WTF!!! (Wonderful Treasure Find!) #29

What a weekend!

Thursday night  we loaded the van with a gazillion water bottles filled with water that we salvaged/saved/recycled from various places.  (Thanks Darlene, Janet, Bill and all the other nice folks who have been giving us their bottles!!!) 

We left early on Friday to beat rush hour through Denver and got up to the land by about 6:00pm. It's a nice easy drive when you don't have to fight traffic!  Getting an early start let us actually start work that evening. So we built this:

 A nice little Hexayurt / Gazebo (Hexebo?) for shade.

  

Another benefit of leaving early:

Unfortunately the fires are still raging somewhere over the horizon, but the upside is awesome sunsets.  Silver lining and all that. 

After assembling our shade, we made a campfire, had a beer and went to bed.  (Note from the wife: don't bother trying the Budweiser Lima-a-rita - tastes nasty, though it does have a high alcohol content....)

 The next morning, we got busy.  The result:



 We connected more of the door to the outer wall
(The darker brown is what we accomplished on Saturday.)

 We also plastered some more on the outer wall and added some papercrete bricks to hide the wood box that holds our firewood.  The wife's been having fun experimenting with being an amature bricklayer  :)

The kitchen from the top of the berm in front of the van:



And from on top of the opposing wall:

We had to paint part of the Hexebo so it wouldn't be quite so visible from the road - a big, white, floating roof would invite too many rubberneckers. 

Now, it blends in soooo much better!

We got so much done that for the first time, we ran out of cement for the wall long before we ran out of water and bottles.  Thankfully, we'll never run out of dirt.  (Psst - wanna buy some genuine Wyoming dirt?  Have I got a deal for you!)

Since we were so focused on work, we didn't finish the cement we had onsite until after the hardware store was closed for the weekend.   So.... we organized our stuff, made another (BIG!) fire to protect the wife from coyotes, had some more beers and went to bed at dark.  Tired, sore and a little chilly - the nights are starting to cool down again - yay!

Sunday morning, the sun woke us up way early.  Since we were up, we camoflage painted the hexayurt.  After that, we didn't have much else that could get done in the little time we had left, so we packed up the last few things and left early.  Since we had time, we decided to come back the long way through the Mountains.  That drive's got some beautiful scenery and along the way we had some WTFs:

Cute tiny house in Saratoga, Wyoming

Cool Geodesic Dome house just outside of Cowdry, Colorado

Rand Colorado Population: 7 or 8 (probably)  

There are no large bodies of water within 1500 miles....

Sign on the Yacht Club window

Sign on the house next to the Yacht Club.

The folks of Rand (all 5 of them) have a sense of humor...or something.

Rand's local constabulary?

Side note:

Traffic on I-70 is stupid just after you get on past Empire, CO because people have never seen a zip line before.  It totally slows things down, so be warned.  Also, the bathrooms at the Safeway in Idaho Springs are in serious need of repair and cleaning.  The store itself is nice and looks to be recently remodeled.  Now their facilities are in need of some TLC.  Just saying.  (The wife here:  they still have nothing on the bathrooms in the train station in Prague!)