We're on the road again! and guess who visited us today?

After taking four RV trips closer to home, we feel like our new little trailer is ready for a long trip. We're planning to be gone for two months! On our very first day of traveling, we had an unexpected visitor. Do you want to take a guess who it was?

We've gotten help with our trip preparation. We had to order a new kayak since our old one started coming apart at the seams. So our grandson, Eli, helped pump up the new one to be sure it was a sound sailing vessel for the trip. But Eli was not our unexpected visitor on our first day of camping.

Before we left, we spent a lot of evenings watching the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team playing in the NBA playoffs. While visiting our son and his fiancé in Tulsa, we even went to the Drillers field to watch a Thunder game on the field's big screen with many other Tulsa residents. (In case you don't follow the NBA, we were thrilled when the Thunder won the championship!) 

Before we left for this two-month-long RV adventure, we spent time with our grandchildren in the Kansas City area. We went to our first-ever swim meet, where our grandaughter came home with some pretty fancy ribbons. But they weren't our unexpected visitors on the first day of our trip.

We're a little rusty in our long-term RV travel skills, but we have a great destination this summer. Our youngest son, Blake, is getting married! He and Jamie planned a destination wedding in Oregon. So that determined our destination this summer. Don't they make a handsome couple?!?

But that's not who visited us today. We left home on July 2, with a plan to be gone at least two months. We had to pack carefully to fit everything we needed for a long trip in our light-weight trailer. We also needed to pack special clothes for the wedding. We had one other special thing to prepare for. We'll be picking up our granddaughter in the middle of this trip. So we need a car seat, a sleeping bag, and an extra life jacket. We are loaded!

We started this adventure with our longest drive with the trailer--seven hours across the entire state of Kansas. That's because our first stop was to see our mothers before we left. We also stayed for the 4th of July Engelman family reunion in the panhandle of Oklahoma. One of the most popular family reunion activities was target practice at a nephew's shooting range. Denisa was obviously more interested in the flowers in the foreground of the picture, rather than the targets.

No other pictures of relatives, but the ranch cat had seven kittens and they were so cute that Denisa had to take pictures of them.

But that's not who visited us today. After the reunion, we left Oklahoma with "On the Road Again" playing through the pickup speakers. We told our mothers good-bye, and were on the road headed north, into Colorado. The wind was light, and it was a good day for another long drive as we crossed into the Mountain Time Zone. We noticed that we were getting 14.3 miles per gallon at one time, and even up to 16.4 miles per gallon in another 50-mile section. That's the best mileage we have seen pulling the trailer.

Our route took us through Rocky Ford, Colorado. We had a refrigerator full of groceries, but you can't drive through this town--famous for raising melons--without stopping at a fruit stand and buying a cantaloupe.

We arrived at our first camping destination at Cheyenne Mountain State Park before the visitor center closed. We bought an annual Colorado State Park pass because they charge $10 each day (on top of the camping fees) without that pass. The pass costs $80, but we're staying at a couple state parks, and plan to visit several others. We got settled into our site in the Meadows Campground, with Cheyenne Mountain in our back yard.

We had our own picnic table, and plenty of space between us and our next door neighbors. But this site had something else we had never seen. If we walked up a few steps, we were in a common area shared with the two campers on either side of us. We had a fire pit, and boulders for seats. A couple steps down from that area was a common eating area with three picnic tables. So if we were traveling with two other families, we would have had a great place to eat and socialize together. But we didn't, so that wasn't who visited us today.

We planned to go on a hike, and we were dropping off trash at the dumpster on our way. We had just asked, "Should we take the bear spray on this hike?" We looked up, and do you see what we saw? Look carefully at the picture below.

We saw a black bear standing up beside the dumpster when we were just thirty feet away. So that was our  unexpected visitor today!

We backed up and started taking pictures, wishing for our good camera instead of just a cell phone.

A fellow camper was walking in the opposite direction, and when we told him about the bear, he almost had a heart attack. We're not afraid of black bears, as they usually don't want to be around humans. Sure enough, this guy was heading back towards the woods as soon as he saw us.

You can see the black bear in the upper left hand of the picture below.The woods he is entering is right behind our trailer, and Denisa is still holding that sack of trash because we haven't made it to the dumpster yet!

Our hike was delayed a bit. Not because of our unexpected visitor, but because of a rain shower. You can be sure we had our bear spray and our good camera when we headed out on the trail behind our trailer and in front of Cheyenne Mountain.

We walked through the woods, making plenty of noise as to not surprise a black bear. But all we found in the woods was a deer.

By the time we finished our hike, it was dusk. A tall column of clouds covered the blue sky, and Colorado Springs got a storm before the night was over.

It feels good to be on the road again, and we had an exciting visitor on this first day of our trip to the wedding!