Owen, Mila, and baby Hannah together for a brief time

Owen made a beautiful home for his new bride.  He completed all the immigration papers necessary for Mila to join him in the United States.  And then the pandemic struck.  Mila and Hannah are in Russia and cannot immigrate....not until the coronavirus is under control.

It breaks our hearts.  We cannot imagine how Owen and Mila feel.  We don’t even know how they get through each day while they’re apart.

They were finally able to meet in the Ukraine—the only country that would allow Owen to travel from the United States and that Mila and Hannah could fly to from Russia.

So for a very brief month the newlyweds we’re together with their precious baby.

We thought that Daddy was supposed to put the baby to sleep......

Hannah is snuggly warm in the little pink hat and matching sweater that I knitted for her very first Christmas.

And here she is wearing the birthday sweater that I lovingly made.

All too soon their time together was over.  Luckily sweet, innocent Hannah was still playful and happy as they packed their bags.  She didn’t know that she would soon have to say goodbye to her Papa.

We all need to stay healthy so a day can come when this happy young family can be together.

We long for the day that we can hug our new daughter-in-law and hold our youngest grandchild, see her smile, and rock her to sleep.

More models completed

The one is of a 1949 Mercury.  I really like the late 30s to early 50s fat fender cars.  Their lines are so classic and retro.  By the mid-50s, fenders had been integrated into the body, and the distinguishing feature was fins.

And now?  All cars look alike.  Gone are the days when cars had personality.  

This "Merc" was a classic car to hot rod up in the 50s and early 60s.  It's lines just demanded it. 

So that's how I built it.  Usually I like the stock look--how it came out of the show room.  But for this one I made it like boys in the 1950s would have modified it, including the color, the V-8 with two Edelbrock carburetors, dual exhausts, fancy tail lights, and side exhausts.  Mostly, though, it is the fender skirts that do it.  I just love fender skirts. And they had all but disappeared in the 1960s.

 How it looked when started:

 And now:  (Doesn't it just scream for a 17-year-old boy in 1960 racing this down main street?)

My next one was a 1929-1936 Rolls Royce Phantom II.  There were only 1680 Phantom IIs ever produced.  The most famous was for the Maharajah of Rajkot.  Here it is:

The kit:

Completed.  Doesn't it look EXACTLY like the real one above?  (sorta?)

1952 Hudson.  Hudson Motor Company lasted until 1954 when it "merged" (i.e., was swallowed up by) with Nash.  In Oklahoma my next door neighbor had a Hudson, although it was not the fancy one shown here.

How it looked out of the box:

Completed model:

1937 Chevy modified to be a dragster:

Finish Line Party at the Moab Sidewinder 240 Ultra Run

One of the highlights for every runner as they cross the finish line of a Destination Trail race is the congratulatory hug that they get from Candice, the owner, creator, and race director of Destination Trail.

Yesterday we competed the virtual Moab Sidewinder 240. We decided to walk and hike the Destination Trail Moab 240 course.  On November 12th we started our 204.3 mile “run.”  Most every morning we headed out for a hike or walk, racking up 4-6 miles at a time.  And a little over two months later we crossed the finish line! 

It just so happened that we were headed to Tucson to visit Candice and our granddaughters, Marina and Stella yesterday.  So we got to have our (virtual) finish line hug from Candice.....and her dogs!

We have enjoyed the virtual bike rides and foot races that have been created this past year due to the pandemic. 

Starting in June 2020 we completed the Race the USA (2572 miles cycling), the Seattle to Portland Bike Ride (206 miles), the Bigfoot 200 Endurance Run (206.5 miles), the Tahoe Tessie 200 Ultra Run (205.5 miles),  and now the Moab Sidewinder 240 (240.3 miles).

But most wonderful thing that happened yesterday is that WE GOT TO SEE MARINA & STELLA!  We hadn’t seen them since the summer that we sold our home on Whidbey Island, one and a half years ago.

Marina and Stella, 1-1/2 years later, both teenagers now and darn near grown up!

Grandpa, Candice, and our granddaughters:

Marina and Stella took us to “The Wash” which is a place that they hang out with their new friends.  Here we are at “The Wash,” three generations of women, Grandma, daughter, and granddaughters:

We celebrated Stella’s 13th birthday. She is an accomplished ice skater.  Here she is with the gifts we gave her, wearing the winter hat that I knitted and holding her new snow globe.  It plays a Skater’s Waltz as glittering snow swirls around a group of ice skaters. 

The last time that we saw Marina and Stella in the summer of 2019, I cooked dinner for all of us.  This time Marina cooked dinner for the five of us!  It was a very complicated Asian dish that she had invented.  

Marina was the chef and her mother was the sous-chef.

The dinner Marina made consisted of rice noodles, chicken breasts simmered in her own broth, rice, stir fry vegetables, a fried egg, chicken broth, a bit of some kind of dried flaky fish, chopped onions, and all of this topped with a small bit of spicy plum sauce.  Marina dished up our bowls one at a time, adding each ingredient exactly as we requested.   

It was absolutely delicious!

Candice set up two tables out on the patio, so we could social distance and be together while we ate our dinner and watched the sun set over mountains and on the distant desert.

We had a perfect day!  

It was so sad to say goodbye. We would have cried, but they are going to come visit us before they return back to their home in Washington.  We are excited to have Marina and Stella see our home.  They loved to spend time at our home on Whidbey Island, and we know they feel that our desert home is also their home.

January 27th:

When Marina, Stella, and Candice visited us at Nuestra Casa, the girls loved our home. They immediately adopted it as their very own special Grandma and Grandpa home.  In fact Stella wanted to know how old she had to be to live here too!

On our three mile walk around the lakes both Marina and Stella said it felt like they were in Venice (although they laughed, because they admitted they had never been to Venice...it just felt like how they imagined Venice would be).

We look forward to many visits from Marina and Stella and all of our grandchildren.  This is something  that brings us one of the greatest joy in our life!

The wild beauty of Kofa touches our souls

Last week we packed up our Turtle and headed west to to Kofa National Wildlife Refuge. This unique refuge was established in 1939.  Eighty-two years ago our government had the foresight to set aside over 666,641 acres (i.e., over 1,000 square miles) of Sonoran desert habitat in western Arizona as a safe place for wildlife and plants to flourish.  

The United States Fish and Wildlife Service manages this vast tract of land that is approximately 45 miles north to south and 30 miles east to west.  And they do a fantastic job!  Bighorn sheep are thriving in the two rugged mountain ranges.  They reintroduced the endangered Sonoran Pronghorn in Kofa in 2013, and their population is growing.  

We have camped and hiked in Kofa three times previously and three additional times just east of Kofa in the Little Horn Mountains.  

There are several reasons that we keep returning to Kofa and the surrounding area. One is that we love the rugged wild and untouched beauty of Kofa.  The roads here push the limits of even 4-wheel drive vehicles.  Good thing that our Toyota TRD is an official “rock climber!”

Another plus is that there are no campgrounds in Kofa, but dispersed camping is allowed.  With our small, sturdy off-road rigs, we can camp and hike far out into the wilderness all by ourselves.  The only people we see in the interior of Kofa are a few hunters and a handful of extreme off-road vehicles enthusiasts.   Strangely, we see no other hikers and we have never seen any one else camping within miles of our campsite.

Everyone is friendly and waves as they pass us.  They all are enjoying the wilderness, each in their own way.  They also are in Kofa because they want the same solitude that we are seeking, so they move on quickly and leave us alone in our desert.

But everyone is helpful and looking out for others.  We are all far out in the desert, and we all know that the desert can be brutal.  We are each our brother’s keeper there. 

Another bonus for Kofa is that although there are two beautiful mountain ranges, the elevation is relatively low.  This means that if it is fairly warm in Mesa, it should be warm enough for us to hike and spend our afternoons relaxing in the warm winter sun in Kofa.   The nights during the winter in the desert are usually 30-40 degrees colder than the daytime temperatures.  So in the winter, we head to the wilderness areas with lower elevations (like Kofa) for our desert trips.

We camped for two nights in our first spot on this trip.  We explored the area and searched for campsites further up the road that would be accessible with our Turtle. 

I knitted a blanket for Candice’s new desert home and Dan started constructing a 1936 Chevy Dragster model car. 

Relaxing together in the sun after hiking in the desert all morning is our idea of afternoon delight:

We hiked off road and up a wash and found a vast secluded valley surrounded by mountains. This area is calling us.  On a future trip we will camp here and hike in a different direction every day.  We even found a good campsite with a dance floor “made by nature," just waiting for us!

We moved to  a spectacular campsite further up the road for our last three nights.  It was high above a beautiful wash!   

It reminded us both of our site at the Grand Canyon where we were 1,500 feet above Marble Canyon.  Luckily we didn’t get darn near blown off the cliff like we did on that Grand Canyon trip in 2019!

On our map we could see that Red Rock Pass was further up the road.  We hoped to be able to reach the pass within our sweet spot for hiking which is 5-6 miles.  

As we hiked toward Red Rock Pass, we quickly found that our Turtle (F350 with a slide-in camper) would not be able to go further on this road. The road deteriorated and became a “Rat and Quail” road.  In other words, next time we camp further along this road we will bring our Toyota 4Runner TRD (Rat) and TC Teardrop off-road trailer (Quail).

Here I am as we scaled the second to last hill before Red Rock Pass.

Dan enjoyed the panoramic view from Red Rock Pass:

This is the mountain that loomed above us during our stay in Kofa.  We spent hours gazing in awe at it.

We just had to hike in the stunningly beautiful wash that we looked down on every day from our high campsite perch.

I am so proud of all the thousands of miles and the difficult terrain that Dan is able and willing to hike on his surgically repaired and rebuilt foot (three major surgeries so far)!

Us together in our wash:

We could see a road on our google and GPS maps, but it was not on the Kofa map.  In fact, the obscure “road” had clearly not been tread upon in many decades.  That was just the challenge we needed....find the road and (hopefully) find out why it had be laboriously built sometime before Kofa became a wildlife refuge 82 years ago.

Dan’s GPS indicated that a substantial part of  this old road was on a wash.  So off we headed up this wash.

Without the GPS we would have never found the road.  Over a mile up the wash, his GPS showed the wash going one direction and the road veering off at a 90 degree angle.  But there was not road there, only a jumble of rocks and dirt on a hillside.  Even though there had been jumbles of rock and dirt throughout most of the wash, we decided to climb up this particular jumble.

And at the top we found clear evidence of the road that we were searching for!

We followed this faint indication of a road for over a mile and found an ancient mine! 

There were old railroad rails and an open hole with rotten wooden braces.  Dan cautiously stood back a bit and threw a rock into the mine......and the rock hit something, kept going, hit something else, and finally way down deep we heard the final thud!

This had been a perfect hike!  We got to explore a beautiful remote area.  We made our hike into a loop hike.  We had to work very hard.  And best of all, we were rewarded by discovering this wonderful road and mine that no one may even remember or know of it’s existence anymore.  This mine is not on any of our maps, so we don't even know what the name of it was.  This is a part of history that has long been forgotten.

This next photo doesn’t even need any explanation.  I was so stoked to find a deer antler.  I think Dan was too, since he had been hearing me throughout the years chatter as we hike about how, “I hope I find my antler today.”  Over.....and over.......and over.....and...

But I never expected to find such a perfect antler!

There are unlimited areas to explore in Kofa.  We will spend countless days and trek many miles through these mountains, valleys, and washes.  We will soon return to this beloved desert wilderness.

Every morning we watched the sun rise over our mountains.  In the afternoons we relaxed above our wash and gazed upon our lovely desert view.  As the sun set and the warmth began to wane, we went inside our little home for dinner and another night together.  In the morning as we awoke, we could hear the music of the coyotes yelping in the early dawn.