A few months after we moved to Colorado in 2020, one of Luke’s coworkers at the time sold him an elderly Saturn for cheap so he wouldn’t have to keep riding a bicycle to work. It was an “as-is” cash deal for a car with over 200k miles on it, sold for the express purpose of keeping Luke showing up to work on time as the weather got colder.
Regardless, the first time Luke got a few days off work in a row he drove out alone into a February snowstorm, heading north through Wyoming with the rather nebulous goal of seeing Seattle. The Saturn took him as far as Oregon before its battery died forever at a rest stop in Weatherby. Luke had it towed to a garage near the Idaho border, where they put a new battery in and sent him on his way. Newly cautious, he gave up on Seattle and came home via Utah. Thank goodness for cell phones and the Internet; without them I would have had to sit at home wondering if he was still alive instead of getting to enjoy his philosophical ramblings on Messenger as he formed snapshot impressions of blue-collar industrial cities like Boise Idaho and the ubiquitous Mormon presence in Utah.
He sold the Saturn to one of those cash-for-junkers companies the following May, when it started overheating due to a leaking gasket, and bought an old Camry that had over 220k miles on it. Once again, the first chance he got he took off alone to try his luck on the open road.
When most people talk about “seeing the country,” they usually mean visiting its iconic cities and landmarks. Luke uses the phrase in a more literal sense: he wants to see what America looks like. The empty stretches and the tiny small-town museums and the winding mountain roads and the mills and factories with their busy smokestacks. He wants to see what it’s all about. On this second adventure he headed west, dropped by Anza to see his dad, then drove up the coast. This time he made it to Seattle, and came home via Montana and Wyoming. He’s done a few more solo road trips since then. His current adventuremobile is a late-90’s Toyota pickup that handles rough conditions better than the Camry can.
The idea of doing road trips the way Luke does them gives me the shivers. Just picking a compass point or a region of the country, finding a road that goes in that general direction and taking off in a cloud of adventurous optimism…that is not my way. I spent literally months planning every last detail of our 2022 Pacific Northwest road trip, just to make sure we didn’t miss anything good or fall behind schedule or end up in unnecessary danger. I am not as reckless as I used to be.
A few weeks ago, Luke realized he would have a four-day Thanksgiving weekend. For him that meant one thing: he got to do another road trip. He bounced around a few different ideas and then decided on a smallish loop that would take him through Steamboat Springs Colorado, Salt Lake City Utah and Horseshoe Bend in Arizona.
As it happens, Horseshoe Bend and the Great Salt Lake were on my bucket list. And seeing them sounded like more fun than cooking a turkey for just myself and Elizabeth. Luke was fine with me joining him. Of course I immediately started checking out the route, and pointed out that Zion National Park was not too far out of the way. Well, that was on Elizabeth’s bucket list, and so was nearby Bryce Canyon National Park. Luke said fine, we could all go together, but if we were visiting Zion and Bryce, then he wanted to see Mesa Verde. By this point we had realized that four days wasn’t going to be enough, so we used PTO to take off an extra two.
After some discussion, we decided to reverse the order of the stops and do Mesa Verde first instead of last. We left home Wednesday night at midnight to beat the holiday traffic, and rolled past the Mesa Verde park sign around 7:45 the next morning.
We had planned to buy an America the Beautiful annual pass at the entry kiosk, but the park was a ghost town. We did not see a single worker the entire time we were there. Presumably they were all home with their families for Thanksgiving.
Luke needed to sleep, so we pulled into an out-of-the-way parking spot inside the park and took a long nap. This turned out to be the best sleep we got on the entire trip. More on that later.
After our nap, we checked out the Park Point Fire Lookout.
This is the highest point in the park. From here you can see all the way to the southern edge of the San Juan Mountain range.
I haven’t yet replaced the camera that was drowned on the PNW trip, so all of the pics from this trip were taken with either the fisheye lens of my GoPro or the noisy camera of my phone. Hard to mess up the subject matter, though.
You can’t go into the cliff dwellings except on an official tour, and tour season is over for this year, so we were only able to view them from a distance. Still very cool, though.
The canyons themselves are as impressive as the dwellings. Phenomenal views.
Adventuremobile barely visible in background:
Some of the old ruins are protected from the elements inside large sheds.
This one is in the open at the top of a cliff.
It reminded me a little of some of the older Spanish missions in San Antonio.
We had a great time exploring. Still no one at the kiosk when we left the park. I would have felt guiltier about the “free” visit if we hadn’t bought the annual pass at the next park anyway.
From Mesa Verde we drove southwest to Horseshoe Bend in Glen Canyon Recreation Area. The entry gate is closed after hours, so we spent the night in the quiet corner of a Walmart parking lot in nearby Page.
Up till now I thought I’d gotten the best sleeping arrangements of our trio. The pickup has a camper shell (missing a back window, but one makes do), and we had put our old futon mattress into the bed. Pure luxury, especially since I had it all to myself. Luke slept on the front bench seat and Elizabeth slept on the rear bench seat.
So it turns out that on cold nights, the futon mattress basically fills up with cold air and just sucks all the heat out of your body. You cannot warm it up. I had to use one of my blankets as an insulating layer between me and the mattress, and then I didn’t have enough blankets on top. No more comfy nights for me until I got back home.
Worth it though! Who needs sleep anyway?
To be continued!
An Invincible Summer 