About Us...
(My dad, Donald, on the left and Charlis-dog getting a treat from me, Darrin.)
I was born and raised in Baltimore, MD, then spent some time in college studying Electrical Engineering Technology in Phoenix, AZ. I eventually wound up in Wyoming in 1989. I currently manage our family's working cattle ranch and operate RUF, Inc. RUF started out with me unofficially building and repairing all sorts of machinery, then evolved into a corporation specializing in custom mobile chassis and enclosures for extreme use.
In early 2006, I traveled to Rotterdam, The Netherlands to visit friends. While there, I met a wonderful woman, Anna, in Den Haag (The Hague). We courted via email for a while after that, and Anna decided she wanted to visit the ranch in Wyoming. She'd been longing to see something other than people and cars out of her Dutch windows, and I knew Wyoming would, if nothing else, offer her wonderful views of nature! To make a short story even shorter, we got married on Sept. 20th, 2006 in Wyoming. Here's Anna...
Some of our more 'urban' friends wonder what on Earth we do out here to occupy ourselves! If building houses, shops, trucks and campers isn't enough, managing livestock and land that you measure in square miles rather than square feet can be a 24/7 job if you want it to be.
We're here full-time, for all three months of summer and nine months of winter! (Spring and fall are short, but cherished, and realistically, winter days can occasionally get into the 50s and 60s so it's not that bad.) There's never really a good time to leave the ranch, but we do manage to get away. We start calving in February, farm in the Spring, put up hay and repair fence in the Summer, gather up and sell the livestock in the Fall, then start to feed our hay to the cows during the Winter months as calving rolls around again and the cycle repeats. We may make some changes in 2007 that will allow us to dedicate more time to RUF and ourselves.
Anna really loves to travel, and spent time in Thailand, Nepal, Guatemala, and Mexico. Of course, she's been all over Europe as well. Our first trip together was to the Four Corners Region of the US, and it was the last one we could take in the AATREC-FG "Expedition Mobile", my company's first "commercial" camper.
We're constantly thinking of our next adventure together, dreaming of far-away places with water and greenery! I thought I'd eventually like to circumnavigate the globe, sailing on a blue water catamaran. Unfortunately, I haven't sailed since I was in my teens in Maryland, Anna's not a big fan of open water, and I can see myself getting really stressed out in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of miles from the nearest land. With these details in mind, we'll likely keep our feet dry and explore the world in the newest "AATREC-FM204".
Anna's not too sure about my pet name for our new camper, but I like it! It's unofficially "Kalzbagon" which was the name I wanted to christen a blue water cat. You know - pronounced like " Cows B' Gone", or COWS-buh-gon. After two decades of ranch management, it's a very meaningful name for the vehicle that lets us move on. In fact, as our personal camper is finally under construction, we've started a new website, Kalzbagon, to track our upcoming adventures.