Pikes Peak is the highest mountain in the southern front range of the Rocky Mountains, and home to the second oldest auto race in the US, the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb (http://www.ppihc.com/). When I find a landmark like that in my path, I don’t ignore it! But having just barely recovered from the trauma of driving up Mount Washington in New Hampshire, I did ask the person at the gate if the road was wide enough for two cars at all…
When I think of Colorado, of course I think of the Rocky Mountains, and I wanted to spend some time getting immersed in them before I moved on to another state. So instead of travelling directly east to Denver, I turned a bit north to visit Rocky Mountain National Park. My good weather luck continued, and it was a stunning day. The snowy mountain tops looked crystalline and pristine in the distance as I passed Lake Granby. And of course,…
When I visited the Gila Cliff Dwellings in New Mexico, I met a wonderful couple who were also there on vacation, and we hit it off immediately. You know how sometimes you meet people and you’re instantly comfortable with them, you seem to already have the same opinions about things, and even the flow of your conversation is comfortable? That’s how I felt about Sheila and Stanley. So when they gave me their contact information and invited me to visit…
Utah continues to be a state full of surprizes for me. I swung back north through Utah, with a vague plan of then turning east through Colorado, and visiting Arches National Park along the way. Unexpectedly, I also found myself driving through Monument Valley in southern Utah. Somehow I had managed to completely miss the fact that this place existed on my maps, but it certainly made for a lovely drive, and I’d like to see more of it again…
First let me start by saying that winter is coming in the US, and even if I am in the southwest, the temperature at night is dropping quickly. The night after leaving Tucson I was sleeping in my FJ at a truck stop, and in spite of having put a new quilt over my thick blanket, and wearing fleece, a warm hat, and mittens, I was freezing! In the morning I found that the temperature was just below freezing and…