Kicking Off the 2025 Camping Season – 3,400 Miles, 7 States, and a Whole Lot of Memories

Our first big trip of the 2025 camping season took us through seven states—New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming covering more than 3,400 miles in total. Along the way, we hit a few major highlights that made this journey unforgettable:

• Attended Overland Expo 2025 in Flagstaff, AZ
• Visited family in Cottonwood, AZ
• Spent time with family in San Diego, CA
• Explored Yosemite National Park and added a new stamp to our National Park Passport
• Reunited with long-time friends (practically family) in Phoenix, OR

What made this trip even better was the timing late May gave us ideal weather: not too hot, not too cold, and just right for travel. Of course, we had our trusty eBikes with us: Kelly’s trike and my XPeak. They came in handy more than once.

GRAV to Hugo Migration

I know it has been quite awhile since I have posted anything here on my website but I am hoping to change that. When I decided on diving back in I was not happy with the performance of my page loads even from my local network. This was the main driver for this migration.

Some of the key factors in switching were:

• portability
• performance
• automation

With hugo all I needs is hugo and go installed on any computer that has access to my webserver. Right now I am writing this post from my macOS system using VSCode. I have added a cpouple of simple tasks to VSCode to ease the creation of a new post and to deploy updates to my web server.

This was our first trip of the year for 2022 and was the first time we have gone camping on the early shoulder of camping season. In Colorado camping season kicks off Memorial day weekend. This trip also served as a shake down for the mods and additions that we had acquired during the winter.

Mods:

• Upgraded thermostat to Micro-Air Easytouch.
• Added a Maxxair II to the front vent.
• Blackstone 22" Griddle for outdoor cooking.

This was our first major trip taken with our travel trailer (TT) were we were totally dependant on the trailer and the campsites we chose. The time span of this trip was fourteen (14) days and covered over two thousand five hundred fifty (2550) miles. The header image of this post shows the route that we took. When traveling on vacation we try to keep the driving to about three hundred (300) miles per day. In doing this we get the following benefits:

Christmas this year I felt truly blessed. We had all of our adult children home to visit. Activities ranged from just visiting and catching up to playing a game called “What do you MEME”. A couple of other highlights are below:

• Ice Skating at Centerra

  • Could not get the oldest son and his wife off the ice. They were having a good time.
  • Our granddaughter lasted all of about 30 seconds on the ice before she got scared.
  • Our other son and his significant other now have this activity checked off their bucket list. :)

• “Christmas in Color” in Thorton, CO.

This post will explain how I document all the settings of the applications that interface with my ham station. With the complexity of any ham station in interfacing both hardware and software it can get a little overwhelming to keep track of how everything is connected and or its settings. The tools that I have chosen work for me and have been real world tested (accidently).

The first thing to determine is what are you going to use to capture all these settings. Some criteria:

If this is your first time here this is will not look to new to you, but for returning visitors this might look a little different.

Both the front end and the back end of this site has been changed. The move removes any dependencies on having to use an external program to make these posts and allows me to just use my editor of choice. The moves also removes the dependency of having to use a MySQL for the back end.

We got our first snow of the season. Been falling since around 4:00 AM. Due to the previous two days being in the mid 70’s or so it has taken some time to accumulate. Streets are still clear since they have the warmth of the previous two days.

With a little help from the North Dakota QSO party I was able to get the last state for my mixed Worked All States (WAS). Big thanks go out to the operator who uploaded their log so quickly after the contest.

73 de KF5JRA

Ron

This short blog entry is to record that I have confirmed 100 DXCC via LoTW. Now it is time to start working toward the next step.

Hope to see you down the Log

73 de KF5JRA

Ron