal, but doesn’t seem like it’s working. ACP is pretty low at 63, which is still a pass (antenna shifted?)
The real deal is that it won’t stay live for more than 4 to 6 hours. Oh well, after 12 days on the road, this has come to seem pretty normal. Boy, is that sad.

Leisurely morning, breakfast for us and the horseys, then dousing them with fly spray. There seem to be swarms of flies despite a lack of fresh manure, or even animal habitation. Maybe flies around an empty barn are like fleas in the carpet when you take your pets on a vacation -- they breed like crazy, and when you come back, when you step in the door, you are covered with the little bloodsuckers!

This morning was pleasant. Here we are in our outdoor office!

And here is Sarai sunning

Around lunchtime we drove in towards Demming in search of beer, and discovered that liquor licenses are very hard to come by in Demming, and there are exactly 4 establishments that sell beer/liquor! We drove by a gas station, nievely assuming that a gas station that has a store attached for cigarettes, snacks, cokes, etc. would sell beer! Not so! We did finally find a gas station that sells beer. In fact it is so proud of its liquor license that it has about 6 large signs ( sized 3' by 6')advertising the various types of beer and hard liquor it sell. The manager told Les that they make more in liquor sales than gas. Usually you find a gas station that sells beer. In Demming, you find a beer store than sells gas.

Loaded up and left the MCS Stables in Flagstaff at 10:00. The horses are getting so good at the traveling that they practically load themselves. Portia still knits her brow at the trailer before stepping up, but Goldie and Al get in even before we can get the lead lines off! We end up having to tell them to wait for us!

On the way we keep seeing the rental RV's--1-800-RV-4-RENT. It must be a pretty successful business! Arizona seems to sanction suicide by motorcycle as they don't require motorcycle helmets. It seems wierd to see folks riding by with their hair flying in the wind.

We drove away from Eagle's Nest next to Escalante National Monument at noon. The horses are getting easier to load. Portia was only slightly reluctant. When I led Goldie out, she was ready to get right in. She had to wait just a moment for Les to finish fastening the divider beside Portia, and she ended up standing beside the ramp waiting, looking at me as if to say "Come on, just let me get in!" When Les tugged on her line, she stepped up the side of the ramp and got right into place! Wow, this is the horse who just a few days ago kept trying to tippy toe up the ramp with her back feet! When I brought Al up, Les just took his lead rope off outside the trailer, and said "get in" and in he got.

It got down to 28 last night -- the coldest so far on the trip. A few coyotes howling, but strangely, Sarai didn't join in.

The wireless access card on my machine is very iffy, and requires the machine to be restarted fairly frequently. The wireless modem requires a power cycle every 4 hours or so, but despite all that powering up, we do have internet access, which turned out to be a good thing because we had to find a lost e-ticket for Garrett for his flight to Austin!

Took the horses on a ride through the Escalante Monument Wilderness Area today. First we took Portia and Goldie, riding up a jeep trail, and up and up, then back down and down.

We left The Shaws at 8:25 a.m. heading for Eagle's Nest about 20 miles from Kanab, Utah. We went down highway 89 rather than I15 thinking that it might be smoother for the horses. Hah! It was so rough that the only thing worse would have been a road paved in large gravel! In addition to being rough, the road leading out of Salt Lake is multiply striped! Old stripes run about 6' away from the new stripes -- very confusling. To give the Utah'ans the benefit of the doubt, they have tried to deal with the problem by painting over the old stripes with something which instead of hiding the stripes, just makes them longer. So, we have the new short stripes, and the old long stripes. If I lived here, I would be writing to my congressman about the roads!

Up later than we had wanted. Guess our internal alarms haven't moved over to Mountain time yet. Got the horseys out on the lunge to stretch their legs, then loaded up. I was concerned that Portia might be reluctant about getting in after the painful ride she had on the way in with the screw head stickingout and cutting her leg, but she exhitited only mild reservations, then walked in. The others are considering the loading, traveling cycle old hat by now, and walked in like old hands. Tjis will be our first use of the new "in-trailer" watering system that Les installed.

We stopped at a nearby RV place to dump, and added to our list of improvements: a mat for kneeling on wet grass when connecting various RV hoses. We decided that the $300 we spend for power dump pump was well worth the price because we can dump even if we are downhill of the dump pipe. Along the same vein, we wish that we had bought the Motosat dish instead of the fixed dish. Sure it's $5K as opposed to $1K, but the pain and agony of setup is amazing!!!!! It's not made to be setup very often. It's made to be setup by two guys once, so the mechanical arrangement is really bad. Motosat just autodeploys, but you spend $4K for that feature. The automation is not worth $4K. All you really need is a simpler mechanical design.