Tuesday, July 6, 1999
Howdy pardner. Edith and I are in Alamosa, Colorado, and we just had a really good Mexican meal at a local restaurant. I am using Dave’s laptop and connected into his Cincinnati Bell Fuse account. Now I don’t want you calling me a geek and saying “don’t those two have anything better to do than hack around on a computer while on vacation”. Lighten up gringo, all the real cowboys out here are laptop-savvy and keep in touch with their friends on the Web.
The
first two days were long drives but not bad. I had to hang on to the Subaru
through Kansas. When we started the wind came out of the South at 30 MPH and, by
afternoon, it came out of the North at 30 MPH.
Many of you know that I have been planning this trip for two years. I
made all the reservations, decided on where we would stay and for how long and
dreamt about the big fish I would catch. For those of you who know Edith, it
should come as no surprise that she was in control of the trip within 100 miles
of Cincinnati. (Shh! Don’t tell her , but she does
a much better job than me and I usually like her choices. I even liked
the sod house and the world’s largest barn in Kansas).
I have a hard time with high
places and have finally calmed down tonight after a few bottles of Mexican beer.
We walked over the world’s highest suspension bridge at Royal Gorge,
Colorado. It moved back and forth in the wind and I got a special thrill looking
down at the Arkansas river through the openings between the boards lining the
walking surface. Better yet was a trip along a road called Razor Ridge (or Skyline
Drive). Edith, my personal tour guide, found this little-known path in a tour
book. It was one-way, barely one lane wide with no guardrails. Some of the time,
there were rocks on one side of the road and I had the Subaru hug that side
closely. Edith chatted away, told jokes about falling off mountains and found
things generally pretty funny. My real test
came at the hairpin turn in the road, just before we were to descend. There was nothing
but a single lane, bare on both sides and at such an angle that I could not see
more than 20, feet of road. When we finally reached the bottom, Edith had to pry
my fingers from the steering wheel.
Tomorrow, we will head for our final destination, Lake City Colorado. My friend at work, Jim McKinney, has a cabin here. I have had to listen to his stories about this town for years and decided that someone needs to check it out. I’ll let you know. When I rented our cabin, I asked the lady to describe they setting. She said it was “like a compound”. Try to run that picture through your mind. Edith and I living in a compound for two weeks (she has always fought to “have her own space”).
I plan to keep you all posted on our adventures in Colorado. Please don’t send us any responses to our emails as we don’t want to add TOO many long distance minutes to David’s Fuse account. We’ll talk to you when we get back.
Happy trails!
Carl