Where’s Nico?

Well, to get the key question out of the way right here in the lede – where’s Nico?

Still loving his time in Tonto National Forest!

I thought I’d do a slightly different blog post this week. I’ll still catch you up on what we’ve been doing since we last spoke, but also, in the spirit of Valentine’s Day and at the risk of being schmaltzy, I wanted to talk a bit about how fortunate I am to have such an amazing partner on this adventure (well, amazing two partners when you count Nico, of course!)

To that end, let’s title this post after one of Tom Petty’s big early hits, “Here Comes My Girl” from his breakthrough album, “Damn the Torpedoes”. It’s kind of a cool tune, in that Tom Petty basically speaks the verses, but then builds to singing for the chorus:

But when she puts her arms around me
I can somehow rise above it
Yeah, man when I got that little girl
Standing right by my side
You know, I can tell the whole wide world
To shove it, hey
Here comes my girl!

Kristen and I had our first date on March 18, 2019. We went to this really tasty BBQ joint in KC called Q39. It was a great date, and after dinner, when I walked her to her car, she gave me this amazing hug. If I wasn’t sold already, that iced it for me.

We both love to cook, and for our second date, I made a big seafood dinner. I made a huge mess of the kitchen, but the food turned out pretty good, if I do say so myself. Kristen loves raw oysters, and I learned how to shuck them that day to make it part of the meal.

From there, things went pretty fast because the fit just seemed so right. And as TP sang:

’cause it just feels so good and so free and so right
I know we ain’t never going to change our minds about it, hey
Here comes my girl!

Here we are, almost six years later, and this amazing woman is willing to live in a 231 square foot trailer for months on end with me and our chihuahua. You really need to be compatible with your roommates to live in close quarters like this! I just feel really blessed to have such an incredible woman and incredible canine to co-pilot this wild ride!

To give you a sense of how well we mesh, we put this picture together and used it for some Christmas cards we sent out this past December:

Man, we look good in turtlenecks and mukluks by the fondue pot.

Kristen and I have come up with some odd (but to us, hilarious) things to pass the time. One thing we did the other year was to badly photoshop our faces onto the painting ‘American Gothic’, then frame the prints and hide them in friends’ houses when they weren’t looking and see how long it took them to find them.

One more example… we live on the edge of the Brookside neighborhood in Kansas City. Brooksiders take Christmas decorations very seriously, to the point where several blocks have decoration themes that all the houses tie into. The neighborhood association goes through and awards prizes to the best block theme, the best individual display, etc. We decided that the neighborhood association shouldn’t have all the fun, so we made up our own awards. We ended up printing a dozen of these signs, filling them out with our own award categories, and leaving them on neighbors’ yards. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you… the Nico Awards!

Anyway, I wish all of you a happy Valentine’s or Palentine’s or Galentine’s Day or whatever you choose to celebrate. I hope you all find yourself someone who you can laugh easily with, if you haven’t already. I’m so glad and so lucky that I did!

One other thing I probably need to mention. I did consider using ‘Hometown Blues’ from TP’s debut album or ‘Blue Sunday’ from ‘Last DJ’ as the title this week, because, of course, our beloved Chiefs kinda took a stumble in the big game this past weekend. Nico was shocked – he’s never had a Super Bowl in his lifetime where the Chiefs didn’t come out as world champs.

But you know… it’s just hard to feel blue. I enjoy sports a lot, but as I’ve gotten older, I try to not tie my emotional happiness to it to a point where a bad outcome in a game gets me down. We watched the Chiefs lose on a TV we mounted to the side of the trailer and we had a beautiful sunset for a backdrop. It’s hard to get too blue when life is going this rosy.

Nico got over the game pretty quickly too.

Anyway… on to the other events of the week.

Last week, I mentioned we are camping right next to Picketpost Mountain. Picketpost offers us spectacular views every night around sunset as it gets a golden hue.

Now that we’re almost to a full moon, we’re getting some lovely views like this:

We have some neat company around us here. Unfortunately, my Sam Elliott replacement has moved on with his horses, but most nights, we get a chance to hear a bunch of coyote neighbors chatting it up with each other.

We haven’t actually seen the coyotes yet, but man, they sure were close to the trailer a few nights back as we lay inside trying to sleep over the racket! In addition to the coyotes, we have a bunch of chipmunks and birds in the area. To that end, we ended up putting up some hummingbird feeders off the trailer, and put a bird feeder and water bowl on the hill next to us.

The hummingbirds haven’t found the area yet, which isn’t surprising as there aren’t any plants in our immediate vicinity that would attract them, but we have dozens of chipmunks and birds coming by all the time to take a bite. At times, it looks like the chipmunks and birds almost go into organized battles with each other to claim the water bowl. Nico tries to keep the peace.

Meanwhile, we’ve been doing more hiking. We really love the trails around Picketpost – both from the east side where we are camping and the west side, off Perlite Road.

We also explored an area about a half hour west of us off Peralta Road that is quite pretty.

And we returned to do some more hiking through and around the local arboretum.

And we drove about an hour northeast to Tonto National Monument, which is a separate thing from Tonto National Forest. Tonto National Monument features a short but somewhat steep hike up to some Sonoran ruins built into the mountain that were pretty impressive.

We’ll be moving on to our next destination in a couple of days, but it’s been a great stay here. If you find a chance to visit Tonto National Forest in your travels, I’d highly recommend it!

– Ken 2/12/2025