Time flies when you pare your life down to the bare essentials and focus on only one or two things, doesn't it?
Let's get caught up first:
The April Shakedown Cruise was a smashing success. I boondocked outside of Albuquerque, found myself in the middle of a world-class web of mountain biking trails, and met a few locals as well as old friends. After two weeks of that I boondocked outside Santa Fe, climbed and rode for a couple weeks, and then made my way back to California (with a quick stopover in Red Rocks for some multipitch climbing fun).
May and June was an intense period of trailer construction. I dropped almost everything from my life except work and trailer construction. Summer was upon me, and I didn't want to spend it in construction mode. My triage list evolved on a daily basis - that is, the list of things I 'had' to finish before I left, and the things that would be 'nice to have' finished. Mostly items moved from the latter list to the former.
On June 18, I declared mission accomplished, attempted to clean up all the various messes I'd left in the shop, and drove north. My friends Ashley and Dave live on a ranch south of Santa Rosa in their beautifully converted shipping container and invited me to stay with them for a bit. Two weeks of waking up in the middle of grape vines, going on motorhome/deck cruises around the ranch, and getting needed work done on my truck was exactly what I needed.
The entire week of July 4 I was up in the Sierras with a crew of 20+, climbing almost every day on world-class granite.
But this blog is about Serenity, not me. Where am I at with that?
My top of list pain point currently is storage. Beyond the usual categories of stuff (clothes, books, food, kitchen gear), I have three piles of stuff I'm struggling with: climbing stuff, biking stuff, and backpacking stuff. I have more stuff than storage space at the moment, so I'm doing a dance where I shuffle my stuff from the bed to the toilet cabinet and back.