Important message for all closet Base Campers:
This is your last chance to put in at least one WU with Base Camp’s present host Team Andrax. If you do it before midnight UTC between February 13 and February 14, this badge will be yours

Good Morning Base Campers!
First let’s go to Pagosa Springs.

Those who trekked with Base Camp to Budapest and Hungary will remember and miss the healing, wholesome hot spring baths. Don’t despair. Colorado can do that too. Pagosa Springs has sulfur springs, including the world's deepest geothermal hot spring. We’ll let the slightly stinking sulphur water work wonders on our muscles and fat and enjoy the shapes of the sediments, and after a late big American breakfast we’ll board our Maybach.
Of course we ought to have tried white water rafting, but even with 72 hour days and the ability to turn frozen rivers into rushing liquid streams, we have to resign from a lot of would-also-have-been-nice-to-dos.

Have you ever read Ayn Rand’s ’Atlas Shrugged’ – the ultimate capitalist novel of about 1,000 pages? I have some 500 pages left.

It deals with industrial matters, above all the railroad company that Dagny Taggart in effect runs and her lover, the steel maker and inventor of a new alloy: Rearden Rail. In an independent and daredevil move Dagny constructs the new Rio Norte Line with Rearden Rail. The Rio Norte Line will compete with the Phoenix-Durango Line, and now we are in Colorado. Throughout the book the fictional music Richard Halley’s Fifth Concerto plays which brings us even more to Colorado.

Our Maybach will take us to Durango and we’ll board what will be the grande finale of our Colorado trek: a railroad trip with the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. And, again, would you be so kind as to sit me in the middle, please?
The line was inaugurated in 1881 and has run continuously ever since. Like ’Atlas Shrugged’ it’s cult, and I for one am pleased finally to take this trip.

There are many corners to be navigated. Better than post a lot of pictures – one more wonderful that the next – I’ll simply link to the mother lode – Google. The picture section.

Tonight we’ll have our goodbye dinner. I imagine it ought to be environmentally questionable tender beef - shamefully large slabs - with baked potato and vegetables. For dessert we’ll have a traditional coffee table as they make them in Southern Jutland in Denmark, the region that has been German/Danish/German/Danish through the ages. We’ll invite all the Team Andrax members to join us for coffee and cake in the secret hope that some of them would like to join us on some future trek with us.


May I thank the each and everyone of the crew for coming. It has been so good to spend this time in Colorado with you, and I certainly look forward to meeting you soon again.
Take care

I have been to the Gorge in Canon city, CO

Yes you can, you can see the bridge in the back ground in picture above
It sway a lot when you walk it.
The cable car I was in is 1 of a pack of 3 that go across, so maybe 12 people total at a time


The view from the trolly car

Good Morning Base Campers!
So now I sit here alone playing yo-yo with a starfish … a bit lonely after having toured Colorado with the Andrax Base Camp crew in our Maybach. I crashed on my waterbed at SeriousCrunchers. sujo1 joined a lot of challenges/races, so I’ll have the opportunity to study the techiques of that

Yesterday was another chapter in my ongoing health story. I had a minor surgery – planned before the blood clot – at my gynocologist, and after that I went to my first heart rehab session. We were four. Did a lot of pedaling which is not my favorite exercise - the surgery was not conducive, but the gynecologist had shown no mercy, so of course I did it. We had other exercises meant to get our heartbeat up, down and up again. Interval training, they call it. Finally, I picked one of the scary fitness machines, the one where you push away with your legs. 10 kilos, 20, 30 all the way up to 70 kg ~ 145 lbs. It was not nearly as dangerous as it looked.
Next time I'll aim for the one that does arms.
Our instructor said we could suggest music to her playlist. One man suggested Stauss whom she didn’t know but would set a reasonable pedalling pace
I wonder if she can find ’An Old Tin Cup’
I’m pretty flat - fibromyalgia does that to you in the first place - and my buttocks hurt, and I just sit here and let my buttocks hurt some more, because I’m too tired to do anything else.
Next time is tomorrow already … thank God it’s dance day, too - good for losing up

At a pre-planned lecture about diet and excercise at the local chapter of the Senior Citizens Association I got hold of some leaflets, one of them dealing with ’The Official Diet Councels’ developed by the Ministry for the Environment and Foods. For a long time I have wondered why we need to have all that salt added to our processed foods. Our basic black bread, the white bread too, the cheese, fish products, bacon, even corn flakes – you name it. The leaflet states that we should limit our intake of salt which I have tried to do for years on end. On average men’s intake is some 3½ oz and women’s a little less. Only 11-12% of this – a miniscule part – is due to what we add ourselves in our own households. So our wiggle room for reducing our salt intake is really limited, and I for one prefer a little salt on my eggs but could do without my bacon being quite as salty - it almost sears your tongue.

I called the Foods Agency who is responsible for the leaflet to ask why we didn’t ask the food manufacturers to put limits on all that salt they pour into everything. Well, I almost scared the young man, but he wisely chose to agree with my point. It’s a legislative question. Not only nationally. It’s a European Union question!
Never mind the food manufacturers’ lobbying.
This little mermaid will start from the bottom up.

Last night Margrethe II, Queen of Denmark, lost her husband, Prince Henrik – Henri Laborde de Monpezat – aged 83.
He made our queen very, very happy.

Good Morning Base Campers!

Hang in there Little Mermaid, things should get easier as you get acclimated to the routine.

By all means, I shall and will, acpartsman. I’ll descend into that torture cellar again today. In fact I try to be a bit cocquettish about it. I benefit from having done a lot of walking and two sets of indoor exercises for many years. But bicycling never was me. Never max rpms for me. Slow, steady, long paces … No crawl, breast stroke, please. I always detested getting sweaty, too …. But they like me to get to breathe too fast for talking (and who can blame them ..?) and want to see sweat on my forehead.

If you feel bored here, you could make SeriousCrunchers win all those races/challenges sujo1 entered them into

Ah, I see that you, davwhite5xq7, tanner2, and yodap are still hanging in with Team Andrax
Now, that’s a nice gesture
It should create some goodwill for a team Andrax member or two to join us on future treks