June 7: Westcliffe to Durango, CO
On the road again.
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| The Perils of Car Travel: When you’ve pulled off the highway onto a dirt road so that your 5YO can get out of the car because he thinks he’s going to throw-up (much like the airplane incident, this proved to be a false alarm), your own stomach isn’t exactly calm. You do, however, experience a certain satisfaction in knowing that this is another bullet point to add to your parenting resume. |
| The Perils of Car Travel, Part 2: Levi falls asleep in the carr, easing our fears that he’ll be losing his breakfast all over the upholstery. However, when we turn on to the bumpy dirt road, which we’ll end up being on for about 12 miles, the nervousness hikes back up a bit. He manages to mostly stay asleep and completely holds down his food (yeah!). However, it is about this time that I realize just how far out in the middle of nowhere we are. Luckily, travel karma doesn’t get me for this thought and we make it through the rest of our drive without car trouble or a flat tire or running out of gas. |
You can’t get much more “middle of nowhere” than
having to stop the car because of cows in the road.
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The Sand Dunes: We stop at the sand dunes for an hour or so. Going all the way to the top is out since we see a family on our way in who said it took them 2½ hours. We just don’t have that kind of time. Well, maybe more to the point, some of us don’t have that level of energy.
They suffered through with some time playing in the creek… |
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| …and getting to scale at least one sand dune.
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The Bonus Towel: At the hotel that night, we are unrolling the wet towels and sandy swimsuits to dry them out. It turns out we’ve acquired an extra towel and a pair of boy’s underpants. There’s no way to get them back to the rightful owner, so I guess we’ve got a new towel. The underpants? Those we won’t keep. I can’t help but feel bad for the poor kid trying to explain to his parents that he had set his stuff right there on the bench and he doesn’t know what happened to it. He’s probably been tortured with some lecture about keeping track of his belongings. |
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Hotel Living: If seventy bucks for a two-bedroom suite seems like a too-good-to-be-true deal, it is. What they call a suite is really a former apartment – which sounds like an even better deal since that now means two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a living room. However, the grime on the living room blinds, the rust in the kitchen sink, and the coffee table with only 3 of 4 glass panes in tact give one pause. The general run-down nature of the neighborhood doesn’t help. Still, Harrison, who checked us in wearing his Sepultura (heavy metal band) T-shirt and announcing that he moved here from Flagstaff for the snowboarding, does seem like a friendly enough guy.
However, the real kicker is when, at 9:30 at night as you try to get kids into bed 1 ½ hours past normal bedtime, you discover the more-than-one-towel-to-soak-it-up leak on the kitchen floor. This apparently is also the kind of leak that, when management is called, prompts questions about whether it really needs tending to tonight. The maintenance guy echoes this sentiment when he tells you that he’s 45 minutes away and he’d rather not deal with it tonight. No problem. We’ll be just fine at the Ramada across the street, thank you. |
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Rules of the Road: No matter how many fun things you’ve done, a 7YO can always find occasions on which to whine “no fair.” |
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