Google is great....sometimes.

Last week was pretty rough in the office, and this week was not much better. The last few days have been the type of days where you just wish you didn't have to work at all.

Then enter Google.

I have an EyeFi card for my DSLR camera. It allows the camera to send photos directly to my phone as they are taken. This is wonderful when I am traveling as it will also append the GPS info to the image when it transfers the photos to my phone.

On my phone, it is set to automatically back up my photos to Google Photos. I started this because it had a great feature where it would automatically put together a "travel story" complete with maps and transitions between photos. This was done automatically without me having to do anything. This feature sadly wad removed, but I still use it as my first photo backup.

Now for the "bad". Just like Facebook which wants to remind you of things from the past, Google Photos's assistant also will periodically give you a notification to "rediscover the day". The assistant was going to remind me for the next week of probably one of the most relaxing vacations I have taken.
In February of last year (2016), I made my third trip in a year back to Cloudcroft. The first was over the 4th of July with a friend to see the area again, and look at a piece of land I had found online. It was pretty much unbuildable, did meet a real estate agent from Blue Canyon Reality named Thomas Mack who would become my guide in finding the right property for me. The second trip was

just after Labor Day in 2016. I was on the way to a football game in Arizona and stopped by for a few days to look at more property and explore the area some more. 

Februarywas the third trip and the reason for this trip was to check out winter in Cloudcroft. The town of Cloudcroft is at 8,600 feet and gets and average of 70 inches of snow each year. For the last 15 years I have been living in South Texas where cold for us is about 32 degrees. Previously though, I had lived in some colder climates. I spent three years in Germany as a kid when my dad was stationed over there. Then in 1997-2001, I was living in Indian and Michigan. So I have driven on snow, dealt with cold winters etc. The colder weather and the snow  was one of the reason I was looking to move, but really wanted to spend some time before I was committed. So I rented a cabin on VBRO and took the dogs up to spend a week relaxing and just enjoying my time with them. This would also give me a chance to see if they liked the snow and could handle the cold. I was not really worried about Atlas; after all, I believe  he is a Swiss Mountian Dog mix. It was more Hermes I was concerned with as he is a Jack Russell Terrier and Chihuahua mix or so I am told. Here is their first walk in snow.

We did so many things that week. From going on hikes, to playing with some other dogs on the snow covered tennis courts. It was there Atlas made some friends with a few Huskies.

We also got to try out skijoring. Well it was not really skijoring since I was not on skis, but did let Atlas pull me in the snow, which will hopefully become one of our favorite actives when we are up there. He will already pull me when I attach him to the bike, so changing over to snow should not be much of an issue. besides the fun actives outside, we also spend a lot of time napping in the cabin with the fire going or in front of the window which let in a lot of southern light.

It was a great time and really set things in motion for trying to make this journey happen.