RV trip part 3: dinosaurs

I left off yesterday with a view of the hills around Dinosaur National Monument, where we'd be spending the fourth night of our August RV trip. Today we start with the dinosaurs...

...which you find here in the "Dinosaur Quarry" building. This is a 2-minute shuttle bus ride from the visitor center and is pretty exciting (the building, not the ride) -- if you have any interest in dinosaurs or fossils that is. Which I do.

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RV trip part 2: getting to Utah

In yesterday's post I condensed a couple of days worth of travel into a lot of words and few photos. That will eventually change today, as we made our way to eastern Utah and we saw things like this along the way:

But first I have to catch you up a bit more, without photos.

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RV trip 2017 begins

Back in mid-August my wife and I took our second RV trip out west. The first was in 2014 and was really fun -- and a lot of driving. This year's trip would be shorter but would also involve much driving: our goal was Colorado. (Since we live in the St. Louis area it takes a few days to get to Colorado unless you're a mindless driving machine.)

It took quite a bit of planning to get the route correct, especially since The Eclipse would be occurring during the trip. Learning months and months ago that totality would be visible only a few miles from our home was so exciting; my disappointment in realizing that our trip would take us away from home at that exact time was equally strong.

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The good and the bad

My garden -- like yours I have to assume -- is full of good and bad this year. Here's an example of good and bad in the same view:

It's the front bed between the driveway and the house. The Alocasia make it worth looking at -- they really set off the understory of bamboo and hakone grass. The bad part though is obvious: the clematis. All of my clematis vines do the same thing each year: grow like gangbusters, bloom, then halfway die during the summer. Blech. Maybe I should put the maypop here too?

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The near back garden

As I've mentioned several times this summer, I've ignored the garden for the most part. Somehow things have snapped into place though, and this part of the garden (made up of the driveway and beds closest to the house) is looking quite nice.

There is still a lot of "junk" on the driveway -- I have lots of projects in the works -- and those two pallets that I've been wondering what to do with? They made a nice little "fence" that hides the mess and gives me a place to put more plants. I envy the people who have fences and garden walls to use as backdrops.

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Say goodbye (to some bamboo)

I grow a lot of bamboo, as regular readers know. Most of them are quite cold-hardy for St. Louis, but there are a few of them that are marginal. This means that they don't do well in our winters, and after a few years I've given up on them.

So this is the last look at three of them: two that are just not hardy enough, and one that is flowering heavily. That flowering one is Phyllostachys propinqua 'Beijing' and is shown above.

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Tidbit

Just a tidbit, a morsel or two to let you know that I'm still here, and still planning on posting more regularly. (I have a big backlog of images to edit from the RV trip and more...)

This is the view from our bedroom window right now. Somehow this part of the garden looks fantastic, even though it has been pretty much ignored for months. The white flowers are the "weeds" that I let grow, probably white snakeroot. The yellow blooms are Rudbeckia submentosa, which always flops once it blooms. I have much of this in my garden now because it's the only way to get some of it to survive the deer.

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