Camping this weekend was great. The weather was perfect, except for the wind on Friday evening--it prevented us from having a campfire that night. We went on several short hikes, which Michael had a lot of fun doing. It's nice that he's old enough to get around on his own without help, even when climbing steep hills and rocky areas, but in another two months, we'll have another little one that'll tie us down for a while longer. Anyway, everything in the trailer worked just fine, though we didn't test the furnace since it didn't get cold enough to bother. It was nice having hot water and a shower, but Michael was the only one who got one. The fridge didn't work when plugged into 110V while in the driveway, but it worked perfectly on propane when we got to our campsite--I was even able to make ice in the freezer.

On Saturday, we went on a drive up Horse Canyon, which is northeast of East Carbon. We took the Subaru up a very steep and winding one-lane dirt road, but we eventually turned around because Traci got a little scared. If I'd been alone or with a friend, I would have definitely gone to the top of the mountain. I think the road goes to the very top of the Book Cliffs, where there's still quite a bit of snow for this time of year. As far as I can tell from topo maps, the road doesn't go much of anywhere, except to meet up with other major dirt roads along the Book Cliffs and the Roan Cliffs. It was definitely scenic, though.

On our way home yesterday, I decided to see how fast I could safely tow the trailer. On the way out on Friday I didn't do more than 55 mph, because if something bad did happen, I didn't want it to ruin my entire weekend. =) Anyhow, on US-6 in Cat Canyon, I kicked it up to 60 mph, but the trailer started swaying pretty badly, so I guess 55 mph is pretty much as fast as I can go. Traci was following me in the Subaru, and she said she really freaked out when she saw the trailer swaying that badly. The truck pulled the trailer without any problems--except for accelerating and stopping (and the 55 mph speed limit), it doesn't feel much like I'm towing a trailer at all.

Well, the weather forecast sure has changed dramatically over the past two days:

So it looks like we're definitely going camping today. =) I was going to buy two spare tires for the trailer this week, but only because of the poor condition that the original tires were in. A single new tire runs about $60, and a rim runs about $40, so it would have cost me about $200 for both spares. Instead, I ended up buying four new tires and one rim, and had one of the better old tires mounted on the rim as a spare, and it only cost me around $300. I went to Big O Tires, since their advertised prices were cheaper than what I paid at Wal-Mart for the new tires I got on my car a couple months ago, but when I realized how much new trailer tires were gonna cost me, I kinda balked at the price. The guy working there (who, by the way, took forever to count my change out, and had to start over twice) said he'd drop the cost of mounting, balancing, and valve stems, so that ended up saving me a bit of money. At least I know I can do that there and probably get a better price than anywhere else in town.

The weather this weekend doesn't exactly look like it'll make for good camping:

I'm gonna wait until tomorrow to decide if I really want to go camping--if the weather is going to be wet and dreary, we can sit with the trailer in the driveway and have that much fun anytime. Of course, I'm sure that if we don't go camping, the weather will turn out to be pretty nice, and I'll regret not going. The only thing I'm really worried about is how cold it's supposed to get at night. I don't know how well (or even if) the furnace works, but it's supposed to get barely below freezing, so if we do go camping, I'm sure we'll find out.

I put some pictures up that I took over the past three weekends. The first bunch was taken on and around Consumers Road two weeks ago after a pretty cool snow storm. The second set is from Big Cottonwood Canyon, where we went with Mike and Allison last weekend--that trip sucked, 'cause my car kept overheating for some reason. The last few pictures I took yesterday while I was on a hike. There's a dirt road that goes from near the Wildcat loadout on Consumers Road to a ridge that overlooks lower Gordon Creek, but the road is gated off at one point. I parked at the gate and hiked the rest of the way to the end of the ridge, which overlooks US-6 and Carbonville. There was a rock cairn about five feet tall where the ridge ends in a point, which I saw from the bottom of the ridge while driving around on Saturday, so I decided to check it out yesterday. There was another dirt road that led off to the north, which I suspect loops back to the west and meets up with Consumers Road somewhere, but I didn't have time to follow it--I'll save that for another time when I have my mountain bike with me.

Traci and I went for a drive yesterday and found a decent place to go camping next weekend. It was tough finding an accessible spot, since our trailer is a little low in the rear, and it would bottom-out on most of the dirt roads we wanted to go on. I think I'm going to do a spring-over job on the trailer this summer so we don't have to worry about bottoming-out anymore. I looked at the suspension setup, and it looks like it will be a simple job, though I might need to find somebody to do some welding for me and to align the axles when I'm finished.

We were going to go camping this (Easter) weekend, but there are too many things to do in order to get ready to go by Friday. We need to register and insure the trailer, flush and fill the water tank, get a spare tire, charge the battery, and test the appliances. I also need to get a trailer brake controller for my truck and test the brakes on the trailer. I've got a spare set of brand-new 31X10.5" tires for my truck, and I'm thinking about getting them mounted this week too, but I'm hesitant to do it because I'd like to sell my truck sometime this year. Then again, I don't want to pull a trailer with bald tires on the truck either, especially off-road.

Ahahahah...check out this online poll that is currently on the Scum Advocate's main page:

Do you feel we are at greater risk or lesser risk in Carbon and Emery counties for terrorist actions, than other parts of the United States?

?Yes

?No

?Don't Care

Here's another argument against the University of Utah's ridiculous ban on legally concealed weapons. In this case, a student at Louisiana Technical College opened fire in a classroom and killed one student, while wounding another. The school already had a ban on carrying weapons of any type (here's a PDF of the policy, from the school's Policies & Procedures page), so anybody who chooses to follow the rules is left at the mercy of those who refuse to do so. Once again, this gun ban only serves to make school administrators feel safer, though the reality is that a murderer probably doesn't study up on school policy before going on a shooting spree.

"[Y]ou've got to view this war like we've been on a long family car ride. Bush is the father and he's been screaming, 'Don't make me come back there!' for around 200 miles now and it just reached the point where we had to pull the car over and the bad kid is going to get the spanking of his life."--Dennis Miller

A man with a middle-eastern name purchased airline tickets with a stolen credit card number, and even though the airline, the Philadelphia police, the FBI, and the Secret Service were notified in advance of the flight, nobody cared to stop the suspect.

We went and got us a camp trailer yesterday, since our camper is really just too much for my truck to handle. It's a 1972 Layton, 19½', tandem axle, self-contained (including water heater and shower), and though it's a little old-looking, everything is in really great shape. Everything in it works, and it pulls just fine behind my truck. We're probably going to take it out overnight on Easter weekend to get used to operating it and get all the bugs worked out, but besides a few cosmetic things, it doesn't need any work on it. Oh, except that I need to buy a spare tire for it, since it didn't come with one. Hell, it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to have two spares. Now I just need to fix the transfer case oil leak on my truck before I'll feel ok hauling this trailer any further than a few blocks, and we'll be set for the summer.

Holy hell, will this sickness never go away? I've been sick for 10 days now, and nothing seems to be getting better. Well, at least it's not getting too much worse either. The antibiotics that I'm taking have some rather unpleasant side-effects, and after 3½ days of taking them, nothing seems to be getting better yet. So in addition to a sore throat, earache, and stuffy head, I have to deal with the aforementioned side-effects (the details of which I'll spare you), and my blood pressure seems to be extremely high as well. Just walking up the stairs is enough that I can feel my pulse throughout my entire body. If things don't get better in the next couple of days, I'll have to see my doctor in Springville and find out what the monkey at the hospital down here missed.