Break for Spirit

I just finished wrapping (almost) the last of the Christmas presents and arranged them artfully under the tiny twinkly tree. Then, with the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas still playing, I poured myself a glass of egg nog (Straight up--it's a little early for brandy.... I'm not that kind of writer.) and parted the living room blinds to watch snowflakes rush through the blue-gray evening sky past street lamps and bare tree branches and the snow-capped bird feeder Eric erected in our building's front yard.

And now...

Back to dishes and laundry and manic writing.

Vacation, Part 3: Fun with Landscapes

On Thursday night we said goodbye to Mesa Verde with appetizers and drinks at the rooftop lounge and went to bed early.


Friday morning started in the dark, at 4:30. We packed our things, drank our coffee (Eric) and tea (me) on our private balcony while the sun rose, and were seen off by four mule deer that surprised us by bounding out, all at once, from behind a large bush, and then spent a long time grazing just a few yards away.


This was our longest day of driving, so we scheduled a break about halfway through, at a place Eric wanted badly to visit anyway: the tasting room at the Fort Collins Brewery. If you're a beer fan, I very much recommend trying to locate some of Fort Collins' stuff. Their brews fall all over the flavor spectrum, and everything I've tried has been excellent. The brewery made a great rest stop, too, since the atmosphere was laid back and the people were nice. And don't worry: we drank in moderation and hung around afterward for long enough to shake the buzz before we got back in the car.


We spent most of the remainder of the day driving straight up the eastern side of Wyoming, which is gorgeous in a grassy, windswept, lonely way. We pulled into a drive-in restaurant in Lusk for cheeseburgers and fries before continuing into South Dakota, where we got to watch the sun set in rich, steely pastels over the Black Hills. After that, the drive quickly became less pleasant, since Eric had to drive for hours through deer country in the dark, and despite my promise to help him scan the sides of the road for reflective eyeballs, I completely failed to stay awake. Happily, we made it to our motel without hitting anything. Except a suicidal bunny. But we try not to think about that.



If you ever have a chance to go to Wall, South Dakota, please don't. Especially don't stay at the Motel 6. (Sorry Motel 6, but it's the way it is.) We arrived close to midnight to find that we'd been given another unsolicited free room upgrade, to this huge room directly over the motel office that had a door in it marked "Employees Only" and a very large chlorinated hot tub. But no bedside tables. A couple of young French guys were staying in the room next to ours, and they turned out to be the housekeepers. The room wasn't so bad as long as we were asleep, so we just tried not to spend much time there while we were awake.

On Saturday morning our quest for pancakes took us to a restaurant across the street from Wall Drug, and after breakfast we wandered over to see what the hundreds of miles of signs were all about. And it was at least as bad as we expected. It's kind of like the world's largest crappy souvenir shop, with smatterings of legitimate crafts like Minnetonka moccasins and Black Hills gold.

Our only reason for being in Wall was to spend the day at nearby Badlands National Park, but since the average visitor to the park only spends something like an hour and a half there, we didn't expect to be able to fill the whole day with it. Turns out, though, that aside from Wall Drug and the Badlands, there is quite literally nothing to do in Wall. So after sitting in our motel room for an hour or so, picking up neighboring hotels' wireless signals on Eric's iPod and feeling the life slowly drain out of us, we decided to head for the Badlands. And you know what? We managed to spend the whole day there.

I don't have much to say about the Badlands, except that it's this entirely unlikely area of rock formations in the middle of what is otherwise flat grassland. When you walk or climb on those formations, they turn out to be made of such soft rock that its surface is really just parched dirt, dusty and cracked and crumbly. We spent hours driving around, stopping frequently for little hikes and to admire the formations, the prairie dogs, and finally the sunset. So it was a good day after all.










Sunday was our shortest drive of the trip and uneventful except for a huge, yummy small-town breakfast along the way. And, oh, also: the sweetness of home.

Vacation, Part 2: Newfound Respect for Rocks

Mesa Verde is phenomenal.


I don't use that word often, or actually ever, but really: it's this gorgeous place with gorgeous park facilities, and it deserves "phenomenal."

As I was saying, we checked into Far View Lodge a little before sunset, when the mesa was drenched in golden light. You'll just have to excuse the purple prose, because that's how it looks in my memory. We were given an unsolicited free room upgrade, and I was initially disappointed and upset by that because I'd just spent 12 tense hours in a car and it had made me crazy, and also because after booking our room, I learned from a guide book that the older, cheaper rooms were simply furnished but had spectacular views of the mesa. Like this:


Our room, on the other hand, featured more luxurious hand-crafted furniture on the inside and a view that included a parking lot, some lodge buildings, and a tuft of trees. It took me a few hours and some sleep to get over this, but it turned out that we didn't spend that many waking hours in our room anyway, and for our purposes when we were there, a little bit of luxury was nice. Besides, it's not as if the view was bad.



The restaurant in the lodge was fantastic, and we started both of our two full days at Mesa Verde by glutting ourselves on the delicious buffet-style breakfast (scrambled eggs! fresh fruit! three kinds of meat! good tea!). Then we spent the rest of the time working it off in the hot, dry sun. On Wednesday, we started easy by touring Cliff Palace, the largest dwelling in the park.



Then we ratcheted it up a notch or ten by taking (on nearly empty stomachs) a 2.5-mile hike along the rim of a canyon. We saw only a handful of other people on the trail (compared with droves at all the cliff dwellings), and couldn't understand, as Eric put it, "how anyone in their right mind could come here and not take this hike." The views were incredible and the trail, which led up, down, across, and between huge rocks, was challenging and fun. It was also the only way to see the largest petroglyph panel in the park.





On Thursday we toured two cliff dwellings, starting with Balcony House, which was by far the most impressive and fun. We were able to get farther inside the structure than on the other tours, and getting in and out meant climbing tall ladders, crawling through a tunnel, and navigating narrow spaces between the rock face and ancient walls.





Later in the day, we walked through Spruce Tree House, the best preserved of the dwellings, and one of the few that visitors are allowed to tour without a ranger. We also went on another long hike, this time along the bottom of the canyon and back up to the mesa top. After our hike the day before, this one was kind of a letdown--just a stroll through a sparse forest followed by a huffing, puffing, high-altitude, uphill trek. But, like everywhere else, there were cool rock formations along the way.



Our last stop, late Thursday afternoon, before the gift shop and ice cream counter, was a trail amidst some older ruins on top of the mesa. These structures were left before the Ancestral Puebloans moved down into the natural alcoves in the cliff faces, and they're less awe-inspiring than the cliff dwellings. But they were also less crowded with people, totally free of rangers, and mostly open for us to walk through.


The last structure on the trail is Far View Tower, which we crawled into through the little window on the front.


And that's where Eric asked me to marry him.

Vacation, Part 1: Headed Toward Wonderment

This morning, I am green. Filled with jealousy almost to the point of spilling over. I'm jealous, crazily enough, of myself. My past self. Because my self of one week ago, exactly 168 hours ago, was in the car on her way into Colorado. She was in a great mood, and she knew this was coming, one week later. I may be crazy, but at least I'm consistent.

Last Tuesday was the second day of our road trip. On Monday we left early, drove through Iowa and most of Nebraska, and stopped for the night in North Platte, where I'd reserved a room at an old but extremely clean two-story motel.


I'd heard bad things about Nebraska before we left, but it turned out to be not so awful. The landscape reminded me of parts of Minnesota, but with more cows. North Platte is a major railroad town, and more attention has been paid to its architecture than we were expecting. We walked through downtown on our way back to the motel from dinner, and were impressed with the intricately carved stonework on most of the buildings. Even the bases of the lampposts were decorative. Even so, it was very much small town America: my meal of lemon pepper chicken linguine (at a restaurant that claimed to have "the best food in town") was so terrible and ugly that I hardly ate any of it (Eric's chicken-fried steak, on the other hand, was very good); we watched a man in a pickup truck rev his engine loudly and squeal away in challenge to a friend standing by his motorcycle in a parking lot; and there were two poems, one patriotic and the other religious, tacked to the wall in our motel room.

That first night, we took a cold, dark swim in the outdoor pool, slept heavily, and woke up early for another day on the road.



On this trip, Eric and I learned that a full day of driving, when you're braced for it and it's part of something worthwhile, isn't all that hard to do. But the second day of our trip was not a good example of this. On that day, we drove into Colorado, where they have mountains. I don't know if you've ever driven through mountains in a Saturn sedan, but I think it's safe to say that they weren't designed for that kind of driving. During the four days we were in Colorado, we saw one other Saturn. One. And it had our sympathy. Going up, we had trouble maintaining a speed of 45 mph. And going down, especially on curves, the anti-lock brake system kicked in and made us worry that our brakes (which we checked shortly before leaving) were not working they way we needed them to. The drive to Mesa Verde was harrowing, nerve-scraping, and about two hours longer than we had planned. Pretty, though:



After finally arriving at the park in a flood of relief and paying the ranger for our vehicle pass, we discovered that the lodge where we were staying was still 15 miles away. Up a mountain. To the west. At sunset. Eric was driving, and for all 15 miles, I clutched the door handle next to me, breathed studiously, and tried not to look down.

But.

It was all worth it.

No Need to Advertise

WF

seeks outdoorsy M

to enjoy the finer things in life,
(like the second tiny hotel from the left)

good food and drink,
(Try the Apricot Wheat, it's delicious)

beautiful cities,

and long walks on the beach.

*****

Eric and I returned home yesterday from a really excellent, mostly lazy, weekend in Duluth. We learned from the last time, and got ourselves a luxurious hotel room at awesome off-season rates. There was a pool on the roof and free Starbucks coffee in the lobby. And a big-screen LCD TV in our room. With cable. We usually scoff at the people who spend most of their vacation lounging in the hotel, but this time, except for the couple of hours we spent on Sunday walking along Lake Superior and climbing on stuff, we were unashamedly those people. And it was pretty great.

Good Things

Morning.


Adolescent ducks, with a watchful mama
following close behind.


Duck butts.


Our old boat.


Loons, actually this close to the boat.


Men.

Montague.

Within.

Without.