All posts for my Travel category

Highway 65 continues up from Powderhorn Resort, where we stayed, so we went up to take a look.

I should mention that we’re driving a rented bright red Prius which has been driven pretty hard. It has half the miles on it that mine has, and yet it is in marginal condition. Not the car itself. It got us where we were going, and pretty economically, all things considered. But the accessories are mostly not of the working persuasion. For example, Priuses have a touchscreen display on the dashboard between the driver and passenger. All the controls for the climate, radio, information about the motors – electric and gas, and controls for the screen itself are there. Only none of them worked on this car. You would push things, and they would remain stubbornly unproductive. You couldn’t turn the air conditioning up or down, you couldn’t dim the screen, you couldn’t turn the fan up or down….you get the picture. The most notable thing about the screen was that (I’m making this up, but I really think this is what happened) someone at some point had gotten fed up, and there appeared to be the mark of a fist in the middle of the screen.

Lots of aspens lined the road, and then lots of spruce trees, with the last winter snow still unmelted at their feet. Then meadows, one of which was host to a pair of mule deer. Lots of wildflowers, wild roses and lupins in blue, red and pink. Small white flowers that I never got the name of, but they looked like petunias and grew on vines close to the ground.

We continued in the Prius up the mountain, and about 12 miles higher we found a road that claimed to go to the “Land’s End” observatory. A dirt road. I have an over-active imagination, so I imagined that dirt road was going to turn into a donkey track at some point, and I’d either have to back up down an incline or try to turn around. Instead what happened was the dirt road suddenly became a paved road about halfway to the observatory.  Why? Dunno. Nor did anyone else…

Bravely, we (that is, I) drove on not knowing what to expect next. And finally reached a lookout point. There was a parking lot, a boarded up ranger station, a bathroom (thank goodness) and several other people standing at a wall overlooking a sheer drop and about 80 miles of gorgeous view. In the distance, the Gunnison and Colorado sparkled, as did Grand Junction. The valley was beautiful and 187 different shades of green. We could also see the mountains to the south where Ouray (pronounced You-ray) and Telluride are located.

A family at the wall were feeding potato chips to the chipmunks, which you’re not technically supposed to do, but the chipmunks didn’t object.

One of about a dozen non-objecting chipmunks

I have a gig here in Grand Junction, at the Unity Church of Grand Junction. I got up at 7:00 am to play the Sunday morning service. Drove back down Highway 65 to I-70 and then 15 more miles to Grand Junction.

Rev. J. Douglas Bottorff, minister of the Unity Church of Grand Junction.

Back in Denver, I’d had a pretty disturbing conversation with a friend, that I was still attempting to interpret on Sunday morning. Despite the fact that the scenery was awe-inspiring, I was still ruminating about what the conversation might have meant, and I had a giant case of the “I-shoulda-said”s. For one thing, it had to do with Israel, which always draws my undivided attention, and for another, it was loaded with Faux News talking points, which always makes me feel a little desperate. The gist of it was that our new president (who, according to Fox News and my friend, who is a smart man and should know better) had sold Israel down the river and that, once Israel was disposed of nuclearly, we would be next. Oh, and  by the way, Obama is a Muslim and not even born in this country. All of which is untrue — just so you know. And I would still think he was the right man for the job, no matter what his religion or lack thereof.

I was probably more charitable than I might have been otherwise, because I had just read Rev. Bottorff’s book, in preparation for this gig. In the chapter he asked me to be familiar with and to choose my songs around, he discussed the way in which people tend to have the same negative experiences repeatedly, because of what they are bringing with them to the experience (AKA “baggage”), and their negative self-image.

But during his sermon, he talked about a catamaran trip he took with his wife on Lake Powell in Utah, where they camped on a tiny spit of land on the river that feeds the lake. The catamarans they were using could be pedaled, paddled, or sailed. People had warned them of the winds, which rose while they were camped. Gale-force winds. Nothing small and benign. They made it through the night, in total darkness and high winds and finally, Doug decided to go out into the lake, just to find out if they could. He kept a journal of the whole trip, and at one point during their adventure, this is what he wrote:

“It occurs to me that fear is a lot like a flashlight beam in the night. When you turn it on, the beam it throws is all you can see. But if you turn it off, you can see the stars, perhaps the Milky Way, even the Universe”

As soon as he said it, I realized that these words were the real reason I was here in this place at this time. All of that conversation that had me so upset had to do with fear, which is what Fox News feeds. Fear is contagious. I probably need to be more careful, not only about the judgments I make, but also about how influenced I allow myself to be.

When the student is ready, the teacher appears, so they say.

Scenery on the way to Grand Junction:

Coming down the mountain from the Powderhorn Goldenwoods Resort

On the Interstate, just east of Grand Junction, which, by the way, is the junction of the Gunnison and Colorado Rivers.

One of the great mesas of the Palisades.

We got up early Saturday morning and got into the car to drive all the way across Colorado to the resort where we would spend the next 6 days. Most of the way, we were on Interstate 70. Here’s a sample of what we saw.

Snow covered mountains on the way to the Continental Divide

The Eisenhower Tunnel under Loveland Pass - otherwise known as the Continental Divide.

The Continental Divide is the place where the Eastern and Western Rocky Mountains meet.  All the water that runs down the eastern slopes ends up, eventually, in the Gulf of Mexico and then the Atlantic Ocean. All the water that runs down the western side ends up in the Pacific Ocean. Hence, the Continental Divide. There must be a similar place on every continent, but I don’t know where the others are.

We stopped in Frisco, CO to buy some groceries, as the resort is 20 miles from the nearest grocery store, and to have lunch. Next to the supermarket, we found a little restaurant named Food Hedz, owned by Gourmet Chef David Welch and his wife, Mary.  The food was simple and wonderful, and we want everyone to go to Frisco immediately and taste it, or at least look for the place the next time you’re there.

After lunch, we continued down I-70, stopping again at Glenwood Springs where we would be staying after the days at the resort. Glenwood Canyon was pretty spectacular, so we stopped at a scenic overlook to take pictures. Here’s one of them:

This train fortuitously happened along just in time for my picture -- lucky me!

From there, we went on and finally arrived at Exit 49, and started up the narrow mountain road to the resort, stopping halfway up in Mesa to buy the foods that had to stay cold. Here’s a sample of what we saw on the way up:

All these pictures and others will be on my website as soon as I get them organized.

Thursday afternoon after wrapping up all our loose ends, we got a ride to the airport for a 6:00 pm flight to Denver.  Unfortunately,  we got a call that the flight was going to be one and a half hours late. Fortunately, we ran into Nancy Coplin, who books the entertainment at Austin’s airport (as I’ve described in the post about WIMPS), so we had something to do with the time spent waiting.  And finally, Southwest came up with a plane and we were off.

Once in Denver, after an uneventful flight (my favorite kind) we picked up our rent car and drove to the south of Denver to our hotel. The temperature was about 30 degrees cooler than Texas had been, and we were jubilant about that, since Texas hit triple digits that day. It was 10:00 pm at this point, so we drove down the road to find a grocery store and bought something more substantial than peanuts — which is what Southwest Airlines has always served — and a bottle of Irish whiskey, and then we ate, drank and went to sleep.

The next day, we went to visit a friend who is the head engineer at the Public Radio station in Denver, KUVO. Mike showed us around the building, and even took us up to the roof to look at the incredible array of satellite dishes up there, the product of much grant-writing and detailed planning on his part. Afterwards, we joined Mike and his wife, Teresa, and their 12-year-old son for dinner at an excellent restaurant and then we all had drinks to see the evening out (except for me, because I was driving).

The next morning, we left for the Western Slopes of the Rocky Mountains.

You know you're in Oklahoma cuz this casino would be illegal in Texas (so far).

When I first moved to Austin, I drove from New York City to Texas through Oklahoma on the way, pretty much the same route I just took driving home from Kansas yesterday. I clearly remember getting so tired of driving that I pulled into a farmer’s driveway in Arkansas and went to sleep, putting a note in the window to wake me if I was in the way. Which he did, with a bemused smile on his face. It was 5:30 a.m. So I had that entire day to watch a whole lotta nothing go by.

I remembered that when I was driving yesterday. When I got to Oklahoma, it was rolling plains, which I learned later is true of most of the midwest. And the dirt was red, beside the highway. I had lived in big cities all my life, and most of what I traveled through on the way to this point was either cities, or semi-mountainous landscape bearing tall trees. Lots of rock face as the road had been cut through mountainsides. Also, blue (really!) grass in Kentucky, which I’d always heard about but never seen. And as I said, I drove through Arkansas at night, so it was impossible to see much of anything beyond the road ahead of me. So I was pretty impressed by red dirt. 

But the thing that got my attention the most was the sky. It arched overhead in the usual way, but then it came all the way to the ground all around me. My sky where I’d come from was the size of a postage stamp, seen between the tops of either trees or buildings. Even in Central Park, the biggest open space in New York City, the sky only came as far as the buildings surrounding the park, or the trees surrounding oneself. In other words, the sky was not what one noticed. I found this new, improved version of sky somewhat terrifying. A little closer to G-d than I was used to. (No wonder people in that part of the country have such an intense religious thing going on.) How did anyone sleep under a sky like that? So exposed. So vulnerable.

See? Huge sky! (Not much else)

I eventually did learn to sleep under it, of course. And forgot all about it. Until yesterday, when I found myself looking at the sky in wonderment again. Wow! What a big sky!

Most of the trip through Oklahoma looked exactly like this.