Winter Road Trip, Day 5: Sipapu

Here's a photo of the total eclipse of the moon that happened around 12:40am Mountain time. We set the camera up on the porch outside our hotel room, got the girls up and took a ton of photos as the earth's shadow crossed over the surface of the moon. It was pretty awesome, but both Brad and I thought how much more incredible it would have been to have seen it from McDonald Observatory.

So here we are, skiing fools. We’ve really enjoyed Sipapu. Grace has mastered the mountain; Caroline has mastered go, but needs to work on stop; Brad’s buzzing right along and I’m actually doing all right. I’ve made it down the entire mountain, and almost entirely on my feet!

We’ve met some great people here, and the kids instantly fell for Sony and her boyfriend, Chris, from Frisco. Sony works in elementary special ed so she’s a total kid magnet. The kids sometimes refused to ski unless she came too, and her patience has been great. Chris actually took Grace all the way up the lift and back down the mountain (at least 20 minutes!) twice.

Above you have Grace on the chair lift, and below you have Brad and Caroline in the chair in front of us. As we reached the end where you’re supposed to slide off the seat and ski down the hill, I saw Brad JUMP in front of me. Apparently Cariboo’s feet didn’t touch and he went a little too far in trying to help her get off.

Again, the girls & Sony. Cariboo’s wearing Sony’s goggles and almost refused to give them back.

On the way back to the hotel we followed a sign that read “High Road to Taos Scenic Byway.” They really should have revised the signs going in our direction to read “High Road FROM Taos Scenic Byway.” We ended up about 40 minutes from the hotel when we finally got to a real road – that after spending about 45 minutes driving there!

We’re ready for one more day on the slopes. I’ll be taking lots of motion pics (hopefully not from MY motion!) and possibly giving snowboarding a good try.

Winter Road Trip 2010, Day 4: Sipapu, New Mexico

 

As we drove into the mountains this scene really stood out. I don’t even think the photo looks real, however I didn’t touch it up one bit.

Now this was just strange – sunset over the mountain. The colors were totally crazy.

Another idyllic scene. I almost expect to see an elk standing in the edge of the woods.

Grace and Caroline kind of enjoyed the snow. They had a blast just playing near the parking lot at the slopes. We picked up two snowball makers at Eddie Bauer (and now I see why a store in Houston would think snow-oriented things would actually sell) and they worked GREAT. Caroline was a great sport and didn’t freak out about being pelted, even when it got down her jacket.

And another freak atmosphere photo. This was taken on our full moon hike up the mountain. Let me tell you, it’s MUCH harder to climb up the mountain than it is to go down. We did slide down a lot on our butts and that was fun, but oh! if we’d had a sled!

We skied all day long and I didn’t feel comfortable wiping out with my camera (camera armor or not!) so no photos of the slopes yet. I’ll take some time off tomorrow and get shots, although I’m considering trying out snowboarding instead of skiing. I might end up in the hospital and miss the shots. Hmmm. Have to think about that.

Winter Road Trip, Day 3

 

Wow. New Mexico is, well, vast and … vast. Oh, and mostly flat. And field-covered. The town of Carlsbad is completely underwhelming, which one would not expect given the spectacular caverns that are found right down the road. We actually chose a hotel based on safety for the first time in our travel lives.

BUT, the caverns were pretty incredible.

(that’s water reflecting there!)

And the kids had a Junior Ranger activity book to fill out – which, amazingly, they really did.

This is the “Natural Entrance” AKA where the bats fly out of when they are actually there. They are smart and spend their winters in Mexico, not New Mexico, so we didn’t get to see their exodus from the depths of the caverns. Bummer. At least we have Austin.

This one room was phenomenally humongous. We really kind of jogged it because we wanted to make it to Roswell in the afternoon and it took forever and ever to make it around. I had somehow erroneously gotten the impression that it was a single, roundish room with a nice flat floor. I’m not sure where that idea came from – it was filled with stalactites, stalagmites and columns. Go figure.

So we finally headed to Roswell, bummed that we were missing out on the open stores (they close up at 5pm), but we made a point of taking alien photos anyway.

And um, we have NO idea what this is. Honestly, there are tons of these signs like they’re nothing special. We think they are a UFO about to abduct a cow. Weirdness.

So – next day – Sipapu Ski Area, near Taos, New Mexico.

Winter Road Trip 2010: Days 1 and 2

 

One of the nice things about our road trips is that we take our time. The Journey is as important as the Destination. These couple of photos were taken on one of those scenic overlooks along the highway.

Texas is rather impressive. You can see for just about forever in some places, there are huge mountains in others and then you have these wind farms.

Indian Lodge is one of the greatest places we’ve ever stayed. It’s up in Davis Mountain State Park, about 3 miles from Fort Davis. It was around $60/night; there’s a restaurant – really good! – on the property; the rooms are great and the views are incredible.

In Fort Davis we discovered this great little place. The gentlemen running the show were even more interesting than their critters.

Saw this guy chillin’ by the side of the road.

That’s Indian Lodge down there.

Yuccas EVERYWHERE

Grandma's 85th Birthday Party

So we all, meaning the entire McMeekin/Rush clan, got together for Grandma's 85th birthday at Saltgrass. I can't think of anyone who didn't make it to the gathering, which was really great to see. Grandma deserves all the lovin' we had to give.

Pat and Megan flew in; Patrick, Cheri, Kolby & Kolton drove in from Oklahoma. We had a great time, but it flew by and there was so much we could have done together but didn't get the time to do. I'm trying to convince Patrick & Cheri to move down here. The girls would LOVE to have Kolby around more.

Android Apps that are MUST HAVES:

So I have this awesome HTC Evo. Do I like it? Well yeah, I really, really do. It does everything I need and oh-so-much more. I agree that iPhones and iPod Touches are nifty, but honestly, I don’t see one single reason why I would ever consider an iPhone instead of the Evo, even if they did have the same monthly charges (which they totally don’t).

The Android Market has a zillion apps. No, not close to the number of apps iTunes has, and the Android Marketplace really kind of sucks, but there are certainly enough apps for everything I wanted to do (and a lot of things I didn’t realize I would want to do) and App \Brain (app number one on my list) helps ease the pain of the sucky Android Market.

You want to know what my most recommended apps are? I’ll try to put them in order of importance. Here goes:

1. AppBrain: From here you can access reviews, search for apps to handle certain needs and check out the most popular apps. The following link will get you to the apps that I currently have loaded on my phone – and that’s kind of cool: being able to share an entire list in one fell swoop. http://www.appbrain.com/user/krush/
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2. Timeriffic: this will automatically change the settings on my phone so I’m not awakened at 1am by a super loud message notification or by a ringing phone, however it will still allow my alarm to go off.
3. Taskos: Voice to text ROCKS! I just click on the microphone, tell it what I need to remember or add to my to-do list, check for accuracy (surprisingly good) and click Add. DONE.
4. Our Groceries:  With a Blackberry app, too, I can create a shopping list and both my mom and my husband can see it. They can check things off the list and share their lists with me. I haven’t written on our grocery list by the pantry for at least a week.
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5. Touch Calendar (Beta): Basically, this looks like a regular wall calendar, but you can scoot it around to see other parts of the screen. Click on a day and use the menu to view the agenda. It looks pretty sweet and syncs with Google.
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6. Dropbox: This is for both your computer and your phone. I have a folder called My Dropbox in my My Docs on my computer. I copy files to that folder and they appear on my phone AND on my other computers that have the app installed. This was crazy helpful when I needed a file on my laptop that I hadn’t put there.
7. Epic Fails (with the ‘S’): I have to put this towards the top of my list because it inevitably cracks me the hell up. These are pictures of the stupidiest, creepiest, whateverist things you can imagine. I had to go and load it on one of the phones in the Sprint store when I was waiting for something just to kill my time. It did the job.
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8. Apps Organizer: I probably should have put this nearer the top – maybe around #2 or so. Like the newest versions of iTunes, you can organize your apps into categories and place those folders on your phone rather than having hundreds of free-floating apps all over your home pages. LOVE IT!
9. SlideIT Soft Keyboard: Although the reviews seem to be going downhill, I sure loved this app until the trail period expired. It is a totally NEW way to type on a keyboard. You just slide your finger across the letters that would go into a word and it guesses the word you’re aiming for. Surprisingly, it was rarely wrong. I’ll have to see what the complaints are about. Swype is another app that does this, but it’s not available for the Evo yet, and might never be.
10. chompSMS: makes cool bubbles for chats. I just like it better than the generic comes-with chat app.
11. Talking Tom Cat Free: I can’t even try to explain this. It’s just something that should come standard on the phone, that’s all.
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12. Spider Man: good, mindless fun. Simple and worth loading. It’s not the comic book Spider Man, don’t worry.
13. Kindle and Nook for Android: Duh. Just good ones to have. There are zillions of free books you can download, too.
14. Key Ring Reward Cards: if you hate those tons of key cards you have hanging all over your keychain get rid of them! Scan or type in the numbers for your cards and the cashiers can scan or type them in to get you your discount. Really works!

OK, so I have many, many more. This is a good start, though, and I’ll add more as I discover them.