July 14, 2021

Harvest Hosts

After a year, we are back in lovely Sebasco, on Casco Bay, in Maine. You might remember our visit last summer, during a short lull in Covid, but still in the midst of the pandemic. We were masked when away from the home, we never dined at restaurants inside. We insisted on any visitors being tested before coming. A lot has changed for the good since then. Maine’s numbers are among the best in the country, and our County is among the best in Maine. Frankly, it almost feels…normal. The stores and restaurants only require masks of people who are not fully vaccinated (how that gets enforced, I have no…

May 20, 2021

ADVENTURE ONCE MORE!

After fourteen months of pandemic, the Rippers were itching to get out there again. I had been fantasizing about this trip for years, and we finally pulled the trigger on a 3-day hut-to-hut bicycle ride from Grand Junction, CO to Moab, UT, earlier this month. I mentioned this ride in my post last month, Adventure Time Again?. Well, the ride was everything I hoped for, only harder! We covered 170 miles over the three days, and climbed over 9,300 feet of elevation. Two of the eight riders who started with us dropped out after Day 1. I almost wished I had joined them (not really). Day 2, which on paper,…

April 19, 2021

Adventure Time Again?

It’s been over a year, and what a year it has been. We have struggled to find topics that don’t seem insensitive to what we have all gone through, and to how many have suffered more than we. But we are beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel. At least we hope that’s what we’re seeing. Gail and I are both fully vaccinated. Numbers are falling in Utah, restrictions are loosening (for better or worse), and warm weather is in sight (notwithstanding the almost 30 inches of snow the Cottonwoods received last week!), which will allow us all to spend even more time outdoors, in what…

July 12, 2020

Maine Time

We are now mountain people. We spend most of our lives in Utah, surrounded by mountains. I have always loved mountain towns, and their culture. But both of us grew up on the ocean, in Marblehead, Massachusetts. So it’s a little odd that we find ourselves 1,000 miles from the nearest ocean, and 2,000 miles from the ocean we grew up on. Generally, I don’t miss being on the water, but that may be in part because every summer for the past 38, Gail and I have spent time at her family’s cottage on the coast of Maine, about an hour northeast of Portland, on the edge of a resort,…