Monday, March 29, 2010 – Cortez, Colorado – Ahhhhhhhh, sleep. The motel bed and pillows were the comfiest we’ve found since we left our own bed, or perhaps it was just that the air here actually has oxygen in it, but we had the best sleep since leaving home. We availed ourselves of the free “continental breakfast” at the motel. Tim, I see what you mean about the sausage and gravy out here. When Joel and I took our first bites of biscuits/gravy, we both said, “YUCK!” Joel traded his biscuits/gravy in for a bowl of cold cereal. I nuked mine in the microwave, thinking that it would be better if it were hotter. I was wrong.

After leaving the hotel, we went to all of the local auto parts stores looking for a part to repair our blinker lights. None of them had one, but we finally found a Chevrolet dealership that hooked us up with the part. Joel replaced it in the parking lot, and said, “Okay, try it now.” I turned the key, flipped the blinker switch, and…it still malfunctioned.


Muttering swear words, Joel went back into the dealership’s service department and asked them to have a look at it. We were both dreading the diagnosis. Last year, a mouse had gotten inside the Tahoe while we weren’t using it, and we were both afraid that he had partially chewed a wire in two, and that it had finished breaking on the trip. But within just a few minutes, the mechanic came out, handed Joel the keys, and said we were set to go. We asked what problem they had found. “It was a bad bulb,” he said. “But we replaced all three bulbs with new ones!” we protested. He said one of the bulbs had a defect – a blob of glass where there it should have been smooth. Geez. Who’d-a thunk it? The mechanic said he left in the new board that Joel had bought, as the old one did look a bit burned. After about 30 minutes, we were on our way again.

Just outside town, we passed a barbeque restaurant that featured an enormous statue of a bull in the parking lot. For those of you who haven’t caught onto the problem yet, barbeque is PIG, not COW. ;)

Around noon, we were in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, where we stopped at a little soda fountain for lunch. We had been seeing tall, snow-capped mountains for a while.











Now, we were very near them. Before an hour had gone by, we were IN those mountains, driving through a mountain pass that looks treacherous, even in good road conditions. The curves were so tight you could almost see the back end of your car before you rounded them!
















Just over the pass, the land was flat, surrounded by tall snowy mountains. It seemed to take forever to drive through that “bowl,” and we knew we’d have to go through another “pass” to get out the other side. Fortunately, the mountains were not as steep and scary on the other side.




An hour or so later, we reached Walsenburg, Colorado. Ten minutes out from Walsenburg, the scenery changed in a snap, and we were back in what looked like desert – no more mountains, no more tall spruce trees, just brown ridges, dotted with junipers. La Junta, Colorado is now about 50 miles away, and I’d swear we could see clear to there from here. For a while, Joel was afraid that I had mis-navigated us, and that we were going down someone’s long driveway instead of Hwy. 10, as we met about 1 other vehicle every mile or two.

Hah! On the way to La Junta, as barren as any place could be, stood one lone juniper along the edge of the road. From a distance, I saw glittering among its limbs. When we neared it, we saw that the glittering was from Christmas ornaments. We looked around; there’s not a house in sight. Joel wondered who rode waaaaaayyyy out here just to decorate that tree for Christmas!

In La Junta, we stopped for a stretch. It was about 5 p.m., too early to stop for the night, so we kept driving, intending to spend the night somewhere near the Kansas state line. I offered to relieve Joel at the wheel, and he took me up on the offer.

There were two little Colorado towns not far from the Kansas line – Lamar and Granada. When we reached Lamar, there was a smell in the air that would gag a buzzard. Although there were motels in the town, we kept driving. No motel in Granada. No motel in Coolidge, Kansas. No motel, except for what looked like a roach motel, in Syracuse, KS. We kept driving.

8 p.m., and we’re tired and hungry. We keep driving. We top a hill and see city lights twinkling in the distance. Boy, what a distance - at least 15 miles away! But town after town had no motel. We kept driving. Going 65 miles per hour, on a dark, two-lane road, with no telling what kinds of animals waiting to spring onto our path would’ve been scary, even if I weren’t half night-blind....

Finally, about 10 p.m., we reached Garden City, Kansas. We pulled off the road and consulted our computer map program. It said there were motels in Garden City. We finally found one, checked in, and then grabbed something to eat from a nearby drive-thru window. We’ll probably have nightmares after eating greasy French fries at 10:30 p.m. and going to bed on full stomachs.

Tomorrow: Dodge City, Wichita, and a whole bunch of little towns in south Missouri – a little over 800 miles, according to the map. We probably won’t make it home tomorrow.