Day Thirteen
Mancos to Hooper, CO
What a beautiful early-Fall drive over the Wolf Creek Pass!
Just before we got to Durango, we saw 30 or more Ferraris (and one Porche) traveling together. Our best guess is that it was a car club. I tried to find them on the dash cam, but couldn’t…and then we got busy and I’m sure the footage is overwritten by now.
After the drive, we settled in and headed straight for the hot springs. This place is just as amazing as Elsa described.
Day Fourteen
Hiking to Zapata Falls was fun. It’s a short-but-“arduous” half-mile journey to a pretty little stream from a seasonal waterfall. And no, of course it’s not arduous; All Trails calls it Easy and clocks the round trip at 28 minutes.
We headed to the Great Sand Dunes National Park. Sadly, the Visitor center was closed.
The dunes are gorgeous…and worth the long-ass walk out to them as well as the wind out there. After our walk, we enjoyed their large picnic area.
(If you want to rent sleds or sand boards, stop at the Oasis before you get to the park. We stopped on the way after. It’s a pretty weak store and cafe, but it’s the only place to get boards and sleds. They also don’t rent them after about 3pm.)
Just as we were leaving the park, the winds kicked up and it rained a bit.
Our evening in the hot springs was accentuated by good food/drinks and chatting with a couple from Dublin!
Day Fifteen
Hooper to Colorado Springs CO
The drive was kind of pretty and pretty easy. We went through a couple of cute little towns and stopped for lunch in one of them.
For Thursday night football, we found Hooters. I love their wing sauce, but the service was weak, so for the second half, we tried two more sports bars.
We walked out of both of them for terrible service (as in: we never got any). Both were also having karaoke night? Really? Karaoke in a sports bar during Thursday Night Football? Seems the sports bar owners/managers in this area need to learn what sports are.
Colorado Springs is to CO as Waco is to TX
- Central-ish in the state
- Trashy in every direction
- Bad roads
- Military base
- Can’t buy weed
- Long-ass red lights
- Super-wonky layout of the streets, so it takes forever to get anywhere
And then, we tried to buy some Dr Pepper and couldn’t find any! WTH, COS?
Day Sixteen
We slept in. Seriously, we didn’t leave the RV until nearly 1pm.
On our way to a Jeep road, we saw two bears! They were wandering the neighborhood and eating berries and stuff off of peoples’ landscaping. It was so cool. We’ve been in Colorado 15 months and RVing for nearly two (plus a few other smaller trips) and finally saw our first bears.
The Jeep road we found was okay, but it was very long, a bit high/scary, and all washboard dirt. When a storm cloud gathered overhead, we decided to turn back. We found lunch, instead.
We have been talking about our “next” motorhome. That’s seems a little silly, but with production taking 6-8 months, we’ll need to order it sooner. Plus, we know some things we want to change with our next one. We researched before buying this one for two years, so it’s time to start to pay attention. We also want to order the new one, take it for a shake down, get all that stuff fixed, maybe do that again, and then sell our current one. Shopping is also something we’ll be able to do in the winter. In that vein, we went to Camping World (We know, and we’ll never buy from them) to look at what they had. They had maybe ten Class A rigs, and most of them were used. If these were a representative sample of what’s available right now, we might have to travel to a manufacturer’s show room instead.
Later, and during a big windstorm, we wandered out for some “just dessert” or something. ha! Instead, we had an enormous dinner at the Black Bear Diner (and quickly noted the location of one in Aurora) and then ran an errand.
Day Seventeen
We got great sleep and slept in. We very much appreciate a quiet campground, even when it’s next to a highway.
We found a real sports bar for college game day, or so we thought until a set of families with toddlers/infants arrived. The food was good and the Bloody Mary was great! After trying two more bars, we landed on the Burrowed Owl, which is a very cool place, but they have no TVs and are proud that they don’t have Wifi. “We encourage customers to play board games, instead” she told us.
After giving up on seeing anymore football, we headed to the rig to get ready for Adult Night at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. It didn’t work the way I expected (at all), but it was still fun, even with some rain.
They gathered us up as a group and let us pick one drink each.
We got a personal and private tour from two staffers and two volunteers/docents.
It was basically a field trip where they took us into some of the exhibit spaces that are clearly designed for young learners, but gave us more age appropriate information. We got to see all 600 pounds of their 1 year old hippo, Omo. He’s way bigger IRL than he is on their YouTube channel. We also got to get close to penguins and pelicans, see the lemurs hunt for a cuddle puddle, see a mountain goat, see quite a few smaller animals and a sloth, and pet a snake. On the way to our next exhibit, we heard this loud squeaking squeak sound. The staffers didn’t know what it was. It was a wild baby bear crying for his mom. They broke into the zoo and got separated. As soon as we rounded the corner with flashlights, he scampered up a tree, still squak-squeaking for mom. E and I both got to see him, though. And then, as she should, our guide turned us all around and ended the tour. She radioed a person or two. Security came to let us out (“You mean we were locked in the zoo with an angry bear cub and his mama??” j.k. It was fine. We never heard or saw her, but she would go to him, not bother with any of us.)
Day Eighteen
That damn check-engine light. It was our nemesis in 2020 right after we got the rig. Just like then, it started almost as soon as we pulled out of the campground, but this time it was blinking. Just so you know, do NOT drive a car with a blinking check-engine light. It might be simple, but it could be catastrophic. Since it was Sunday, nothing was open. We figured we could get a tow (hahahaha), but there wasn’t anywhere for them to tow her to.
We parked at a Sam’s club next to a very busy Walmart, got permission to stay there, and went to the bar to watch the Broncos. We met some fun women there who were working on some kind of Principal work for their schools. It was a good bar with good food (Wyatt’s), but the Broncos lost.
Day Nineteen
Neither of us slept well. It wasn’t that loud or anything, we were just stressed. We set an early alarm and started calling the Roadside Assistance at 8am. Next, we went through five+ hours of some familiar and failed attempts:
“Yes, she’s enormous: 36.5′ long and 26000# dry. Yes, you’ll need the very very big tow truck. No, she’s not just a trailer, she’s a whole motorhome with an engine
…..you don’t get a check engine light on a trailer with no motor.”
“Well, yes, you’ll have to disconnect the drive train to tow her. If you don’t, you’ll blow her whole transmission. Oh, you don’t want to do that? Okay, we’ll find a real professional, then.”
Finally, we heard from Regional Collision and Towing Service! Cue the singing angels. They showed up in a pickup, plugged in the gizmo, read the code, knew she was safe to drive, and started working on her the minute we all got to their shop! The owner, Jim, is a nice as can be. We used as much of our Roadside as we could, paid in cash to get yet another discount, and gave him a bottle of Palisade wine for his date with a doctor later that night. We’ll have to go to COS to get her, but it’s not that far…and we might just be taking her straight to the RV shop for some maintenance work, anyway.
We were home in plenty of time for dinner and Monday Night Football and to get end-of-season laundry started. We even got to spend some time with one of our sometimes-night staff members and catch up with him.
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She’s probably going to hibernate for the season after this. But if we have another trip, we’ll post about it. It’s been a GREAT year!