Tuesday, while we
were loading things in the camper and pickup, the hummingbirds were buzzing
around all over the place, sometimes just whisking over my head – and several
times, a monarch butterfly sideswiped my face.
Here’s a picture
Hannah took when she went out to our place to care for the cats.
We stopped at
Cabela’s in Kearney, and Larry got some things in case he went hunting or we
went hiking: bear spray... backpacks... walkie-talkies
with a range of up to 38 miles... Our
bill was over $200, but we had a $50 refund voucher from the time we bought
something there, and found it online $50 cheaper the next day, and I had $95
worth of points on my Cabela’s card. So
it wound up being quite a good deal.
Meanwhile, Loren
and Norma were also heading for Colorado.
They got to Frisco at about 6:00 p.m., and camped alongside Dillon
Reservoir.
We turned south and
headed toward Holdrege. We always laugh
when we see the sign telling us we’re on the Chicken Dance Trail. That’s Rte. 34.
Wednesday, we
turned south to Oberlin, Kansas. We
filled the propane tanks, so the refrigerator wouldn’t conk out halfway to Creede. We had 8 hours of steady driving ahead of us,
and it was really windy. The man at the
station gave Larry his coffee free, since he was ready to make a new pot.
“Free scum!” I
said, but Larry said it was just fine.
(His ‘just fine’
and my ‘just fine’ are a little different.)
At 10:08 a.m., I
was focusing my camera on the ‘Welcome to Kansas’ sign, when my tablet
announced, “Welcome to Kansas!” I didn’t
know it did that!
An hour later, we went
by McCarty Family Farms – a huge dairy.
The four sons run the business now, and with extended family and
coworkers, there are over 165 employees.
All the milk from the 7,200 cows goes into Dannon Yogurt. They started 90 years ago in the small town of
Sugar Run, Pennsylvania. They had no
electricity, and milked their cows by hand.
One of the
great-grandsons wrote this on their webpage:
“Our great-grandfather Taylor McCarty’s
cow, Elmglade Pride Abbekerk, was recognized for producing 101,966 lbs. of milk
during her almost 11 years of milk production.”
At 11:30 a.m., we stopped
at a Cenex station south of Levant, Kansas, to check the alignment on the
pickup. It was toed in, wearing the
tires unevenly, and not driving as well as it could. Larry remarked that it would only take about
15 minutes to adjust it.
I helped by holding
a 2x4 against the tire on one side while Larry did the same on the other, and
then he slid his measuring tape to me so I could hold it against the 2x4. We measured the backs of the tires, then the
fronts. (If you haven’t seen anyone
check their alignment, you’re not going to know what in the world I mean, I don’t
suppose. If you really want to know,
check it out here: How to Check Wheel Alignment.)
Now, this might
seem like an easy thing to do, but let me remind you that it was windy. The wind was blowing at a steady 20 mph, with
gusts up to 40. As near as I could tell, the gusts didn’t leave the
steady wind to itself much at all.
I had to squat down
by that tire and hold those pieces of wood and the tape measure in place. I discovered that there was a hurricane-force gale blowing through the
wheel wells and under the pickup. AND we
were in a gravel parking lot. AND the
air conditioner was dripping, right beside the wheel well, and the wind was
blowing the drips all over the place. I
had water splatted all over me, and sand in my eyes.
Aarrgghh.
The bolts that
Larry needed to loosen were rusted in place.
He sprayed them with lubricant, waited a minute, grabbed his wrench, and
twisted.
One after the
other, two bolt heads twisted right off.
So much for this
being a quick, 15-minute job.
Fortunately, he had
some more bolts that fit. We were back on the road again after that a
short delay, and the pickup was driving much better. Even the passenger could
tell it. š
I don’t like it
when we’re veering down the road like a sheep herder!
At 1:00 p.m., we entered
MDT – and then it was noon.
After a long spell of driving, we stopped at a truck stop
in Eads, Colorado. I needed to get out and walk – rigor
mortis was setting in! It was 279 miles to our campground near Creede:
My tablet informed
me that we had about 4 ½ hours of driving ahead of us, though I didn’t know how
accurate that was, when you consider we were driving an extended-cab dually
pickup with a large camper on it, pulling a stock trailer full of ‘toys’ (the
Polaris RZR, the kayak, our bikes, etc.).
As we drove, I
edited and posted pictures from the last day of our trip out to the Sandhills –
plus the cats greeting us when we got home:
From
Atkinson to Home
At 2:36 p.m. MDT, we
topped a hill –and there were the mountains!
By 5:01 p.m., we
were almost to Walsenburg. A house about
a mile outside of town sported a big, hand-painted sign out front: NOT 4 SALE.
It wasn’t anything to brag about, really; why did they need that sign?
We saw a number of
antelope, and a mule deer.
Norma sent me a
note:
“Seeing lots of beautiful scenery. Loren is enjoying the beautiful colors and the
mountains.”
That night, they stayed
in a campground by Turquoise Lake near Leadville. They were 175 miles north of us.
She sent me a
picture of Loren. I wrote back, “That’s
a good picture! Now you need to hand your phone to Loren, show him which
button to push, and have him take a picture of you. š”
The next day, she
sent me a photo of herself.
And there you see
the first photo my brother ever took with a cellphone! At least, I think it is.
By a quarter ’til
7, we were in Fort Garland, with 93 miles to go – 1 hour and 46 minutes, if we could
go as fast as Google maps believe we can.
AND, we discovered we’d gotten a phone message from the campground about
an hour earlier (cellphone service is spotty), informing us that their office
closes at 5:00, and they will only allow people to park in the campground until
9:00, and after that we would have to stay outside the gates until
morning. We filled with fuel and rushed
westward.
And then I figured
out why: he was looking at the clock on
the dash of the pickup, which doesn’t change with different time zones. We had an hour more than he thought we did!
And... we made
it! We made it with 25 minutes to
spare. This is a nice campground, and
the showers are quite nice, too, thankfully.
One doesn’t like to be stuck at a campground for a week if they have bad
showers.
The next morning, we
walked around the campground a bit. I
think it would take all day, to walk
around the whole works. But everything
is pretty, and each camper has a lot of room.
We saw the ritzy part, where they lease lots and have tented pavilions
beside their campers and motorhomes, and carved wooden signs with their names
on them. Their large lots are sometimes
terraced and landscaped, and flowers still abound.
There are signs all
around warning about bears, and a picture showing a bear in the campground
garbage bin last month. We walked to the
fishing pond, then along the Rio Grande river that flows on the south and east
side of the campground.
Then we drove to
Creede and looked around. We got some
water and bananas at the Kentucky Belle Market, then went to True Value
Hardware in one of the old, old buildings on Main Street for a fitting for the
camper, where it keeps leaking water. At
least the leak is outside. I got a Rio Grande Cookbook for Teddy and Amy
– their anniversary is next month.
We went in a few boutiques,
including the Quiller’s Gallery, in case it might be something to do with the
quilling Hannah does.
It wasn’t.
It was an art gallery, with lots of sketches by
someone with the last name of Quiller. There
were bronze animal figurines by a talented sculpture – for prices anywhere from
$750 to $10,000. The sketches and
paintings were... uh, not my style. š¤
Haha ... no,
actually, the show is in a big area ----- in a blasted-out area of the rock
wall along the box canyon in which Creede is located – it’s their Community
Center. We saw them setting things up.
Larry immediately
accused me of booking reservations in this place on account of the quilt
show. I immediately accused him of coming to this area on account of
the car show. ‘Cruisin’ the Canyon’ Car Show was going to
be on Saturday, we learned.
When we came back
to the campground, we saw a couple of the old vehicles that are here for the
show. Almost everyone else around this
place is in humongous campers of one sort or another, or gargantuan
motorhomes. We saw one loooong fifth-wheeler
with six opposing slideouts.
Actually, I did see a pull-behind popup camper – with four pop-outs.
We saw a giant RZR
– I think they’d need a ladder to get in that thing!
We were planning to
take the RZR on the 17-mile Bachelor Loop Trail; but first, Larry straightened
the jack on the stock trailer. It got
bent backwards in a dip in Alma, Nebraska, when we were looking for a
campground. It was bent backwards when
we got it, and Larry fixed it. It looks
pretty gimpy now.
As Larry got the
RZR out of the trailer, another antique car came into the campground, followed
by a very large camper ----- and then another one, and it was brilliant turquoise
blue! Ooooo, pretty, pretty. I could hear it puttity-putt-putting away, as
it moved down the wide, tree-lined lane to its designated parking spot.
This is the kind of
a campground where elderly gentlemen in cashmere robes and silk pajamas come
out early in the morning to walk their Boxers and Yorkies (those are dogs, in
case you’re wondering), carrying large ceramic souvenir mugs full of steaming
coffee. (The man carries the steaming coffee, not the dog.)
It was a lovely
55°, and would get up to the mid-60s. It would be that way for the next
week. Beautiful blue skies... aspens turning gold and orange and
scarlet... just gorgeous. I love the mountains!
See, here’s how you
can tell this is a ritzy campground, over and above our ilk: I took a bag of trash to the dumpster
(enclosed in a rustic, wood-pole corral, so pretty you’d never think it to be a
dumpster corral) – and discovered a big pot of blooming petunias therein!
(No, I didn’t go
dumpster-diving. Me has me pride, and
besides, I would have no way of transporting a big pot of bloomers. But... they were purty!)
Bloomers and boxers.
When the breakfast
dishes were done, we headed off to the Silver Threads Quilt Show, put on by the
Silver Threads Quilt Guild, named after the Silver Thread Scenic Byway, which
refers to the silver mines in the area, past and present.
Some of my friends mentioned
that they didn’t know if they could handle being underground, as they are
claustrophobic. Well, I am a bit
claustrophobic, too; but the rooms were big enough and airy enough, it didn’t
bother me in the slightest.
Sooo... we bought
some cookies and headed out.
My quilting friends
can’t understand how I can duck into a big quilt show, race through it, and be
gone in 30 or 40 minutes. Well, for one
thing, I take pictures of almost every single quilt. I’ll be looking at
them in detail later, when I edit my pictures. Next, there are many things to do!
Several ladies
asked if I take any quilting/sewing projects with me on my trips. I take
my little bag (it’s actually a nifty computer bag with gobs of pockets) with
the Bucilla butterfly cross-stitch quilt in it, just in case... in case it’s
pouring rain, I can’t trot around and explore, we have no electricity, and the
battery on my computer runs flat, and I can’t edit my pictures.
I’ve been carrying
that case around for... ? four years, I think, and I just recently finished the
first butterfly. š
That afternoon,
Norma wrote to say that they would be home that evening. They’d gone over Trail Ridge Road in Rocky
Mountain National Park. Loren has been
glad quite a few times lately that he got that new camper last Spring!
You know, meeting
people you’ve never seen before, but think you know something about, can be a
... revelation.
“That’s all,” she
wrote. About that, anyway.
Upon leaving Lake
City, we drove around Lake San Cristobel. We’d hoped to find a nice
picnic area where we could have supper, but no such luck. The only parking areas were primitive
campgrounds, and most of them were filled with big campers and motorhomes that
had no need of electricity, water, or anything else. Nary a picnic table to be seen.
Meanwhile, back
home, Victoria had taken a turn at caring for the cats – and was unable to get
in the front door. Hannah discovered the
next time she went that she couldn’t
get in the front door, either. The knob wouldn’t
work. Hannah called to tell us the
troubles.
When he did
come, as Hannah told it, he couldn’t get through his noggin that he should go
around to the back patio door. Hannah finally
had to go out the back, walk all the way around to the front, collect the cat,
and carry him to the back.
Cats. Sometimes he’s gotten up on the
roof and come to the window of my quilting room, and meowed his head off. I refused to let him in; I went and called
him to the front door. But Victoria used
to take the screen out and let him in up there!
Way to encourage the waywardness.
haha
When I told Larry
what I’d suggested, he exclaimed, “I hope he doesn’t just hook his pickup
to the knob and jerk door and all out of there!” (hee hee... He did something
similar, once upon a time, with my red twig dogwood. Thought it was a volunteer tree.)
That evening at our campground, I finally posted
some bird photos that I had taken a couple of weeks ago: Finches,
Sparrows, & Cardinals
There was a cute
little terrier in the back of a 1957 Chevy Bel Air. I took her picture... but she wasn’t looking
at me. Her owner, in a nearby chair,
said, “Smile for the camera, Candy!” and the doggy looked at me and wagged. So I offered the back of my hand for her to
sniff, and she wagged again and carefully licked it with her little pink
tongue.
(Well, that could
be merely because there was a lot more area to walk. It takes more room to display 200 cars than
it does to display 175 quilts!)
Soon we were on our
way to South Fork to go kayaking on Beaver Creek Reservoir south of the town in
Rio Grande National Forest.
And then a rainbow
trout shot straight out of the water beside them and flew a good three feet in
the air.
“QUAAAAAACKKKK!!!!!!!” screamed
both mergansers in unison, and flapped and splatted and squawked themselves
into flight.
We couldn’t paddle for a while after that,
because we were too busy laughing.
The sun set on the
way back to the campground. While the
sky to the west was brilliant orange, a streak of apricot appeared to the north
– the effects of one narrow band of clouds hanging lower than the others, right
where the last rays of the sun could hit it. Striking.
I downloaded my
pictures – all 943 of them. š² Good thing I no longer have to
pay for film and processing, eh?
Sunday morning, my
hair was all curled... all I needed to do was comb and spray it ---- and I
spent 5 minutes hunting for my mirror. I
knew Larry had borrowed it... but what in the world had he done with it?? I finally found it – hanging on the knob of a
high kitchen cupboard, several inches above my head. Larry wonders how I could’ve missed it. I wonder
why he should think I would look for my mirror,
some distance above my head!
Across the road
from the campground, there is a little airport.
There was a fly-in pilots’ breakfast that morning, and we stopped to
look at the little planes – especially this little red bi-winger.
We drove north that
day, first to Lake City, then to Blue Mesa Reservoir. The water is seriously low in the reservoir.
We continued on to Black
Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.
The roads in the Park are steep and bumpy. I figure we jarred about ten years of life out
of our pickup camper. š
I will say
this: it’s not as bad as some coffee we’ve gotten in convenience stores.
’Course, they also
say that a bit of caffeine is good for one’s heart and can ward off certain
cancers. So, since decaf still has a
little bit of caffeine in it... maybe I’ve hit the perfect balance, hmmm?
Larry called me from
the top of a trail with his walkie-talkie, and I could hear him quite well. When they work, these are good
walkie-talkies. But they don’t seem to
hold a charge worth a hoot.
We stopped at a
little picnic/campground area beside the Rio Grande River, and Larry worked on
the refrigerator latch at a picnic table.
The little spring that holds the lock in place had broken. At the hardware store, they didn’t have what
we needed, but Larry bought a small spring, and with his handy-dandy pliers/wire
cutter/multi-tool, he cut and rebent the spring to make it work.
We walked along the
pathway beside the canyon, looking at the falls, then had a yummy lunch in our
camper: fresh raspberries with Kefir
Madagascar Vanilla smoothie poured over them. Mmmmm, mmmm.
When we got back to
the campground, I opened the windows in the camper and enjoyed the mountain breeze
while I typed my journal and uploaded pictures.
It was 68° and partly cloudy. I could see that it was raining over
some of the mountain ranges.
Larry took the RZR
out on the trails one last time. He took a raincoat, just in case.
The only time we’ve
had Internet while we’ve been here has been when we’re in the campground using
their signal. Oh, well... lack of Internet doesn’t shut down cameras, RZRs,
bicycles, or pickups! š
We had chicken,
rice, and vegetables for supper... with applesauce... and mint chip ice cream
for dessert.
We’ll be leaving
Creede tomorrow, heading northeast. We’ll probably stay in Lake George
tomorrow night. Larry wants to fish at the nearby Elevenmile Canyon
Reservoir.
Boy oh boy, do I
ever have a lot of pictures to edit! š
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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