Chapter Twenty-One
Shorts in the Snow
May 10, 2009—Loma to Bonny Lake: We located the ElderTang! It had found its way into the adventure bag along with the blue plastic cereal bowl. Much rejoicing.
Another Zero-Dark-Hundred start—someday we're going to learn how to sleep late. The first job before heading off was to sort the clean laundry, which we did in the dark.
This had been a great "refit" stop. We were cleaned, laundered, exercised, reorganized, and rejuvenated.
Here's roll call for the bags (note that you can see Gunilla’s Malibu Dreamhouse on the floor of the front seat):
Top row: Al laptop, Lena big big heavy Imelda Marcos bag, Al cold weather clothes, sleeping bags and pillows, biking bag, Al warm weather clothes, towels and sheet, tent, tent poles, cozy tent bag. Bottom row: dirty clothes, kitchen, Lena laptop, camping bag 2. Not pictured: Adventure bag (jackets and binoculars), electronics bag, chairs, toolbox, cooler, food box, frying pan bag, paper plate bag.
Segregating everything into small bags helps us find things. For example, to find the stove, we only have to find the kitchen bag, and look in it. We carefully purchased bags that had different colors to help when searching—no, wait a second, all the bags are different colors because we accumulated them over years of garage-sale shopping.
Today we followed the Colorado River through the Rockies. We'd planned to drive through Rocky Mountain National Park, but we called ahead and learned that the summit road was closed. We still planned to visit it (after all, it would be free because we had our annual pass), but as we got up in elevation, the weather turned snowy and windy, so we changed our minds.
We drove through snow squalls, and the lack of lane markers on the road (all worn away) made driving difficult (Colorado Department of Transportation, if you’re reading this, try the little plastic markers that California uses).
We've done a lot of climate changing on this trip, and sometimes we end up with the wrong clothes on. Here's a driver change near the summit. You can't see it, but I'm wearing sandals and almost standing in a puddle of ice-water.
The weather was pretty bad here, so we decided to take a break and look for some Wi-Fi and coffee. We stopped in Frisco, and found a great place (Rocky Mountain Coffee Roasters). People from San Francisco hate hearing the word “Frisco,” but here, Frisco is the correct and official name of the town, so “Frisco, Frisco, Frisco!”
I dove into cyberspace, got a few day's info into the journal, and when I came to the surface, it was sunny out. We took out our leftover chicken and coleslaw, I got a beer, and we dined al Frisco at 9,042 feet.
Back on the road, we saw that Vail and Breckenridge were huge, with lots of new building going on. In most places more than half of the trees were dead. The whitebark pines are being massacred by the mountain pine beetles. Milder winters and warmer summers are allowing the beetles to flourish, and 19% of the trees in Rocky Mountain National Park are infested.
We passed through Denver and on to our next campground: Bonny Lake. This place was almost deserted, and a little desolate due to the cloudy windy weather. On the menu: Baked beans and hot dogs. The coyotes sung us to sleep.
Our gas mileage had improved substantially since that first 28 MPG tank. We had a 35 MPG day, and two 39 MPG days. I keep our tires at the max pressure of 44 psi, but when I checked at Zion, they were at 50 psi due to the elevation change! Oops.
Coming up: duct tape car repairs, followed by Larry the Cable Guy and killer tornadoes in Missouri! Don't miss it.