Buena Vista

I am writing this on a picnic table at a pretty little park with a pond at the corner of Hwy 24 and County Road 306 in Buena Vista, CO.  It is across the street from the library, and apparently I am spiriting away their free wi-fi.  I came into town to go to the City Market, where I found 4 pieces of fried chicken for 4 bucks, a bargain any way you look at it.  This park is a great place for lunch.  Or just relaxin'. 

Unfortunately I lost almost all the pictures when my laptop crashed.

There's a couple from Texas walking their blue heeler, a half dozen tiny kids learning how to paddle their equally tiny kayaks on the pond, some other kids fishing and playing on a swing.  I could profitably while away the afternoon here, if the benches weren't so hard.  Should have thrown a chair in the back of the truck before I left camp.  A couple of big motorhomes could park on the side street. 

Heck, they could even charge up their batteries here.  There's power outlets on the pole behind me. 

Quite a friendly place.

I was headed up to Cottonwood Pass on 306 the other day, when just a little past Rainbow Lake I saw a cut in the bushes on the downhill side to the left.  It didn't look like I could get the trailer in there, so I proceeded on a half mile or so to the Forest Service’s Collegiate Peaks campground.  I found a spot, though the place was crowded.  But as I was setting up my mind kept going back to that little cut in the bushes.  So ultimately I just dropped the trailer and went back there.  Turned out to be 6 or 7 sites along a little stream.  Completely deserted, completely free.  Lots to trees to scrape against if you've a mind to, but they are avoidable if you know what you are getting into.  You could even get a Class C and a toad in there when it's empty like this.  But the problem is you can't see what you are getting into until you are well into it.  Best to explore first in a smaller vehicle.

Very nice, very quiet, very shady, a stream running past and singing you to sleep at night.  My kind of place.  There's even a 4 bar Verizon connection when I use the Yagi antenna.  To bad about the fire ban.  I'd really like to cook a steak here.  Tonight will be my third night, and nobody has turned in here yet.  Unbelievable.



Four miles back toward town I passed Cottonwood Hot Springs, a kind of mom and pop little spa.  I misinformed a few people about this place in the past, calling it Princeton Hot Springs.  That is another place altogether, on another road, and a lot more of a commercial complex.  Cottonwood is just a small motel with a few camping places and 5 pools ranging from 95 to 105 degrees.  Fifteen bucks gets you an all day pass, from 8 am to 10 pm.  I showed up at 10 this morning and had the whole place to myself for an hour, when maybe half a dozen others came in. 

The only surviving picture from the day.

Let me see if I can describe the rigors of my day.  First I got in the mild pool, quickly moving on to a hot one.  Then I got a cold cup of water and lay back on a lounge chair in the dappled shade of a tree, and let the cool breeze tease me dry.  Somewhere in there a short nap caught up with me.  Then I got back in the pool again, talked to some folks, then back to the napping place.  Then I tried the sauna for a bit.  Then back in the hot pool, followed by another snooze.



It's a harsh regimen, I know.  But somebody has to do it.

There's plenty of parking for cars, considering the lack of traffic.  There's a small campground that will accommodate tents and small campers, but as they don't have electricity I didn't look at it.  If you have a larger RV or a toad, just past the entrance is a huge gravel parking lot with a trail at the back that leads down into the springs.

Well, that's it.  As you can see, I've been busy here.  I may be able to stand it for a few weeks, unless something better comes along.

Transition

I’ve started traveling again.

And as you can see, I’ve streamlined my act a bit.  The last time you heard from me I was moseying about in a Lazy Daze Class C, with a Motorcycle hanging out behind.  Now I have a Dodge truck and a 17 foot stick-and-tin trailer. 

My brother’s accident set this blog back a bit.  Then when he got lung cancer and passed away the following year, it just stopped.  It was a case of having nothing useful to say and too much to talk about, all at the same time.  If you catch my drift.

“Catch Me If You Can” has become an iffy title for the blog, because as it turned out I got caught rather easily.  Big-time.  Perhaps I should start anew with an different smart aleck title.  It isn’t as if a few don’t come to mind.

But if life can be full of gaps, why not blogs?  We’ll see how it goes.

I’m going to begin with July 2013, in Colorado, and make posts of some letters to family and friends.  They are not all that personal, and may be mildly educational for those of you that have not traveled the road I’m on.  But indeed, there may not be any of “you” left after my personal interregnum.  That will be as it may.

I expect that things may not be exactly sequential for a while.  My last post was about the birth of my grandaughter.  She’s 16 months old now, and learning to say “no”.  That’s a critical juncture in any woman’s life.  She’s a quick learner.  I expect by the time I return in September she will be doing her own shopping.

There won’t be anything new before the post called "Hostage Taker", but everything since will be dated in some approximate manner for a while, including perhaps a few bridge pieces about the last two years.  I will be posting those from memory, in a gesture towards overall coherence.  But I have actually begun writing again right after the Fourth of July 2013.

You can keep looking back for new stuff if you want.  There will be some.  But I expect to be going forward as well. Bear in mind that I am doing all this from the side of the road.

Wish me luck.  And ya'll have a nice day.

Bob

Hostage Taker

"The father of a daughter is nothing but a high-class hostage. A father turns a stony face to his sons, berates them, shakes his antlers, paws the ground, snorts, runs them off into the underbrush, but when his daughter puts her arm over his shoulder and says, "Daddy, I need to ask you something," he is a pat of butter in a hot frying pan."
~ Garrison Keillor

I promise I am not going to turn this into a baby blog.  Everybody thinks their child or grandchild is special.  And they're right.  


But I have been distracted lately by the spectacle of new parents slowly realizing in their bones that everything has changed forever.  I guess there is no way to teach this.  It's not just an idea.  You have to learn it the hard way to learn it right, and some people never do.  They can't have a schedule of their own any more.  They are going to have to pack that away for 20 or 30 years.  They can't come and go as they please, or be themselves alone.  It's only been a week, but something tiny has taken over the world.  And she means business.


Forget the birth.  Incredible as that is, evolution has conspired to make most of it automatic.  The really amazing thing comes in the weeks after that, as a couple plus one struggle to understand how to become something more, something that wasn't there before.  Something that matters more than they do.


They are learning how to be a family.

The Beast Is No More

So why do I have a trailer now?  What happened to La Daze?  Well, all that took a while to come about.  And may take some time to explain.

First off, lamentations.  The Beast is no more.  After the accident, it sat out there in the garage for 6 months.  I rode it a couple of times.  But it just wasn't fun any more.

Motorcycling is one of those things that gets dramatically more dangerous as it becomes less fun.  Like downhill skiing.   Even the semblance of physical grace requires a certain gleeful ignorance.  Otherwise known as  faith.  Without it, your natural human clumsiness comes to the fore.  All the terrible things you imagine happening are more likely to happen if you allow their potential to distract you.

Sometimes the worst thing you can do is think too much.  I don't believe my brother ever had that problem.

It's not all imagination, of course.  I had a few real close calls up in the mountains.  Twice in one day, deer ran right out in front of me while I was cruising at 60 mph.   A car turned abruptly into my lane in Arkansas, without giving any signal.  I was nearly thrown a couple of times by almost invisible cuts and ruts in the road.  And once on the Interstate I got boxed in by huge rumbling trucks, and had to ride in that box for several miles.  They probably thought it was funny.

But what finally took the air out of motorcycling for me was all the grinding worry and daily toil of dealing with my brother's care.   It's still going on a year and a half later.  Nothing is worth putting someone else through all that.

I sold the Beast to a guy with terminal cancer and an apparent death wish, who rode off blithely without a helmet.  He said he'd lived his life too quiet, and was determined to finish the last months loud.  Well, that's what he said.  Good luck to him.

As an RV ploy, a motorhome pulling a big road bike sounds better than it turned out to be. Big bikes, the sort I like, are only stable on pavement.  And in reasonably good weather.  I turned the Beast over trying to ride up a mildly rutted 4 wheel drive road out of Silverton, just to prove I could.  And actual off road bikes are not to my taste.  Can't stand the nee-nee-nee whine of the the motors or the riding position.  And I'm certainly too old to carry off the look.

Give me a jeep, or a 4wd truck.  I really missed my truck, up there in the mountains.

I sold both bike and trailer for what I gave for them a year before.  I was out about $600 for motorcycle paraphernalia like helmets and rainsuits, etc.  It was fun while it lasted.

To paraphrase Chief Joseph, "From where the sun now stands, I will ride no more forever."

Yeah, nobody believed him either.