Mesa Verde

This is the laddder to get up to Balcony House, one of the cliff dwellings we toured today.


A view out over the canyon from the Cliff Palace overlook. There was a thunderstorm starting so the picture is dark.


This is Cliff Palace, the other cliff dwelling we toured. Within minutes of the start of this tour the sky opened up in a massive thunderstorm. We huddled under the cliff face as much as possible, but still came out of the tour drenched to the bone.


Huddling under the overhang of the cliff waiting for our entire tour group to get to the bottom. It was COLD!


The kids posing at the park entrance sign. You can see how wet they still are, even though it had stopped raining an hour before I took this picture.

Mountains!

We left Dodge City at 7AM Central time. We left this early because there was a thunderstorm rolling in and we wanted to drop the camper before it started raining. We had a great time travelling west into Colorado. It was a beautiful day, never getting hotter than 80 degrees. Most of the time it was in the mid '70s. We never ran the air conditioner, instead spent most of the time with the windows partway down.

Theresa and I, paying attention, first noticed the shadowy outline of the approaching mountains almost 30 minutes before the kids did. They were busy watching what was outside the sides of the van. Eastern Colorado is greener than Kansas, with sagebrush and small pine trees, things we didn't see in Kansas. We saw several deer. I'm not sure what kind they were. They had single spike type antlers. Were these mule deer or pronghorn antelope? We also saw two elk.

Once we reached the mountains the kids' excitement level really cranked up. The scenery was absolutely amazing. We had to climb over a mountain pass over 9000 feet above sea level to reach the San Luis valley. The van did fine, slowing just a bit, but really not having any trouble.

We reached Alamosa around 1, Mountain time. My grandmother lived in Alamosa as a child, and I drove through here once before, for a family reunion at Beaver Creek. I remember Alamosa as a city in a valley surrounded by mountains. I was right. The San Luis valley is about 80 miles across. We stopped in Alamosa for Frostys from Wendy's, then pushed on.

On the west side of the valley Wolf Creek Pass takes you over the Continental Divide. The road down is incredible, with switchbacks and steep grades, runaway truck ramps, and, to top it off, driving rain and lightning strikes hitting the mountain tops around the top of the pass. At one point we were above a cloud, and the road looped around the sheer rock wall where the cloud was hanging, so we drove 3/4 of the way around it. Really neat.

We got to our campground at Mesa Verde about 5 Mountain time. A total of 11 hours today, which is pretty good considering we lost 20 minutes at Wendys and 30 minutes getting gas and making a picnic lunch in Walesenburg (?). This is a really nice campground. They have two hot tubs, a pool, a strong wireless internet signal, and bathrooms that look like they came out of a luxury hotel. It's our most expensive place to stay, but with our Good Sam discount it's still under $40 per night.

Sam ran about 4 miles while Theresa and I did some laundry and Jeanette got online. There's no cell service here for us at all. I hope there will be service before we reach California, but I'm not holding my breath. Getting off the interstates onto the back roads is a fantastic way to travel (we took lots of pictures out the car windows today), and I guess no cell phone service is the trade off. I'll take that trade.

Tomorrow we're touring Mesa Verde National Park. We're not sure what we'll see there yet, but we know it will be fun.

If anyone needs to reach us, you can email any of us at any of our addresses. We've got internet through Wednesday morning (if we think to check it then) and then will have internet again on Thursday.

How 'bout some Pictures?

It's late afternoon, and we're relaxing after a great supper. The kids have been swimming this afternoon, so I'll try to figure out how to upload pictures.

This is as we're starting off on the trip, leaving home.




Here's Jamie at Auto Source fixing our A/C for us.



Now a few of the kids...





Our Campsite here in Dodge City


And a Kansas Sunflower to wrap things up for the day.

Getting Into Dodge

Well, we made it to Dodge City. I won't spend a lot of time on this post, because Jeanette wants to get to her email still and it's late.

We have had two great days of travel. We've gone a little over 1000 miles so far, I think. The notes are in the van. So far we've had van trouble (air conditioning didn't blow through the vents) and camper trouble (stop at the end of one bunk broke). The AC problem we got fixed before we left Coopersville, our regular garage fixed a vacuum line and didn't charge us anything. The bunk problem I sort of fixed tonight after a trip to Wal Mart for screws.

It has been hot, as high as 101 today. The scenery has been increcible. Eastern Kansas on I-70 is very hilly, but the last 100 miles after we left the interstate were flat as a pancake.

As I write this it's a little after 11, and nice and cool. The campground we're at is nice, with grassy sites and a nice lake next to our camper. We'll be touring Dodge City tomorrow, and we'll try to upload some pictures tomorrow night.

Countdown

There are so many crazy things you have to do before you leave on a long vacation. At 6:40 this evening I realized I had forgotten to stop the newspaper. Fortunately the circulation department is open until 8 to take calls from cranky people who didn't get their paper on time. They said they'd stop it starting tomorrow already. Whew!

I've been especially busy the past week with wrapping up teaching for the semester. Today was our final day of class, but when I got home I had to run the pet lizards to Emily's house, which turned into a 2 hour trip because of road construction and traffic delays. Then I had to finish putting all the maps in order and making sure I have all the phone numbers set. In the middle of all this I got a phone call from one of the campgrounds where we hoped to stay giving me the reservation confirmation, so I had to quickly write another check and add it to the stack of bills getting mailed out tomorrow.

I still haven't packed a single article of clothing (for a one month trip!) and it's just about 8 PM. I'll be lucky to be in bed by midnight. Tomorrow morning I have three errands to run in Grand Rapids while Theresa and the kids get the trailer packed. If everything goes right (and it probably won't), we'll be on the road by 11 tomorrow morning. Google Maps tells me it will be about a 7 hour drive to Hannibal, Missouri, where we're staying Friday night. We'll see.

We will not have internet access until Saturday at least, so this is probably our last post before we leave. Our campground in Dodge City, Kansas advertises wireless internet, but we'll see how much they want us to pay for it. Almost all of the places we're staying after this weekend offer free wireless.

Trip Plans

This blog is set up for our family to use as an online journal for our big trip out west.

Our plan is to hit the road from Coopersville, Michigan on July 27. We'll spend a week working our way to California, and hope to spend the weekend of August 4-5 with our friends Mark and Shari Jackson in Fresno, California. We'll then head to San Jose where we'll stay with my sister Heidi and her family for a week. During that time we'll visit San Francisco, the Pacific Ocean, and just relax with Heidi, Jeff, and their kids.

On Friday August 10, Theresa and I will fly to Seattle where we'll spend the night and go to our nephew Ryan's wedding on Saturday. The kids will stay behind, with Heidi and Jeff. We'll fly back to San Jose on Saturday after the wedding, and go to church with Jeff and Heidi on Sunday.

We plan to leave San Jose on Monday, August 12. We'll head north to Oregon, visiting Crater Lake and the Columbia River Valley. On our way east we'll visit Glacier National Park and then the Black Hills of South Dakota. We plan to get back home on Thursday, August 23.

All told, we will be gone for almost a month, and we'll put around 6000 miles on our van and camper. We plan to visit national parks in Colorado, Arizona, Utah, Oregon, and Montana. We're hoping for good (not hot) weather, minimal road construction, and safe travel. We'll update the blog when we can; many of the campgrounds where we hope to stay have internet access. We should be able to post a few pictures to this blog as well.