Veteran's Day ride

First, I want to send a hat's off to the Veteran's out there on this Veteran's Day. Other than my dad who was a Marine during the Korean war but didn't get sent to Korea, I only know one Vet - friend and neighbor NinjaPonyDad who lives with his experiences in Vietnam every day. I cannot imagine what it's like to live with those experiences, to lose friends, and have to return to "normalcy" and make it all work out. My thoughts go out to all of you.

As I work for a Government agency, I get the day off and decide to go for a ride before settling into some ranch-work. The weather called for snow yesterday and today, but we just got some wind that blew snow in from the Divide. Partly sunny, or cloudy depending on whether your glass is half full or empty, it got up to 42deg I think and turned out to be a very nice day. A perfect singlespeed ride on the Hunter around the hood. A two hour ride turned into a 4 hour ride as I unexpectedly found some 'interesting' things in the woods (see picture).

After some ranch work I headed out with Basie and Monkey before darkness fell (5pm now! ouch!). I let Monkey lead the way as she's the Matriarch in the family now and she can do whatever the hell she wants as she just turned 12 (we don't know her real birthday unfortunately as Smrp found her on the side of the road over a decade ago). We go down the driveway, up to the "Monkey Traverse" trail as I call it. It's a contour-grade trail on the property that makes a loop instead of an out-and-back. I hope we can have a few more years of exploring together.