Condo Week 2.0: In the Books

This is part six, the final part, of the posts for this year's Condo Trip. You really should read them in order. Here's a link to take you to Part One; then click on "Newer Post" at the bottom left when you get to the end.

Thursday night in Denver (or some suburb thereof) our hotel had some technical problem, so no TV and no Internet. Somehow we didn't care. We talked half-heartedly about where to get dinner from the many take-out and delivery places nearby, but none of them interested us ... so we skipped dinner. Yeah, that happens all the time. I think I had an apple from our little stash of food.

We were up pretty early on Friday morning and out of there. I noticed that only about half the people around the hotel, staff and guests, were wearing masks. In the rest of the state that we saw, it was more like 80%. But people were keeping their distance from each other, even in the elevator. So that's something.

We got off the interstate south of Springs

Hines Creek Valley

and headed west, to Custer and Archuleta counties. In between we had a very nice lunch at the Three Barrel Brewery (with tables outside under a shade, so Carly could join us), and enjoyed the beautiful views off US 160 in the Rio Grande National Forest. But the main thing is that now I've been to all the counties in Colorado.

After that, we came down into New Mexico and went through Santa Fe, where I picked up a Subway sandwich. We stopped a couple of hours later in a little village south of I-40 and ate dinner at the city park as the last of the sunlight faded. Then we drove into Vaughn, about 20 miles further on, and got an inexpensive ($49, plus $10 for the dog) room at the Desert Motel, just the kind of place I always like to find: clean, cheap, no frills. This one comes without air conditioning, but apparently one doesn't need A/C in central New Mexico at the end of July. It was plenty comfortable.

Breakfast was at a Denny's in Roswell. On their "patio." They closed off the parking lot on one side -- the west side -- and lined up half a dozen tables in the shade of the building. Presumably in the afternoon they move the arrangement to the other side. I don't know what they do for lunch, when there wouldn't be any shade.

The audio books we've listened to on this trip were Reasonable Doubt, by Charles Todd -- a whodunit set in England in the 1920s; Murder in Mayfair, by D.M Quincy, a disposable mystery set in London in 1814, most remarkable for making almost no mention of any historical figures or events (I believe the name Napoleon came up once, but that's pretty much it; what's the point of "historical fiction" if you're not going to tie it into anything that makes a time unique or interesting?); Blue Moon, by Lee Child, an entertaining action story set in some unnamed American city, and featuring his crime-fighting hero Jack Reacher (I couldn't believe my luck when I found there was a Reacher novel I'd never read or listened to); The Evil Men Do, by John McMahon, another present-day crime thriller set in Georgia -- these novels make me wonder: when did fictional detectives quit being idiosyncratic, like Poirot and Marple and Queen and Stout, and instead all become flawed? Is anybody else tired of hearing about how the detective has to not only solve the crime but overcome alcoholism and the demons in their past all at the same time? That's not to say McMahon's book wasn't interesting -- it was -- but after a few of these novels they all start to feel formulaic. (On the other hand, there's Jack Heath's detective Timothy Blake, a cannibal who savors his flaws.) We also started Alan Furst's novel Under Occupation, a spy thriller set in occupied France, but didn't finish it. Usually we just abandon whatever we were listening to when we get home, but this one's not very long and I'm enjoying it, so I'm going to listen to the rest of it on my own.

And here, once again, is a link to the picture album for this trip.

And again: if you're reading this in your email, please click on 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 a certain someone happy. You don't have to actually read it again when you visit the blog; though I think it's always worth reading again....