Last Day of Part One

Linda and I are relaxing comfortably in Steamboat Springs, CO, the last day of "part one" of this trip. I call it the "hurry up and relax" phase, or the visiting phase, because except for one day, we've seen friends every day on the road so far. Thank you to everyone who has joined us for meals or hosted us along the way so far: Steve and Mary Ann in Cleveland; R. J. in Des Moines; Mike and Helen in Cheyenne; Andy and then Terry and Noel in Boulder; and now Karolynn in Steamboat Springs. There was also the dialysis center in Lakewood where a sign proclaims "May all who enter as guests, leave as friends," which was the case.

Steamboat is especially beautiful right now, the mountains vibrant with skinny Colorado pines and yellow aspens. I've been coming to Steamboat since the 1970s, when my grad school friends Karolynn and Jim moved here. On one of those early trips, I bought a dark blue Stetson at F.M. Light & Co., the Western outfitters who have been here since 1905 and have signs about every quarter-mile along the highway for 50 miles in both directions. We checked out F.M. Light yesterday and Linda bought straw cowboy hats for two of her grandsons. The time has certainly flown.

Jim, a fine photographer, is in central Africa right now in search of wildlife, but Linda got to cross two items off of her own wildlife wish-list. Not far from Denver we passed a buffalo herd "reserve" (fenced in) and I took two photos of them. Later in the day, further north, she saw antelope for the first time. Now the big target for the trip is moose. In addition, Karolynn cooked elk steaks for us last night, another first for both of us. It was delicious, especially with a sauce made with shallots, red wine, and lingonberry preserves. Karolynn has a great front porch where we ate dinner last night and breakfast this morning, and where the late-afternoon strawberry daiquiris of old have been replaced by margaritas. It will be tough to leave tomorrow morning, but we'll be off around 7:30 am to get to Linda's dialysis in Grand Junction a little after noon.

I'm calling the second part of the trip the "exploration phase." Starting tomorrow and for the next ten days, we'll be covering a relatively small area, just a few hundred miles from Moab to St. George in Utah, plus another hundred or so miles south into Arizona. We'll see at least a half-dozen national parks and national monuments--Arches, Canyonlands, the north and south rims of the Grand Canyon, Bryce, Zion, and Cedar Breaks, plus the Glen Canyon Recreation Area, maybe Natural Bridges, and more. We'll be reading Edward Abbey's The Monkey-Wrench Gang, which we started the other day, an impassioned novel blasting all encroachment of "civilization" and economic development on the starkly beautiful deserts of the southwest United States. We'll stay two nights in Moab, two nights in Page, AZ, in the shadow of the Glen Canyon Dam that Abbey blew up in the sequel to TMWG, and our anniversary weekend at the Grand Canyon. It's going to be a great ten days, so come along with us.