Mountain Clams

Vacation, day 4 of 4.

My wife, daughter (16), son (15) and I took a short 4-day vacation to the western slope of Colorado, from Friday to Monday. I thought I would share a couple stories from that trip.

On Monday, we drove back to Denver... indirectly. We stopped in Palisade for some peaches and tomatoes, then, realizing we were going to get back to Denver kindof early, decided to take one of the scenic byways off I-70. This particular scenic byway, though, was not very well marked. At one point, for no apparent (to me) reason, everyone in the line of cars EXCEPT US turned left at the light in the middle of some small town. There was no sign, no indication that we should turn, but it seems that everyone but us just knew to turn there. So after a short tour of the small town and finding the extent of their paved roads, we turned around and headed in the same direction as the rest of the cars had gone. Yep, this is the right way to go.

At one point, there is road construction on the scenic route, and we found ourselves behind a camper trailer. This gave us enough time to notice that the name of the trailer was PlayMor, but also that the license plate was a U.S. Government tag! And really, hasn't the government played enough lately?

A little while later, there’s a sign saying “pavement ends.” Another mile or two later, the pavement finally did end. We think they’re working on their road and just forgot to move their sign to tell you when they quit working on the road. So now we’re driving along this dirt and gravel road through the countryside. It’s pretty nice, but there’s still that problem of lack of signs to tell you you’re not heading off into Deliverance country. At one point, we get to a T-intersection. The left is the way that it seems most people go, based on the wear and look of the road. So we head left a little ways and the road turns, starting to head us back towards the last little town we just finished driving through! So we turn around and go the other way. Yep, this is the right way to go. I love driving with the Force. (Stretch out with your feelings!)

So we’re winding through the hills on this dirt road, and we’re noticing that some of the dirt looks like it was recently stirred up, like someone has done some work on the road recently. We go around the corner of a hill to see a road grader coming up the hill at us! At least we see each other and I am able to get past him without too much difficulty. This was actually the wide part of the road.

We continue on our way without too much difficulty after that, finally reaching I-70 again. We begin heading east on I-70 when traffic starts to back up and we see construction signs telling us that the highway gets reduced to one lane. My wife pulls out the map and tells me that we can take the next scenic byway. I get off the exit and we drive up to Leadville. If you’ve seen a map of Colorado, you know that Leadville is not what you would call “on” I-70. In fact, driving to it and back from I-70 is about equivalent to driving up one side of a mountain and down the other. But we got there and opted to take in some of the local color by having dinner... at Pizza Hut. When we got back to I-70, apparently the construction crews had gone home for the day since all lanes were open the rest of the way down. We got home, unpacked, started some laundry, and found that the TiVO was full, so watched several things to make some room. Vacation was nice, but it was good to sleep in my own bed again!

During the trip, we found about 5 or 6 different times when we thought it would be nice to have the truck rather than the van. On the other hand, we found a few ways in which the van was really the best choice, like when it rained, or when we only had to fill up the tank twice.

Labels: vacation

posted by Brett @ 9:13 AM