It started in Creede, CO. Not the road trip, but the idea. The trip began in California. My girlfriend Darinka, her daughter Chloe and myself (Paul) had decided to get out of town. A big two week camping extravaganza. From Southern California we made a b-line straight to Bisbee, AZ. We cut up through Silver City, NM to the Gila National Forest, then had a short stay in Ruidoso and Lincoln. We continued east dipping into Texas a couple of times before we stopped and had peanut butter shakes in Clovis. From there we headed north to Wheeless OK. I tell you there isn’t a whole hell of a lot in Wheeless, but sometimes you look at a map and get a funny idea in your head, and well…you end up in Wheeless…in the middle of the night…for the annual bug convention. With very little ceremony, we left Wheeless that morning and we wiggled our way past the snakes and the antelope into Colorado. We caught highway 50 to the 149, following the Rio Grande up into the mountains. 

It was one of the most beautiful places that we had ever seen. Giant Rocky Mountain goodness. An enormous valley in The Rockies where the Rio Grande is still crystal clear. Long before it receives the additives and effluvia it’s so famous for. It was August and everything was green green green. Coming from Los Angeles we don’t get to see that too often. Our green season lasts about 2 months if we’re lucky. Also we had just come up from desert and flat land. With every curve on that highway coming up from Alamosa opened up new views, each more striking than the last. Wayne Hancock on the car stereo and stopping a few times to dip our “dirty camp feet” in the river, we made our way into Creede, pop. 377. A handsome old mining town. Sure there were a fair amount of tourists, and plenty of “kitsch window shopping trinkety things,” but that’s just the thing, it was an inspiring place in spite of all that. It wasn’t just an old town full of retired people. Although, the oldest person that I saw there was a woman who looked in here late 60′s riding a little pink motor scooter with a pink helmet on. There were also lots of young folks there, music, kayakers, climbers, exchange students from Russian runaway republics and Ecuador. Darinka spotted the “Slav” sisters from a mile away. She’s got a knack for it.  After a bison burger, a walk around town and a drive through the canyon loop just behind the town, we headed out to find a camp ground nearby.

I have a favorite thing that I like to do wherever I travel. I love to go to a mexican restaurant. The more unlikely place the better. From Amsterdam to Germany to Eastern Europe. I just like to see how other people represent it. Darinka has a similar little travel game she likes to play. Real estate. I believe that my game is easier to play, because we can actually afford a burrito. Nonetheless we stopped on the edge of town to pick up a real estate rag. Let the day dreaming begin. 5 acres, 40 acres, ranches, on the banks of the Rio Grande, up in the high chaparral, horse property, old mining buildings, it was all there. Looking through that magazine, we speculated what it would be like to live on each one of those properties.

We set up camp just over the Sevenmile Bridge, in a campground on the bank of the river. One of our first chilly nights. It was welcome with a little over a weeks worth of desert weather behind us. Maybe it was the seeing the camp hosts in their motor home, or just the smell in the air and the pictures in that magazine, we had to figure out what you had to do to live in a place like this, and make a living. We lay under the stars thinking about it. Sleep.

I got up earlier than the  girls. I drove back to Creede, got coffee and hot chocolate for them and woke ‘em up. The rest of the drive through The Rockies was big, green, blue skied, covered in wild flowers with the river drawing crazy lines through the meadows. On that drive we speculated. Bed and breakfast, a shop, a restaurant, a summer camp and on and on. Ironically, my friend Otis and I were, at one time, buying 40 acres down the hill in Alamosa. The deal never went through, because the seller was so senile that he didn’t have all the faculties to complete the process by mail. In fact he once sent us a letter telling us that he would have sent us such and such paperwork but he didn’t have our address. Anyway, Otis and I had also speculated. Wild, vivid details of what to make of our new “World Headquarters.” A bomb shelter, a crazy underground house made of stuff that we could get for free (you would enter the house from what looked like an abandoned car on the property), a theme park called “Otis and Paul’s Mud Hole” (we would just install a pump in the middle of the lot and just shoot a whole mess of water up in the air), a Christmas tree farm and…wait a minute. “What was that last one?” That one seemed to catch her attention. It appealed to her sensibilities. It appealed to OUR sensibilities. I mean, hell, the place looked to us like it was covered in Christmas trees already. I was going to be like shooting fish in a barrel. I didn’t know why everyone here wasn’t doing it already. Time to do some research, but that’s another week away.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Filed under: Camping, Farming, Traveling by Paul