A Sundancer Class C motorhome at Bannack State Park, Montana.
A view from the Bannack State Park visitor parking lot.
The State Park visitor center building, below, was once owned and occupied by carpenter George French.
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Bannack, Montana was founded in 1862 after a major gold discovery. It served as the capital of Montana Territory briefly during the civil war. The last residents left in the 1970s.
“Images from Bannack” are from July 30, 2010, our third visit to Bannack.
We lucked out and the worst of the storm went south of us. I hear it snarled traffic near Little Rock into a multi-hour backup with some people stuck in their vehicles overnight. This is the same southern storm that is hitting the east and may turn into a nor’easter for New England.
Top picture is with flash – bottom is with camera on a tripod using HDR feature of my camera.
2004 Honda CR-V
Though we hadn’t really talked about, Karen and I had been looking forward to the day when we could get a newer car. The 2004 CR-V was what Karen primarily drove and what we took, most of the time, if we were going somewhere together.
It also just happened to be the car we tow behind our motorhome.
However, it was 7 years old, with over 130,000 miles on it. Though it has been extremely reliable, with that high of mileage, it’s getting closer and closer to the point where I don’t like for drive very far away – and, when I’m working, she periodically goes to see her mom, who lives about 2 1/2 hours from here.
The time was approaching for a new car, but we figured it would be a year or so away.
Then we had the December 26th car accident….
2010 Honda CR-V.
And, of course, we’ll be able to tow it behind our motorhome.
One of the two loops at the campground along Grasshopper Creek in Montana’s Bannack State Park.
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Bannack, Montana was founded in 1862 after a major gold discovery. It served as the capital of Montana Territory briefly during the civil war. The last residents left in the 1970s.
“Images from Bannack” are from July 30, 2010, our third visit to Bannack.
(continued from Our accident)
I remember Karen talking to one of the EMTs like she knew him. It turned out she did – sort of.
I think the encounter went something like this:
Karen immediately recognized one of the EMTs when she saw him through the windshield as they were coming around the front of the car.
As they started checking her over, she asked, “Are you Larry?”
Somewhat surprised, he said that he was. When Karen told him, “I know your wife, Vivian,” he asked how she knew her.
Karen replied, “Blogging, email, quilting.”
He responded with another question, “Are you C.J. or Karen?”
Karen, C.J., and Vivian had been commenting on each others blogs for quite some time. Last year, they met for lunch and had arranged to do it again this week – tomorrow, in fact. Karen recognized Larry because Vivian had just posted a photo of him making Christmas breakfast.
On her blog, Karen says, “– it felt really reassuring to me even though I had never met him. It was like I knew I was in good hands.”
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Karen is getting around a lot better today. Her chest still hurts a lot and she has pains all over, kind of like the all over pains you get from the flu, except she doesn’t have the flu.
Yesterday, I went to the wrecker yard and got all of our stuff out of the car. It’s seven years old and I’d be very surprised if it could be fixed for the approximate $5,000 the car is worth on Kelly Blue Book. Unfortunately, I don’t have any of the insurance information for the driver of the other car. It’ll be in the police report, which my insurance company is supposed to obtain. The other driver was cited by the police officer which establishes fault for the insurance purposes.
This car was the one we towed behind our motor home, so if it’s totaled, we’ll have make sure to get a replacement that can be towed.
“The coast ain’t clear, __-___”
This isn’t our car and it’s not even the same model year, but the front end of our car looks something like this.
If I had just a moment and could turn back the clock, that’s what I’d tell the person that waved the kid through.
It’s what I would tell the kid, too.
We had just seen “True Grit” at a new theater that just opened about an hour’s drive from home. On the way home, we decided to go ten miles out of the way to go out to eat.
When it happened, we were driving on a road that is two lanes in each direction with a center turning lane.
We had just gone through a traffic light as it turned yellow. The next light had just turned green and the cars stopped there had started to move. We were in the southbound lane next to the turning lane and there were fewer cars ahead of us than there were in the other southbound lane.
Just after we made it through the light that had turned yellow, a car that I hadn’t seen darted through a gap in the other lane of traffic.
They had been waved through by a driver in that lane.
“The coast ain’t clear, __-___s”
We were about three blocks from the restaurant we had decided to go to.
I hit the brakes and thought that we just might make it – but realized, just before impact, that we weren’t going to.
We hit hard, but not so hard that the air bags deployed. The impact moved us a little sideways, so that the front, driver side tire was over the yellow line of the turning lane.
Shortly after the impact, the kid backed his car back into the drive of the convenience store, clearing one lane of traffic. The __-___ driver that had waved the kid through didn’t even stop to see if anyone was hurt. The accident happened right in front of their vehicle, but they just drove off.
Our car wasn’t going any place under it’s own power.
“My chest hurts.”
Karen still had her seatbelt on.
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Karen’s brother brought us home after she was released from the Emergency Room.
Karen is still hurting, but nothing is broken – according to the x-rays – and her heart is fine. She got a shot for pain at the Emergency Room and got a prescription for the same medication – something that doesn’t cause nausea.
I’m fine – no pains that I can attribute to the accident. Tomorrow may be a different story.
The car is 6 years old with quite a lot of mileage on it. It’s probably totaled. The cost of repair will probably be more than the value of the car.
Well Christmas has come, and soon will be gone.
It’s cold here and, while we had some flurries this morning, it’s not a white Christmas. The winter storm that hit the southeast US missed us.
Our youngest daughter, her hubby and kids are traveling from the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee on their way home. Part of their travel was to be through some areas with snow, but, hopefully, it wasn’t too bad. Living in the north, they are familiar with winter weather.
We had an abbreviated visit with our older daughter – shorter than planned. Her husband had a bad cold and stayed home. She had a short visit with her mother-in-law and then came up the hill for a middle of the day meal with us and a few hours with us before leaving with enough time to get home before dark.
I hope that the rest of the holiday season – and next year – is great for everyone.
By most indicators, the Sun is not behaving as expected at this point in the solar cycle – and it hasn’t been for quite a while. The most visible indicator of solar activity – the number of sunspots – is far lower than normal. Over the last few days, the Sun’s surface facing Earth has been spotless.
We are currently in Solar Cycle 24.
The figure on the right, above, is a composite of historical monthly sunspot numbers as of early December from NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center superimposed over the same figure from March 2007. The red lines represent the 2007 predicted maximum and minimum monthly sunspot counts. The current average monthly count, which should be ramping up to the cycle’s maximum, is far below what was anticipated.
picture
In a paper published March 2006, David Archibald predicted that Solar Cycles 24 and 25 would be very much like Solar Cycle 5 and 6 – the Dalton Minimum. Nearly two years into Cycle 24, the pattern he predicted appears to be developing.
So what was the Dalton Minimum and what might a similar period mean for the modern world?
Bottom line – it’s going to get colder.
The Dalton Minimum was a period of low solar activity that lasted from about 1790 to 1830 in which global temperatures were also lower than average. If we are entering into a similar “modern” minimum and the correlation of colder global temperatures hold true, global “warming” may stop and global temperatures may drop through the end of the minimum.
By many indicators, global temperatures appear to have been relatively stable for nearly a decade – or more – already, except for perturbations caused by climate features such as the Arctic Oscillation, El Nino, and La Nina.
Some scientists believe that the recent warming that has been seen is simply a natural recovery from the cold period of the Little Ice Age, which may have resulted from several low solar activity periods. If that is the case, even if temperature were to drop over the next couple of decades, the overall trend, since the end of the Little Ice Age, may be maintained, temperatures may drop for the next 20 to 30 years.
Previous related posts:
Have you been seeing a large increase in the amount of spam comments on your blog?
I sure have…, and I’ve taken temporary action to limit it.
I went to the discussion link under Settings on the WordPress dashboard.
Once there, I enabled the option to automatically close comments and, for now, I’m setting the time period to 4 days. After a post has been up for 4 days, comment will be closed.
I had had this option set for a long time to limit the amount of spam, but, for some reason, a few weeks back, I had disabled it.
Hopefully, this surge of spam will fall to more normal levels and I will reset the period that comments are open to a somewhat longer duration.
On July 29, 2010, we started heading east towards Yellowstone National Park, where we had a reservation at the Fishing Bridge RV Park. Our first camping stop along the way was May Creek Campground in Montana.
