We took it easy this morning. After my usual breakfast, I processed an image for the blog then packed up the last item I had eBayed and had received payment late last night. We prepped the RV to move and left with me in the RV and J in the Jeep around 10:25.

We went to the Bellaire Lake Day Use Area to dump and take on fresh water. I used our Flojet Macerator Pump to dump into the pit toilet, then I started to use our Water Thief to take on fresh water. I got sprayed pretty good a couple of times when the seal got loose — yuk! I wasn't too happy when two Camp Hosts drove up in their golf cart. They were doing their usual rounds to check on and clean the pit toilet, and I was expecting them to at least tell us that we couldn't fill our RV, and maybe even write us up a citation. Instead, the guy said I was doing it the hard way and got out an adaptor to screw into the fitting at the bottom of the post so I could screw our hose directly onto it. Then he got out his special key to fit over the 5/16-inch (7.9mm) square valve knob. What an improvement — I no longer had to hold the Water Thief in position while holding the faucet open. After we finished taking on water, we hooked up the Jeep to tow and got underway around noon.

We headed south on CR-162 then turned right on CR-69. We got on CO-14 heading west near Rustic to head up the scenic Poudre Canyon. We went over Cameron Pass (10,276 ft or 3132m) at 1:03, and there were lots of wildflowers near the top on both sides.

We reached a nice boondocking spot near Gould in the Routt National Forest around 1:20. It was great for solar-electric power, but I didn't have a Verizon Wireless signal on my Palm Treo 755p which is what we expected from our previous visits to the area. We prepped our laundry and packed up our computers and left in the Jeep around 1:45.

We went to the Post Office in Walden around 2:15 so I could mail off the eBayed item and to pick up our mail.

Then we went to a coin laundry in Walden. After we got the laundry started, we went through our mail, and I went back to the Post Office to send something off. On my way back, I stopped at the Shell gas station to fill up the Jeep at $2.999/gal. I returned to the laundry just in time to put things in the dryer. Then I worked up a blog entry and did other things online. We left around 4:00.

We went to the North Park Super's grocery store on the far north side of town at 4:08 to go grocery shopping. The store had a decent selection of groceries and also had a camping/hunting section and a hardware section.

Then we went to the Do It hardware store to pick up some things for J's hummingbird photography setup.

We returned to the RV around 5:25 and the temperature outside had dropped to the upper 50's as a cloud bank (and probably a front) had moved by.

We had dinner at 6:00 of Bertolli Chicken alla Vodka & Farfalle. It's one of our favorite flavors, and we hadn't seen it for quite a while.

After dinner, we put away the rest of our laundry and I tested out my new cell antenna pigtail that arrived from China. It's an 8-inch (20cm) long adaptor from an FME male plug, that fits onto our Wilson Electronics 859957 700-2400 MHz Splitter via an N-male-to-FME-female adaptor, to a TS-9 plug that fits on my USB727 stick. With the pigtail letting me connect to our external cell antenna, I could get one bar of Verizon Broadband that let me get online with decent speed! :) BTW, the similar adaptor that J picked up at the Verizon Wireless Store in Silverthorne on July 2, 2010 is about 20 inches (50cm) long and only cost about a buck more than the adaptor I got. So, now each of us can connect our USB sticks directly to our roof-mounted cell antenna. We left in the Jeep around 7:14.

We went in search of moose. Moose were reintroduced to Colorado in this area, known as North Park, beginning in 1978, and there's a large population of them now. We didn't see any moose where we went tonight, and a beaver pond where we photographed a beaver on a previous visit was gone too. We were really surprised that the Pines Campground, a Forrest Service campground, where we had stayed on our first visit to the area together, had been clear-cut to remove the beetle-killed trees. The campground is still closed, and it looks horrible!

The clouds started to get some nice light on them, but there wasn't a good place to photograph them because the area is mostly pine forest with small meadows along the creek. We turned onto FR-792, a road we hadn't been on before, and pretty soon we were heading up the side of a mountain. There was a clearing big enough to photograph through, so we stopped to capture the fantastic light on the ridge across the valley. Unfortunately, we were about two minutes too late because by the time we were parked and set up, the fantastic light on the ridge was gone. The light on the clouds was still nice though, as can be seen in the image to the left. The image was created from three captures, to retain detail in the bright clouds through the dark foreground, and then combined by hand in Photoshop.

Apple Magic Mouse

We returned to the RV around 8:15. I downloaded the images I took then set up my new Apple Magic Mouse. I got the mouse to pair by going to the System Preferences / Keyboard & Mouse panel, but the swipes didn't work — no scrolling. So, I downloaded the Wireless Mouse Software update, and that replaced the single System Preferences / Keyboard & Mouse panel with one panel each for the Keyboard, Trackpad, and Mouse. Now I was able to use the swipe gestures on the mouse for scrolling. :) It'll take me a while to get used to the mouse because the sides of the Magic Mouse are quite different from my old Mighty Mouse. The sides of the Mighty Mouse are more vertical, and I used to grasp the mouse close to the bottom, just above my mouse pad. The sides of the Magic Mouse are angled in towards the bottom, so when I tried to grasp it tightly near the bottom the first time, I ended up lifting the mouse off of the mouse pad as my thumb and third finger just kept pinching together under the mouse. It'll take me a while to get used to grasping the mouse further away from the mouse pad. I love the swipe-based scrolling! It's silent compared to the slight clicking sound on my old Mighty Mouse, and I will no longer have to clean the tiny rubber scroll ball on the Mighty Mouse.

I processed an image for the blog before going to bed.