This trip did not get off to the best start. We were in no hurry, as we were only driving as far as Amarillo on the first day, an easy day's drive. We stopped as usual at our preferred travel-breakfast restaurant in Kerrville, an hour out of San Antonio.
The staff there, and most of the patrons, were not wearing masks. Kerr County appears to be solid Trump country, so common sense is laid aside in favour of And-The-Horse-You-Rode-In-On political expression. We almost went elsewhere, but I do like the food at this little mom-and-pop place, and had to think hard about that. Then the waitress was there asking what we wanted to drink, and when I hesitated, still deciding, Sherry assumed I was just leaving it up to her, and ordered coffee. I was still thinking about going over and cancelling, telling the waitress why we weren't comfortable there, until she brought the coffee. At that point I felt committed. (They did at least have a sign on the door asking patrons not to sit at dirty tables until they'd had the chance to bus them and wipe them down with sterilizer.)
Had my two breakfast tacos & two cups of good coffee. Sherry went out to walk Carly while I paid the bill. That's when I realized I'd left home without my wallet.
That was the end of Condo Week 1.0. After an hour's drive home, we launched Condo Week 2.0. It has, so far, gone much better than Version 1.0. Kind of like the difference between Windows 7 and Windows XP. (I still miss my Windows XP computer, which lasted 16 years with no major problem, and 3 more years after the first hard drive failed; compared to this Apple MacBook Air, which lasted a few months before the motherboard had to be replaced (under the manufacturer's warranty), and another year before it had to be replaced again (under the credit card extended warranty). It's already getting persnickity again, but if the damn board goes again, so does the computer.)
But I digress.
We make the trip to Colorado with the dog every year, at Christmas, so we have our favourite spots: the restaurant in Kerrville; the hotel in Amarillo and the Thai place across the road; the breakfast burritos smothered in green chili at Sierra Grande in Des Moines, New Mexico; and, for some reason, a gas station in Castle Rock, Colorado. (That last is just coincidence; no matter where I fill up the time before, that's always where I need another tank. I don't know why.) This time it's summer, but we hit all the same spots. Because we're going on to Wyoming, to a condo where pets aren't allowed, we dropped Carly off at our niece's house in Golden -- via a touchless curbside delivery, of course, because of the pandemic. Their dog,
Aspen, is Carly's unrelated identical-twin cousin. I wouldn't have thought that possible, but if they didn't have collars on it would be almost impossible to tell them apart.
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| cousins |
Now we're in Laramie for the night, after a stop at Vedauwoo Rocks
(pronounced VEE-da-voo) in the Laramie Mountains. I used to go up there when I lived in Cheyenne. You'd just pull off the road and start climbing around in the rocks. Now it's all been improved by the Forest Service (it's in the Medicine Bow National Forest), and there's a campground and places for RVs and marked trails and warning signs, and they charge fees (which we don't have to pay, being Old Folks with the lifetime pass, but still...). Thirty-five years ago, there'd have been almost no one around on a Saturday; now, the parking lot was full, on a Wednesday. I hadn't realized that so much had changed, in what seems like the blink of an eye until I consciously think about how long it's actually been since I was there.
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| Turtle Rock, in Vedauwoo Rocks |
Before dinner we took a little tour of Laramie; our hotel is up on a ridge west of town, while the town is down in the valley. In Wyoming, all the towns in the valleys, because that's where the water is and the wind isn't. Laramie now is as big as Cheyenne was when I lived there in the '80s -- 30,000 people, but it also has the University of Wyoming, with its 14,000 students, so it seems bigger. But looking from my hotel across the city, it is clearly a very small city. We're thinking of buying a summer home here. We went across town (took no time at all) and then back to the old part of the city, 3rd & 4th Streets, and had a nice dinner at a brew pub called Accomplice. (Sherry discovered that you can now use "Covid-19 precautions" as a filter on Trip Advisor. That's good to know.) Excellent beer, excellent pizza. Apple fritter? We disagreed: Sherry liked it because it was crunchy; I thought it tasted burnt.
And as we were wandering back to our car, we passed a small bar filled with happy college-aged people, all crowded together without masks, ensuring the next generation of corona virus. Sad that, in a few weeks, one percent of them will be dead and a third of them will live with heart and lung ailments for the rest of their lives. Without having had the pleasure of a lifetime of smoking tobacco and eating fatty foods. So sad.
By the way, if you're reading this in your email, please click the link to the actual blog before you delete it, so it'll register as having been seen. My blog visitor numbers are pathetic, and you have it in your power to do something completely altruistic that will make somebody happy. You don't have to actually read it again when you visit; though I think it's always worth reading again....
