{"id":986,"date":"2017-07-06T02:45:52","date_gmt":"2017-07-06T02:45:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/?p=986"},"modified":"2017-07-06T03:06:54","modified_gmt":"2017-07-06T03:06:54","slug":"wednesday-july-5-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/2017\/07\/06\/wednesday-july-5-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Wednesday, July 5 2017 (Day 16)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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We woke up way too early when dawn was just starting and I could see Venus as the morning star even without my glasses.\u00a0 But thankfully, I managed to fall back asleep and then woke up at about 7:30.\u00a0 We packed up our things, but stayed for quite a while and chatted with Nicki and John over coffee and tea, explaining gravity and complicated family relations to Jesse, and feeding Gavin (14 months old) his oatmeal in the meantime.\u00a0 We left about 9:30, and since we hadn’t really made up our minds about the route to take as we headed south, we made it up as we went along.<\/div>\n
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We took the road from Nederland to Black Hawk \/ Central City, Colorado’s most overbuilt former mining towns (the 14-story Ameristar hotel pisses me off every time we drive through this ridiculous area, and only the gorgeous drives out of the area and the fact that the county built a free rec center and a great school with the casino money reconcile me with the atrocity that BHCC).\u00a0 That led us down the feeder roads of the I-70, which ingeniously helped us to avoid a traffic jam, and a 10-mile stretch of freeway, until we got to Georgetown.\u00a0 I had done some quick internet research en route and found out that Guenella Pass Road, which we took in 2014 to get from Fairplay to Georgetown, but which was then a very slow, rocky dirt road for a long-ish stretch, was now fully paved.\u00a0 So we took this beautiful 22-mile short cut and looked around a little bit at the summit of the pass, which is also the trailhead for several hiking trails.\u00a0 We were at first surprised at how many vehicles were parked there, until we realized that it offers fairly easy access to Sawtooth Mountain and Mount Bierstadt, which is one of the 14,000-footers that people make it their ambition to climb and “check off”–and probably one of the easiest.\u00a0 With the help of Mark’s tele, could see dozens of people on the ridge alone.\u00a0 We just went along a little walkway to look the other way, where another, much more tame-looking peak also invited a lot of hikers. We then stopped at the first “picnic ground” past the summit and had our lunch by the side of a lovely creek (Duck Creek) before traversing South Park, and driving South through Salida–that was a little bit of a detour, but otherwise we drove basically the same route we had taken up from Alamosa on the 29th and then past the Great Sand Dunes again, mostly on the 285.\u00a0 There is some really beautiful scenery along the way, and an interesting stretch where the old stage coach road is visible to the left and right of 285 after Buena Vista.\u00a0 We stopped in Alamosa for an ice cream sandwich, and just to get out of the car for a bit, but decided we were still good for the 1 1\/2 hours to Taos, so I quickly picked a cheap hotel on the outskirts for us, and we continued our way south.<\/div>\n
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As we got closer to New Mexico, the Rockies flatten out and become these high but much gentler slopes, and the landscape starts looking ridiculously “Georgia O’Keefe”–beautiful and so radically different from the alpine, craggy mountains half an hour earlier.\u00a0 But we had a couple of surprises in store: on the roadside half an hour outside of Taos, we suddenly saw the strangest and most fantastic-looking buildings–part sci-fi, part Gaudi, and some mostly underground like earth lodges–and Mark suddenly said: “They are Earthships!” \u00a0There is a whole little colony\/community of these, which are intended to be self-sustaining, with solar, thermal, and wind energy and gardens, and although the visitor center was closed, we took a few pictures of the building closest to the road and picked up a brochure as well.\u00a0 Then we saw a bridge coming up ahead for the Rio Grande Gorge, but we were not the least bit prepared for the canyon that the Rio Grande has carved through this gentle, flat landscape–like a baby Black Canyon, it was flowing 600 feet below us with steep cliffs left and right.\u00a0 That was really impressive.\u00a0 The cursory drive through the main drag of Taos wasn’t, though–one cheesy touristy adobe building after the next, with tons of knick knacks and restaurants (even the MacDonald’s was adobe-clad) and ultimately the same-old-same-old string of Walmart, Walgreens, supermarkets, motels (like ours) at the tail end.\u00a0 But we found the perfect cheap roadside Chinese place that we had been thinking about for dinner, had totally fine orange chicken and moo-shu chicken, and then checked into our hotel around 7 to be done for the day!<\/div>\n

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We woke up way too early when dawn was just starting and I could see Venus as the morning star even without my glasses.\u00a0 But thankfully, I managed to fall back asleep and then woke up at about 7:30.\u00a0 We packed up our things, but stayed for quite a while and chatted with Nicki and … Continue reading “Wednesday, July 5 2017 (Day 16)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-summer2017roadtrip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=986"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/986\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":998,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/986\/revisions\/998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}