[7 of 10.] So we loaded up the car with 500 pounds of guns and ammo and left L.A. that evening, after having lunch with Leslie Ann Warren…
We timed it this way so we could cross Death Valley and the Mojave Desert at night, when it was cool.
We pulled into Vegas after midnight. Whoa, it’s grown since we were there last. We got a cheap room at the ginormous Excalibur, on the almost scary top (28th) floor (scary due to the eaves angling in, letting you FEEL the top). We parked in a remote lot and all walked in carrying our pajamas and toothbrushes in our hands. Anything goes…
The next day we drove down the main drag for an eyeful and, Lord, we got one. It might actually be a neat place to hike around someday. The buildings in Vegas are over the top and cheek by jowl. Truly a postmodern culture. Almost a Singapore or Dubei, perhaps. It seemed like there MIGHT be a way for a ped to get around.
Then we ran for some Natural Beauty.
Deserts and canyons sure are cool. I love that Big Sky stuff and I don’t mind a good dose of heat.
Henry has been trying to catch a lizard with a homemade butterfly net for a week now. No luck, but plenty of fun, it looks like. Although he’s starting to get resentful. Curses, you lizzies!
We skipped the National Parks. They seemed to have lines of RV’s streaming into their $25 entrances. The canyons on either side seemed just as cool. Also, we were running short on time. Time for full implementation of the “fast transfer” concept of the French Cyclotourists: linger at your destination then skidaddle home nonstop.
Here are a few short vids of what we DID see:
We went on a picnic hike at Negro Bill Canyon a few miles outside Moab down Hwy 128, a lovely and famous “locals” road. This canyon ends up at a huge arch (at no extra charge). A stream follows you the whole way, if you get tired of the desert experience. Our kids were in and out of the stream the whole time. Many western movies were filmed further out Hwy 128. Lots of tenting places along the highway with the Colorado river right next to them. Lots of rafters and mtbikers, too.
Once we were driving down a steep canyon highway and came upon a big old Airstream and SUV. The trailer was on its side in the middle of the highway. Later on at a rest area I asked another trailer person if they’d seen the wreck and he said Yeah, and he saw lugnuts strewn on the highway beforehand. The punchline is that we saw the same trailer at a gas station a few hours earlier with its wheels off being serviced. Maybe someone forgot to tighten the lugnuts. Then someone else forgot to check that they were tight. Ouch.
We never did drive the wide open backroad mesas at night, where you can see headlights 50 miles away. Or a huge lightning display. Or even lotsa stars. …Next time.
We took a little detour into Beaver, Utah, because the kids were excited about it. They’d seen the indie movie, “The Beaver Trilogy,” the first flick made by indie director Trent Harris (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beaver_Trilogy), featuring early performances by Sean Penn and Crispin Glover. A cult classic and hard to get. The kids enjoyed the vignettes about a young rural lad who impersonates Olivia Newton John. Based on a true story and includes documentary footage of this kid. The erstwhile Hollywood actors each get a chance to remake the original lip-synching action. A different sort of film… But when little Lucy saw the road sign to Beaver, she had to visit! (We parents saw that it was coming up and wondered if any young ones would notice. One sure did!)
We tented at a cute campground called Butch Cassidy Campground in Salina, UT, which featured a resident menagerie of birds and bunnies running loose that the kids loved.
While there we met a nice young guy who was living in a tent and working in a town down the road. He just sat by his tent all evening. The next morning we chatted and he said we’d like his truck sticker as he drove out: “Freedom isn’t Made in China” blazed across his whole rear window. Cool!
(The town featured “Mom’s Cafe,” a call-out in the famous line-up of Road Food—it was like any other roadside greasy spoon that I could tell, with pre-fab pies labeled as homemade and other sad things. Not my type. But Martha approved, with caveats. Go figger.)
When we crossed into Colorado I remember the Tour Divide mtbike race action and found a wifi hotspot to check it out. Sure, enough, it was happening and if we got a move on maybe we could meet the race leader as he crossed the highway the next day! (See other reports and pics about what happened here at OYB.)
Montrose, CO, seems like a well-preserved, full-featured small town. Thumbs up.
But we got stuck with $30/night urban tenting there. (Hey, this kind of full-featured tenting may well be worth it to folks, especially RVers, who want to stay put and use all the campground amenities for awhile, but that kind of tenting didn’t fit our needs this trip.) There’s likely cheaper tenting east out of town a short ways in the Black Mt. Rec Area but we never sorted it out as to whether you’d need something like a $20 state park sticker to go with a $15 tent fee or what.
What’s more, the last of 3 huge Colorado bike tours in June was rolling through town that day to the tune of 2000 riders. We passed them streaming along for a solid hour driving the hills of Hwy 50 east of town.
Salida was another super-duper little Colorado town. The downtown is a mile off the highway so it’s quiet yet still hoppin’ due to its lovely riverside location. The Tour Divide was starting to roll through, with probably all riders stopping at the famous Absolute Bikes shop. But the weekend before the town was 3 times its usual size due to the FIBARK kayak races. At 60 years old, I suspect this is the oldest, biggest whitewater racing festival in the USA. The slalom and rodeo is right in town but the nifty downriver wildwater distance race goes 26 miles down the river. Oh yeah! (Someday!) fibark.net
Now things start to get wild again…
Canon City is an interesting place.
First, there’s the Royal Gorge. But they’ve turned it mostly into a tourist trap. Charging to visit is no problem, but adding the gewgaws: ugh. We gawked from outside the fence. It’s the world’s tallest suspension bridge. But here’s the trick: it’s actually a real public road bridge, to an extent. So every day the “public” loophole is handled by allowing people to cross free of charge at dawn and at dusk, or something like that. It’s a one-lane bridge that’s like 1000 feet over the river below. Oooh!
(Ya know, that Richmond Bridge over the Bay is what really gave me the willies.)
Canon City has a couple other neat features, as revealed to us by my uncles. Yes, they used to haunt this part of Colorado back in the day. My aunt Jo’s aunt was Aunt Franny and she owned a schoolhouse on a bunch of acreage up in Cripple Creek. She was a wild one who’d traveled the world and was a concert violinist. I should look into her more. I met her once when I was a teen and she reminded me of Katherine Hepburn. She drove a Jeep.
The uncles told me about an infamous road, the Shelf Road that comes down to Canon City from Cripple Creek. I googled it and YouTubed it a bit and sure enough: it looks scary! Maybe even scarier than Tim’s road to Seneca. Longer, for sure. It’s high, narrow, steep and considered one of the scariest roads in the nation. It wasn’t suitable for exploration by our tail-dragging ammo dump of a car. We’ll save it for later. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS1Krc8YbpA
Once you’re in Canon City you’re hungry, right? Well, the place to go is Merlino’s, a couple miles south of town. It’s in an old orchard and part of a family farm. The restaurant is in the basement. And it’s one of the highest rated steakhouses and restaurants around. For decades. It has a cool grotto setting—they say it’s because the old owner was a miner for his other job, I mean, for his 3rd job. He ran a farm, a restaurant, and was a miner. All full-time, I think. It’s one of the good old places that are holding on and hanging tough. We stopped by, out of time, but it was closed between lunch and dinner anyway. It looked pretty good. Clean, well-appointed and semi-fancy even. Certainly worth a try. I plan to next time, for sure!
Next comes something special. It gets its own OYB Story.
Bishop Castle.
After that, we’re back to the Plains and the wrap-up to our Tale.
What of the Plains? Well, I like em well enough but there ain’t much to write home about. Not when doing a Fast Transfer. Ya gotta go slow to learn ’em. So we just blasted. Tented in Nebraska. Listened to books and poems on tape and watched DVDs on a little player. Then we blasted to a lovely dinner at Johnnie’s in the old stockyards of Omaha. Now THAT’s a steakhouse. Oneathesedays I’ll order oneathem $90 jeroboams of wine. It’s the only restaurant I’ve ever seen that stocks a variety of them. (4 bottle equivalent. A double-magnum to the crass.) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_bottle.
A set of bronze doors that weigh 500 lbs each…
We ate there early enough, as planned, that we could drive another couple hours into Iowa before exhaustion. Once there I checked the Iowa state road map at a rest area and found basically ZERO campgrounds noted. Weird. Then I did my own googling, thanks to their hotspot, and realized that many Iowa small towns allow camping in their city park. So we drove to the next town and did just that, no sweat. Actually, lots of sweat. It was our first hot, humid, airless night of the trip.
The next day we blasted home. But I have ONE MORE TIP for y’all!
In upper middle Illinois is the town of Ladd and in that town is a GREAT restaurant called Lanuti’s. We didn’t eat there; it was closed. But I just know it’s great. Googling will tell ya so. It’s run by a wife and husband. She’s 93. She broke a hip last year and they were closed awhile. Their fans were worried. But she bounced back and they re-opened in January. It’s a little dinner place that serves everything made from scratch, for real. And it has a bar. And it’s clean. And it’s no foolin’. Try it! I’m almost tempted to make the drive. Oh, and they also serve TURTLE! Maybe the next time we visit Chicago… www.restaurantdb.net/restaurants/view-56546.html
