London seems really grimy – I never remembered it this way. The constant drone of the city is almost unbearable – the crawling traffic, the antique buses belching black smoke, the trains, the sirens, the car alarms, a million noisy conversations in a few square miles. There’s dust everywhere. It’s unbearably warm. My senses are amplified – it’s like watching a tv that needs the brightness, contrast, colour and volume turning down. Ben Saunders is off the ice. He was originally planning on skiing right across the Arctic alone, from Russia to Canada. However, ice conditions and a late start…

As you’ve probably guessed, dear robots and spiders and lurkers (oh my)… we’re home. We pulled into the driveway at about 430pm today, after putting a little over 3800 miles on the nice Silver Beast we rented. David did all the driving and deserves about a month of back rubs. And more. Our last wild-ass guess on pictures uploaded: approximately 1.3 GIG of images. I’ll be doing a lot of re-sizing of the ones I already used in posts – I didn’t have a lot of time to fool with them, but they will be a more manageable size soon.…

I didn’t plan it this way, honest. I didn’t know the wildflowers would be so beautiful this time of year in the desert. I mean, I know in a general way that they’re supposed to be beautiful in Arizona, but I’d never heard anyone raving about Colorado and Utah wildflowers before now. They were so beautiful in Mesa Verde that I ended up buying a wildflower field guide before leaving the park, and they were pretty as we drove up through southern Utah to Moab. Today we went to Canyonlands National Park, and they crowded the roadsides. These are silver…

I’d add photos now, but don’t have time to crop them down to a manageable size to upload. We’ve hiked a lot in the past couple of days; yesterday we headed to the Bear Lake trailhead in Rocky Mountain National Park and hiked to Alberta Falls, where we met a couple that were setting up a virtual geocache. We chatted with them about that for a while, then tried to go on to Mills Lake, but there was too much snow on the trail. As it was the trail was mostly snowcovered to Alberta, so we were pooped and called…

We’re in Boulder – not a lot of time on the clock for blogging. Will be uploading a LOT of pictures later.

Big Horseshoe/Fall River Road 40.24N 105.38W 8671ft What an incredible day — we had a great drive in from Grand Island and made good time, in spite of getting off I-76 too soon and taking an extra 10 miles on the 2-lane highway. We listened to :NPR again on various public radio stations. When they faded, started to repeat or played yesterday’s programs, we stuck CDs in the player — the RAV doesn’t have one and the Silver Beast does, so that was a treat. We got into Estes Park at 12:30 or 1:00pm — much higher average speeds were…

We’re moving. Tonight we’re in Grand Island NE which was probably an important stop on the pioneer trail, but now it’s the junction of two highways, a lot of hotels, and a river. We started late this morning (me, my bad, didn’t get much done last night and dinked around blogging). But anyway, we’re on the road and think we’ll arrive in Estes Park tomorrow.