All Our Bags Are Packed...

As John Denver sang, "All our bags are packed, we're ready to go..."  Tomorrow we are off to Italy.  Three weeks of a great adventure that wll take us to Venice, Florence, the Dolomite Mountains, Tuscany, Cinque Terre and who knows where else.  Oh Yeah.  Pam knows because she is our trip planner supreme.  This is my trial blog to make sure that everything is working well and that those of you who want to read the blogs from Italy are seeing what we put up.  As always, if you don't care to travel along, just disregard the emails announcing something new.

We have enjoyed an extraordinary fall here in the Colorado mountains.  The elk rut is in full craziness with visitors and locals alike out and about in the early morning and late afternoon to bask in Aspen gold, and hear the elk bulls bugling.  Here in Little Valley, we have an abundance of aspen trees, and our own resident, handsome, vociferous bull with a harem of cows and calves.  While Lucy is fairly tolerant of coyotes howling and elk bugling the night long, she was wildly upset when a rather large black bear took a stroll on our deck about 1:30 a.m. the other morning.  Between her barking and snarling and my window pounding we did manage to get the bear to turn around by the hot tub and saunter back off the deck to pursue other nocturnal explorations.

Due to clouds and surrounding pine trees, we totally missed the super blood moon Sunday evening, but the Broncos won so we went to bed happy.  Rather than blather on, I need to make sure I can add pictures to the blog, so here is a bit of what our fall looks like.  We hope you are enjoying the season wherever you are.  Next stop?  Venice.  Ciao!

The Supermoon settng Monday a.m.

Morning clouds in our orange world Monday.

From our deck, looking down Little Valley Road.

A drive along highway 7--Mount Meeker.

Mount Meeker on the left, Longs Peak--middle--and Mount Lady Washington.