Where’s Nico?

Hello all! I hope all is good in your neck of the woods! For this week’s title, I chose kind of an obscure Dylan track – this was found on the Bootleg Series Vol. 8 release, and it’s a song that Dylan wrote for a Civil War movie called ‘Gods and Generals’. I hope Tom Petty’s ghost is over this whole Dylan switch…

Hey! Maybe some forgiveness from the ghost of Tom Petty!

I actually grew up on a street called Green Mountain Drive back in Iowa City – maybe that’s why the title stuck with me. OR maybe it’s because of where Nico is currently located. And just where is that, you may ask? Where is Nico?

Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests!

That’s right – we are currently camping about 9200 feet above sea level in this beautiful green mountain right next to a lovely yellow field, in a wonderful national forest area in eastern Arizona. It’s a nice little spot that we have pretty much to ourselves.

There are some nice hiking trails in the area, we’ve seen some nice wildlife (elk, mule deer, cool lizards, hummingbirds, and some very fresh mountain lion scat thankfully without the mountain lion, and we had a lone grey wolf strolling through our field early this evening), and the weather has been nice. It’s always fun to have a sunny day, but we also really love a good storm, and since we arrived in the area this past Friday, we’ve had brief rainstorms (sometimes with hail) pass through pretty much daily, which has been cool to watch too. The highs have been in the low- to mid-70’s, which has really suited Nico well. After struggling with the heat a bit in the lower altitudes, he’s been a true mountain dog up here on our hikes!

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Last time you and I talked, we were at Gila Wilderness. I mentioned at the time that we were making a lot of little hummingbird friends. Well, after a week or so, we started putting the hummingbird feeders in the palm of our hands, and our little buddies started coming right up to perch on our hands and take a drink. We’d have points where there would be three or four hummingbirds drinking out of each hand at the same time! Here’s a link to a video I put out on Facebook to give you a sense of it – it was a very cool experience!

I should apologize for just being in my boxers in the video there, and for my rather awkward body pose – I wasn’t really focusing on that while I was hanging out with my new friends.

I also mentioned last time that we needed to replace our awning. We ordered the awning off Amazon. Often when we order Amazon goods while on the road, we have them delivered to Amazon Lockers which can be found at a lot of gas stations and groceries stores and places like that. But the awning was WAY to big for an Amazon Locker. Luckily, our friends Steve and Dolores live in Tucson, and they were nice enough to let us have Amazon ship the packages there. We picked them up last week, which also gave us a chance to see Steve and Dolores, which is always a treat.

We stayed in Tucson for just a couple of nights, which was good because it was really warm there. We occasionally use an app called Harvest Hosts while we’re on the road. Harvest Hosts lines up a bunch of wineries and museums and breweries and farms and the like who offer to let RVer’s stay on the premises for the night for free, and in exchange the guests buy some of the products that their hosts create. In Tucson, we found a really nice guy who owned a swimming club who allowed us to camp there, and he even had water and electric hookups, which gave us a chance to have the A/C running in the Tucson heat.

Installing the new awning proved to be a much bigger task than we expected, largely due to some not great instructions.

But in the end, we have the new awning up, and we like it quite a bit. It’s even Kansas City Royals colors!

Nico wasn’t thrilled as we were installing it, as he was trapped in the air conditioned trailer as we worked for several hours outside on the project. However, Kristen and I took it as surviving a major relationship test – installing a new awning together without wishing physical harm on each other! At this point we’re rock solid! Not to brag, but the two of us even have survived a trip to T-Mobile together to get new phones. Nuthin’ gonna stop us now!

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This is now our third major outing with our trailer. One thing that’s been fun is to make improvements as we go along. We’ve upgraded the toilet, shower head, and kitchen faucet, we’ve added a higher watt inverter so we can do things like run a Keurig and a sous vide, we put in higher powered solar panels, Kristen added quick connects to a bunch of the hoses we utilize, we did a big mattress upgrade with some extensions added to the bed frame, and in this past stretch at home, and we added a super cool new custom spare tire cover.

One upgrade to our daily road living that we’ve taken a lot of satisfaction in is we bought a little slice of Heaven called a Gozney Roccbox pizza oven to take on the road with us.

That’s been a really nice treat on this trip. We have propane tanks along with us already, to support the trailer, and we can hook one of the tanks up to the Roccbox and get the thing over 1000 degrees in 20 or 30 minutes.

From there, we can cook whatever we want. The past two nights have been pizza night and steak night.

I mentioned earlier that I have a huge Sam Elliott man crush. Well, I have to admit he’s not the only crush I have. Kenji Lopez-Alt is definitely up there for me too – he’s one of the more creative chefs you’ll find out there. The first time I remember hearing of him was with his “almost no knead bread” recipe – delicious bread made with beer. How could I not love that? But he’s no one trick pony! He’s done all kinds of different recipes worth checking out – one that we use a lot is his hollandaise sauce recipe for unforgettable Eggs Benedict. We’ve always eaten pretty well on the road together, but the pizza oven has definitely introduced some new opportunities.

Anyway, we’re still having an amazing time here! I hope you’re having a great time on your end too. Until next time!

– Ken, 6/4/2025