My Mountain Trail

Piloting the Mothership

We are going to St. George, UT this year for our holiday vacation. Lori wants to scope out the Ironman course, and it’s hard to beat such a beautiful area. We will try to spend a few days in Zion, Snow Canyon, and maybe some new discovory.

As usual it took a bit longer to get ready than we expected. Monday morning we finished prepping for our trip and then went for a run. Just as we started our run, it started to rain hard. Didn’t matter though; it was still a lot of fun. And, it wasn’t too cold either. Maybe 52 degrees.

We ran as a family. Even with the rain, Cookie was a trooper. She never really complained at all, and as we got nearer home she started pushing. Fun!

After our run we ended up spending another hour or so getting ready. Then we burned some time running some last minute errands. One of which was to pick up the mail from the post office — in the hopes that we would get the Adobe Illustrator we had ordered. The mail man didn’t stop the mail, so there wasn’t any to pick up. I think he does that every time. Then picks it up later and they hold it.

Anyway, we finally got on the road at about 1:15 p.m. Since we had decided to go only as far as Tehachapi, that was manageable. The trip to Tehachapi was pretty uneventful. We arrived at about 8:15 p.m. and headed up the mountain to Tehachapi Mountain county park.

The park is straight up the mountain. I figured the truck was okay w/ towing the jeep since it was about 40 degrees. Well, after three miles of 8% -10% or more climbing, we were smoking — Not bad, but the torque converter seal was definitely doing some spraying. And the park was a big disappointment. It wasn’t well maintained, there was old snow, and it was deserted. Lori said something like “I wonder where the meth lab is?”… And it was 36 degrees and starting to rain. We decided not to stay.

We landed in a partially completed strip mall. It’s flat, and we have a pretty secluded spot behind a building — but not too secluded so it will be safe.

Driving to Tehachapi we had quite a bit of rain. Once we setteled into our “campsite” the wind continued to pick up and it started to rain. Then the rain started to freezed, and finally it turned to snow. We woke up to a couple of inches of snow and a bit of ice. My first thought was, “Wonder what it would be like to spend the day in Tehachapi?” But after looking at the weather forecast, we figured thigns would dry up pretty quickly once we were on the road… and it did.

On the road it was windy, but dry. We even braved a few sandstorms.

Cookie helped with the driving though, which made a big difference. We arrived in Henderson, NV in the early afternoon. I went for a run and Lori did some shopping. Unfortunatley, the Zappos outlet store was closed so she didn’t find what she was looking for. I saw mostly burbs and tried to stay warm on my run.