Blogs from Bakersfield, California, United States, North America

Thanks to the friends and relatives who voted for me, our Santa Fe trip is becoming a reality. Several months ago the Santa Fe School of Cooking, http://santafeschoolofcooking.com/ had a contest; it was a photo contest with the winner receiving certificates for 2 cooking classes. I made sure that I had the most votes by begging and pleading with anyone and everyone. The trip is planned: Tuesday we fly Wednesday we will spend in Taos with an early lunch at La Cueva Café where they serve gluten free New Mexican food. Dinner will be at Orlando’s, we went there with Elias on the last grandkids trip, a place highly recommended by the locals. We hope to visit our vacation home in Taos in the afternoon. This is a home that we found when Taos dreaming last ... read more

2012 is coming to a close and it has been an awsome year for travel. I wrote a long blog a month or so a go in Mexico but the internet is not very reliable and I didn't save it often enough and lost it. So here is another one in a nutshell. My last blog we were just about to arrive back to the UK for a 2 weeks drive around. We did that and also had 5 days in London proper to walk our legs off. It was a delight. We bussed, tubed everywhere. We arrived home on October 8th. Had Thanksgiving dinner with our family, picked up our 5th wheel on Oct 15th and headed south. We spent 10 days getting down to Tucson to meet up with our Caravan buddies to do ... read more

Bill and Rick took the highway from Fresno to Bakerfield, I went through Kings Canyon and Sequoia national Parks took me 12 hours blog to follow https://picasaweb.google.com/103671248113620284938/Day24?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCI3ssoKNz5q0PA&feat=directlink... read more

So I promised that I’d write a post about menus for our backpacking trip. We’ve had lots of stops and starts and experiments on food and I think that we finally have made our decisions. As I’ve written before we have several considerations with choosing the foods we will eat. I cannot eat gluten at all and need to eat several small meals as well, Elias eats a major amount of calories a day, Dale can eat plenty too, and it will be cold so we all will eat more. I will add Pinion nuts to most meals for this reason. For breakfasts kids and Dale have chosen various cereals and granolas. We told kids that if they wanted a specific cereal they could have it but they decided to share everything. One morning we will ... read more

Today Dale and I started making a mega list of everything we need to take; underlining those items we still need to buy. We decided to just rent down sleeping bags rather than spend $600+ per bag. We will also rent a tent for the 3 kids. We’ll use our Coleman tent for us, it’s a little heavier than a backpack tent but we already own it and it is only a couple of pounds more. I wanted to buy a solar charger for the phone and camera but what I really need/want is really more than I want to spend and larger than I want to carry. A simpler solution is not to use the phone much, I’d wanted to use it to post blogs if I could find service at all, and to buy ... read more

Here is a little background on our backpacking experience as I have some relatives who ask for me to write about earlier experiences. Dale and I first backpacked before we were married. We hiked into the Sierra’s, a 10 hour hike, over a pass into what is called Evolution Valley. We stayed for several days but we were certainly not as sophisticated then as we are today. Those days we just ate the freeze dried meals and cold granola for breakfast. When our kids were young we hiked down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back up over 3 days. I carried fresh food, one meal we will have on our upcoming backpack trip; Chicken Curry over rice. We had other backpack trips into the back county; on one I carried angel food cake, ... read more

Last night Camilo and Justin came for dinner and to discuss the upcoming hike. I’d started mapping out meals in preparation for our talk. (Just like a mom?) Camilo thought that he and his boys would just have bologna or peanut butter sandwiches every night, Justin didn’t have much outlined. My outline was, of course, much more extensive: chicken curry over rice the first night, then other meals of pasta with sauce, warm quinoa salad, chili and sautéed salmon patties with mashed potatoes. Camilo quickly decided that he’d go in with us for the curry and the pasta but was shocked when we told him he’d need to carry his own food. He had hiked when in the military but they had emphasized taking care of his feet; he hadn’t thought about how his food was ... read more

The big concern, besides food, is that I’m just coming off a knee injury. It is actually an old ski injury that flared up when I increased my incline on the tread mill, one of our cardio routines. I didn’t do anything about it for a couple of weeks just thinking it would go away but when it didn’t then I went to the doctor and was diagnosed with tendinitis. I told the Doc that I was going backpacking in 3 weeks and my knee had to be healed up. Not a small request as I am beginning to understand. The Doc, to get rid of me put me into physical therapy. So now I go to physical therapy 3 times a week, 1-1/2 hours each visit and then on the other days do prescribed exercises ... read more