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Hey everybody from the Denver area!
Em & I had a good trip up, and have enjoyed our first day here. My alarm rang at 4am Saturday morning; by 5am the truck was ready to leave. I was going around, making sure the house was ready for us to go, and one of the blinds crashed down. The screws ripped right out of the brick! (sigh) Well, I knew that those would have to be fixed sometime. Not this morning, though. I grabbed a sheet, duct-taped it over the window, and left a note about it for Derek.
So now it's 5:15. I woke up Emily and got her out to the truck and situated; we finally pulled out at 5:30.
I went from Swan & 29th all the way to Deming, NM literally without stopping...not even a stop light, IIRC :) Em woke up just minutes before we got to Deming (at around 8:30 Tucson time) and started asking for breakfast. Seemed like a good time to pull over, so we did, finding a little mexican diner sort of place. I'd hoped it would be really cheap, like Joe's back in Tucson, but it wasn't. We both had breakfast burritos (basically omelletes in tortillas), which were tasty - and cheap - but too small. We went on a walk for a while (it was supposed to be 30 minutes...it turned into more like an hour), and finally made it back on the road at 11:30am local time (10:30am Tucson time).
Back on the road, we hit Las Cruces and turned north on I-25. Stopped once for gas, and twice for my tired eyes, and hit Albuquerque in the late afternoon. We were headed for camping in the National Forest east of Albuquerque, but we wanted to grab dinner first. We found a Little Anthony's sort of place which had great malts and even better burgers. Plus, it was on "Historic Route 66," for what it's worth. Anyhow, we enjoyed the meal and headed off.
It didn't take us too much searching to find a place to camp (you can camp for free anywhere in a National Forest - if you're willing to rough it). Luckily, though, we ran across a trailhead with restrooms (even pit toilets are better than nothing). So we parked at the trailhead and camped in the grassland nearby. It was nice, though I have back pain each time I camp - we haven't figured out how to arrange the pads to fix that yet.
We were up the next morning, and I was pretty concerned about the coming drive. We had another 8 hours to go, but I was feeling tired (I was up in the night a lot with a sore back) and didn't know how long I would last. We had a lazy breakfast, chatted with the local park ranger when he drove by, and packed up. We didn't get out of the campsite and back on the highway until almost 11. Bad start for a long day of driving.
Going north through New Mexico had been, and continued to be, a very odd experience. Em was constantly ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the rolling grasslands; she was taken with their beauty. But I could look out the window at the same landscape and see nothing but desert with a carpeting of dry, dead grass. She took a lot of pictures on the way, and I did my best to be supportive.
It seemed - to me - like New Mexico went on forever. I really really wanted to get into Colorado: the mountain passes, the high forests, and the cooler weather. Everything in New Mexico, it seemed, was a variation on the same basic theme: high, rolling desert. It's something like 450 miles of that from Las Cruces to the Colorado border.
Eventually, though, we got through to the "good stuff" and I got to drive a Colorado moutain pass again. (There was only one on our route, unfortunately.) We got to see Garden of the Gods (wow!) on our way through Colorado Springs, and eventually arrived in Longmont (about a half hour north of Denver) at 9:30pm.
We're here staying with Rob & Renna, and their 2 month old son, Reid. It's nice to be here. They are great people, whom I've never been able to really meet (except in passing at my wedding) and great hosts. They have a great split-level house that is perfect for guests; the master bedroom and baby room are in the upper level, and we guests have our own private bedroom (with bath, no less!) adjoining the office in the lower level. So we have privacy, and very comfortable accomodations. Not to mention great company!
We went out today to Rocky Mountain National Park, and spent much of the afternoon watching a number of herds of elk. This month is mating season, apparently, and the elf come down out of the hills to the meadows in huge numbers. In one large meadow, we observed at least four large (six point) bulls, each with a herd of 10 or more cows. Rob is a professional photographer, and he spent most of the afternoon waiting for elk to pose just perfectly, in just the perfect light.
So now I'm here writing a blog at the end of three very long but very good days. For any interested, Rob has 4 (or more?) Macs running down here, with parts for about a hundred more scattered around his office. My sort of place :) It was a little hard checking my email here - I'd set up VNC where it would work well from either Linux or Windows, but hadn't considered Macs - but now I have the firewall issues worked out and am fairly productive. So far I've only gotten one email from anybody, so I guess (I hope) that that means things are going well.
Derek, please gimme an email just to let me know things are sane back home...
Russ
P.S. I will be posting photos ASAP, once we download them from the digital camera. |
