Day 7 – Strasburg, Colorado

What a long day this has been!  We all got up pretty early, and went through our morning routines, me fetching the phony paper and getting my breakfast, Don perusing the comics and news on the computer, and Geri doodling on her iPad.  I had been hoping for an outing in the park in town, the one with the big missile in it, but Don wasn’t going to unhook the truck for anybody, even me.  Instead, we had a brief tour through the RV Park, walking carefully to avoid getting stickers in my feet and finding no grass to roll in.  Third rate walk.  We got the rig ready to roll, and were out the gate before ten!

Don wanted to top off the fuel tank before we got into the Rockies, so Geri tried to scout a truck stop in Grand Junction for him.  It didn’t go too well, probably due to the fact that there are no truck stops in Grand Junction.  They finally decided to try a Conoco station about a mile off the I-70, but when we got there, it was obvious that it wasn’t set up for access by about sixty feet of motorhome and pickup truck.  Don had to pull into a shopping mall parking area to get the rig turned around and headed back to the highway, and he was muttering things I didn’t fully understand.  We finally located a small truck fueling station about twenty miles up the road, and Don got his wish for a full tank. 

We drove through some spectacular country, with the highway paralleling the Colorado River, which is unusually huge this year.  Geri took photos out the windshield of the mountains and the river, which I’m sure Don will post.  We stopped in a place called Glenwood Springs, a little resort town on the river, and I finally got some good grass to roll in.  Don was interested in the history of the place as a big resort during the late 1800’s, and learned that someone by the name of Doc Holliday died there.  I have no idea what the import of that is.  The route up Glenwood Canyon, east of the town, was truly spectacular, a narrow gorge with the Colorado rushing through it, and a major highway going multi-level to find a usable route.  We went through Vail, where there was still a lot of snow on the ground, and were very impressed with the lovely homes and hotels there.  From there, it was a long, slow grind up the mountains to reach the entrance to the Eisenhower Tunnel, which I thought we were never going to get out of, it was so long!  Actually, we went through the Johnson Tunnel, but nobody calls it that; the westbound tunnel is named for Eisenhower, and he seems to be a lot more popular that this guy Johnson.  I have no idea who either of them were.  From there, it was mostly a downhill run with the JakeBrake activated most of the time into Denver, where I-70 immediately became a traffic jam.  It took the better part of an hour to fight our way through it, though Garmy was giving lots of suggestions on how we could get on surface streets and avoid the mess.  Don wasn’t having any of it, as he has had some really bad luck with Garmy’s suggestions in the past, so he hung tough and sweated out the traffic.

Finally free of Denver, we barreled down the road to this burg, Strasburg, and this pretty good KOA Park.  Well, the grass isn’t very good, and there are sticker patches all around, and the roads are gravel, which hurts my dainty paws, and there are lots of small dogs who seem to want to kill me, but I’m with folks who love me, treat me with respect, feed me very well, and give me my treats almost on schedule.  What more can I ask for!  We’ll be heading east into Kansas tomorrow; I’ve never been there, but Don says I haven’t missed much.  I’ll give you a full report of my impressions tomorrow!  See you then!