While making our way from Longmont to Fort Collins we drove through the small town of Lyons. We were originally just looking for a spot to buy some of Oskar Blues famous Pale Ale in a can when we stumbled upon a pinball museum of sorts.

Lyon’s Classic Pinball is essentially the house of a pinball enthusiast who turned it into an arcade. There were over 35 pinball games from the 1960’s to 2000 with such rarities as the world’s largest pinball machine and the only three tiered pinball game made.

We had a blast playing the only two player (versus) pinball game where you stand across form each other and try and send balls to your opponent’s side.

One of my favorite’s was the Disc’s of Tron (based on the game played in the movie Tron) video game that had to be one of the first games to try and use 3D video projection that would make dizzy if you looked at it too long.

After some retro fun we were on to Fort Collins via Estes Park. Maria had looked up a cool dog park in Estes with three different sections and a swimming area. When we arrived we were excited to see that they had a mini obstacle course for dogs. Our immediate thought was “Oh, Ernie would love to do this!” Turns out Ernie wasn’t interested, but Buddha picked it up right away. After a couple of times showing him how to go up and down the ramp he was running the course like a pro.

As you can see he had trouble with the last jump, but we just wrote it off as a prejudice obstacle.

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As you drive along I-80 toward Rock Springs, WY you may notice many fences that seem to be randomly placed along the road side. It has been bugging me for the past 50 miles, not knowing what these unconnected fences were trying to do, so I found this post in a forum for my answer:

These are snow fences to prevent ground blizzards which happen in flat, windy places. Even if the snow isn’t falling from the sky, the wind-whipped snow can create very dangerous conditions on roadways – zero visibility. These fences help prevent that.

So, aahh now I can relax knowing what these damn things were for.

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We apologize for being a bit lazy on the blog, but after a nice week of catching up with family and friends we are ready to jump back into it. We arrived in Denver last Sunday and stayed with my cousin Heidi and her family through Thursday. And by stay with them I mean, parked Stanley outside her house for about a week 😉 Sunday night was a fantastic dinner at my Aunt Betsy’s, Monday was a most excellent BBQ cookout hosted by Lauren and Chris (and thanks to Kyle for the ride there 🙂 Tuesday we met Brian’s Uncle Tom for a fantastic meal at The Berkshire and Wednesday I made dinner for the fam. (thanks to the latest issue of Cooking Light, the cover meal, Chicken and Guac tostadas was delicious!!)

After our relaxing stay in Denver, we headed up to Boulder for some beer tastings. We hit up Boulder Beer for lunch on Thursday then headed 20 minutes north to Longmont to stay at the RV park for the night. There we hit up Left Hand and Oskar Blues and then took our bikes and the bus back to Boulder for more breweries. We were very disappointed to find that Avery brewery closes early at 8pm so we missed that 🙁

So far our running total of brewery tastings are as follows:

Bristol Brewing Co, Colorado Springs
Trinity Brewing Co, Garden of the Gods
McClellans Brewery, Canon City, Colorado
Breckenridge Brewery, Breckenridge
Great Divide, Denver, Colorado
Boulder Brewery
Mountain Sun, Boulder
Walnut Brewery, Boulder
Left Hand Brewery, Longmont, Colorado
Oskar Blues, Longmont Colorado (2 locations)
Coopersmiths Brewery, Ft. Collins
Equinox, Ft. Collins
Odells, Ft. Collins

Needless to say, I am ready for a break! Well, not that long because there are two breweries that we will hit in Wyoming. Staying in Colorado has been great, I feel like I could spend two more weeks here, but atlas it is time to move on and use these wheels on our home. Tonight I think you will all be happy to hear we are going to try out our first Walmart camping night in Rock Springs, Wyoming. Then Tuesday we will head to Jackson, which according to most people I talk to is the most beautiful place, EVER. So we will see 🙂

Thanks again for following. Brian is going to post about our adventures in Lyons. Here is a synopsis of our last week in a Facebook album. We love to hear from you so use our comments if you’d like to give us a shout out!!

“Visiting family and friends, seeing the sights and enjoying the brews!”

From Road Trippin’ pt 4, posted by Maria Scarpello on 8/30/2010 (54 items)

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After a great time in Colorado Springs we packed up Stanley and headed to Cañon (pronounced Canyon) City. We arrived at what appeared to be a run down parking lot, but was in fact the RV park we had booked. There was a range of campers from Class A buses that were past their prime and broken down trucks that had simply set up a tent and a tarp. We were informed that most of the residents lived there term and we were more than a little nervous about being the outsiders.

After spending most of Thursday working while Maria ran some errands we were excited to go white water rafting through Royal Gorge on Friday. We had gone rafting this already summer in Switzerland so were interested to see how Colorado compared.

We were lucky to get a private raft with one of the more veteran guides. Our guide Johnathan had grown up in Canon City and educated us about the history of the gorge which included a lot of gold mining, railroad building, prison labor. The whole tour took about 2 hours to travel 8 miles through plenty of class 3 and 4 rapids while executing fancy moves like the “S” move high side shifts. About half way through we pulled off to the side and Johnathan showed us a good spot to go cliff jumping. We spent about 10 minutes swimming and jumping off rocks into the Arkansas River.

By the end of the day we had learned a lot about the gorge, the region, and rafting in general. We had also both developed lop sided sunburns as we were facing the same direction the whole way down. It didn’t take much discussion to agree taht the rapids were more intense than Switzerland and decided we needed a beer to celebrate. We hit up the McLellan’s, the local brewery, but were disappointed when their nut brown ale was neither brown nor an ale.

With the Canon City experience completed we were off to our next destination, Breckenridge.

“More photos of the stanley crew”

From Colorado sights, posted by Maria Scarpello on 8/23/2010 (26 items)

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Hey everyone, thanks for checking back in. Brian and I had a great time in CO springs and the surrounding area. We arrived on Tuesday and are leaving today. I would have liked to stay longer, but there is just too much more to see and do. We’ve posted some pics on Facebook and have now downloaded a new plugin so I can link them in right here!!

Thanks for visiting… wish you were here with us!

“Bristol Brewing Co, Seven Falls, Garden of the Gods, Manitou Springs and Trinity Brewing Co.”

From Aug 17, 2010, posted by Maria Scarpello on 8/19/2010 (36 items)

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We enjoyed our stay at High Plains in Oakley, KS. The RV park was VERY nice with Putt Putt, Hot Tubs, Pick your own Garden and a dog run. Unfortunately we arrived late and left early so the only one we enjoyed was the dog run. We did however do our first run with Boxee and watched a few South Park episodes. All these old folks with their antennas and direct TV dishes have no clue!! Our mac mini with a 1TB drive and streaming Boxee is definitely the way to go. “But how will you watch the news” my Dad asks, ha! Jon Stewart’s Daily Show is streaming… that’s all the news you need!

Thanks for following!

“At High Plains Campgrounds”

From First RV Park outside of Lawrence, posted by Maria Scarpello on 8/17/2010 (13 items)

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Ok, so I am waaay behind on these posts but if you can believe it or not, I’ve been kind of busy lately. I did successfully finish my thesis last week for my masters in Design Management. (I can do another post about that topic if people are interested) And now that we are on the road I have some catching up to do!

So the last time we talked about Stanley I introduced you to Gare Gare. The steps after the purchase seemed to be endless, so where do we start? The ugly fabric, that’s where! Ripped all that out of there, took down all the blinds and then started to remove all the cabinet doors for painting. Basically the rest of the steps that follow was to take out everything that was yellow/dirty (which was EVERYTHING) and prep it all to paint. Ripped out the carpet, took out the queen size bed in the back, attempted to remove the dinette benches so we could lay the laminate down, but that didn’t work, so they stayed in. The steps went on and on and on. One nice little idea we had, when taking everything out, we put all screens and hardware into individual plastic bags labeled with a sharpie so we knew what each screw went with. Right when you think you are done taking everything out, you realize there are about 20 other things you’ve missed.

Ok so fast forward about two weeks, everything is out, we’ve begun the soaking process with OxiClean, by the way, the best cleaning solution EVER! It worked on just about anything i could fit into the small baby pool! I had been scouring the RV blogs and found two very helpful posts on soaking the Day/Night blinds in OxiClean and painting the inside of your RV. This forum provided a great tip, purchase PVC pipe with two end caps for soaking the day/night blinds as the longest ones we had were over 68″ and were too long to fit in our baby pool or the bathtub. Once we got the right size PVC pipe, this worked like a charm. I’d recommend at least 4″ pipe, 5″ if you can find it.

The second RV renovation tip comes via Jim on RVhobby.com for painting the interior of your RV. Turns out RV’s don’t have walls like you would typically find in a home, instead most RV walls use a technique that bonds a vinyl sheet to luan board. What does this mean? Well, it means that priming the walls takes a little more attention and effort that normal.

Scrubbing away, beer never too far away 😉

The TSP cleaner that Jim recommended really did the trick. Gare Gare must have been a smoker because everything in the RV was yellow, before the TSP and OxiClean got a hold of it anyway. TSP is nice because it doesn’t suds up and it cuts right through all the grime and grease on the walls to ensure the primer sticks. After cleaning the walls it was on to sanding

and masking.

Luckily we have incredible friends and were able to barter beer, baby haircuts and food in trade for help with all our steps. Big thanks to Scott, Ann, Angel and Jen for lending a hand!

Trading haircuts for labor 😉


Now everything is cleaned and prepped, so its on to the priming. We ended up going with Kilz Primer. This was the first time Brian and I have ever painted, so as it turns out, we weren’t very good! Luckily, it was just the primer and it didn’t really matter if you could see brush strokes going every which way. This experience did however trigger 1 of the 2 best ideas we had for the entire renovation, we ended up hiring a professional to come in and paint everything white. This was a great decision as the painter used a spray gun and everything was nice and evenly covered. It is always nice to do things on your own, but if you can pay $400 for a professional to come in and get it all done in 2 hours vs. your 2 weeks of time, it becomes VERY worth it.

This concludes our post on Renovations Pt. 1. Part 2 will include applying the green and fast foward to the finishing touches. Thanks for following!

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You’ve got to love technology. On the road with this new Sprint Mobile WiFi hotspot and while on our way to CO our friend Angel says: “you are definitely going to see the Garden of Eden in Lucas, Kansas, right? It’s a trip” and we said, “well, why the hell not.” We actually were in for a big surprise!! Not only was the Garden of Eden really cool but the Worlds Largest Collection of the Worlds Smallest Versions of the Worlds Largest Things Traveling Roadside Attraction and Museum by artist Erika Nelson, was even better! Thanks to Erika, we will now be adding other random Worlds Largest Stops on our adventure.

View our photos on Facebook!

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Just like the Barry Bonds #73 home run ball has an asterisk so too should the largest ball of twine in Cawker, KS. As it turns out, according to Wiki there are actually a few cities that claim the largest ball of twine and Cawker can more specifically claim the largest ball of twine built by a community. I say this is nearly as impressive as the largest ball of twine built by one person in Darwin, Minnesota, big ups to Francis A. Johnson. Nevertheless we will drive a little out of our way to say we’ve seen it and surely will never recognize the wiki claim that Branson, Missouri believes they too have the largest ball of twine. Good try Missouri, we know you only have one thing that is bigger than KS… idiots!

Thanks for following… we are on our way. more posts this week to include renovation stages and the newly improved Stanley pics! 😉

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Many of you might know that I have been with the same company since I graduated, Popstar Networks. It is a software company that specializes in digital media and interactive kiosks. I helped to implement a number of different initiatives and client projects for the past 5 1/2 years. I started with two others, Steve Hagenlock, CTO and Brian Fusco, VP Product Dev and a handful of graphic design interns and will be leaving just over 30 co-workers. I slowly migrated out of the design production role and as my boss Don Selmon would like to say “moved over to the dark side” in Sales. In 2009 I formed the Sales Solutions Department, where we assisted in all areas of the sales process, including defining client project strategy and coordinating internal departments for implementation. Yesterday, they threw me one hell of a send-off party equipped with the best content I’ve ever seen on digital signage called the “Stanley Send Off”. They made us videos and wrote us good luck messages in the RSS feed. I’ve never been so touched with all the warm wishes and support I received yesterday. It was an incredible scene to see all of the company sitting in the room at once, it is quite the production we’ve built over here and I can’t wait to hear of all their future successes.

I loved the content they made me soo much I was given permission to post on the blog! I have Stacie Doyle, Deena Schaumberg, Erica Birkman and Jen Catloth to thank for all their hard work and making me laugh all day long on my last day. Couldn’t be a better way to go out!

All things Stanley related:

I will post the videos later!

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