Bucket list vacation: Southwest

I've been working on several long, picture-laden posts by way of catch-up. It has involved trying to track down pictures from different cameras and different computers (which always upload photos to locations that are mystifyingly obscure). So it's out of chronological order, but this is the post I've managed to get together first.

The day Edith finished school, we headed off for a five-day family vacation. It was a long time since we'd been anywhere as a family with no ulterior motive (i.e. visiting relatives, attending a wedding or funeral, etc.) In fact, I'm not sure it has happened at all since Alice was born? It was very nice. 

With an average of 2-3 hours of driving per day, we struck a good balance between seeing new places and catering to kid sensibilities.

 

 

Our first stop was the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado. That's Mt. Blanca, sacred to the Utes and other tribes who moved through this region as one of the sites of the creation of life. In the valley is Sand Dunes National Park. For reasons that the informational signs at the park fail to elucidate fully, streams in the San Luis Valley have over thousands of years deposited a huge amount of sand here in this inland valley. Think Lawrence of Arabia--they could have filmed the movie here.

It was extremely windy the afternoon we were there, so we didn't hike out onto the dunes (unlike those tiny black dots behind E and A, which are people). The sand whipped at your skin and stung horribly. Instead, the girls were happy to splash around in the seasonal creek--supposedly running at its peak flow for the year in late May, but this year at 1/3 of normal. The wind was blowing straight north, and as long as you stayed in the N-S creek bed, you didn't get hit by sand.

 

We stayed that first night at one of the southwestern-style town homes on Colorado College's Baca Campus nearby, a retreat location where classes sometimes meet and where faculty and staff can stay when school isn't in session. It backs up to a national wildlife refuge and is near the tiny, quirky town of Crestone, Colorado. We wandered Crestone in the morning and discovered it is home to spiritual seekers, particularly in the Eastern traditions, as well as ashrams, retreat centers, and socialists. The town hall has a sign on it announcing that commodity distribution occurs on Wednesday mornings. Meanwhile, the lady at the coffee shop/yarn store at the center of town was willing to give me 40% off any yarn I chose, just because she was tired of it and wanted to order new stuff. It's a measure of my self-discipline that I didn't buy her out.

 

There are also some more traditional Western faith traditions represented in Crestone, as in this tiny Episcopal church, founded in the 1870s and still in operation.

We headed next for Durango, Colorado, tracing part of the route that I bicycled cross-country in 1998 after graduating from college. Our day's drive included the biggest climb of the bike trip, over Wolf Creek Pass, for which I earned some retroactive points from Tom for my once-upon-a-time athletic prowess.

Wolf Creek Pass

1998:

2012:

We came down from Wolf Creek into the town of Pagosa Springs. A fancy-shmancy resort had been built up around the springs on the river since 1998, precluding our jumping in there. But we discovered a more cost-conscious new spa on Main Street that had built Roman-style indoor baths around half a dozen springs, then piped water from two springs up to rooftop pools. No one else was there, and we had a blast, soaking in the warm mineral waters on the roof, looking out over the river and the mountains.

Pagosa Springs was also hosting a fiber festival, and Tom indulged my eagerness to attend (not even smirking). The girls loved the animals; I geeked out on rovings and dyeing and spinning demos.

I've been to Durango twice before, once with my family in 1984 and once with the bike trip crew in 1998, and enjoyed this old western town both times. But in the last 14 years it has completely boomed, in what seemed mostly good ways. The 19th-century downtown hotel is still going strong, as is the narrow-gauge railroad trip to a ghost town and other draws. But meanwhile, downtown also has become a vibrant home to more restaurants per capita than Chicago or L.A., as well as art galleries, independent bookstores, and tons of foot traffic. There was an Ironman Bike Challenge kicking off while we were there, too, and the energy in town was great--even if the Strater Hotel was full, and we had to stay at a more prosaic place.

A heading in the Durango-area magazine for tourists:

We used Durango as our base to head out to Four Corners one day.

Tom in Arizona, Alice in Utah, Gretchen in Colorado, Edith in New Mexico

Edith especially got a kick out of it. She then carefully toured all the stalls staffed by Navajo craftspeople, who operate the site because it's on native lands, and chose a souvenir for herself. (Query: If this is tribal territory, do Edith's tax dollars go to Arizona if that's the side she bought her souvenir on? I hope not.)

Tom and I were really struck by the change in the landscape on the drive. It goes from green and rolling to completely, desolately barren...right at the spot where a sign announces that you are entering tribal lands. It hardly seemed a coincidence.

Durango:



The start of tribal lands:

Northern New Mexico, by contrast, was much greener than either of us had imagined that state. We counted over 1,000 cattle, horses, and sheep grazing before we quit counting.

About an hour into the drive, the landscape started looking more like we'd expected.

A natural echo chamber, at which we stopped

The chapel in Abiquiu, New Mexico, the town where Georgia O'Keefe spent much of her time

The so-called miracle staircase in the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe. According to legend, the chapel was completed without the architects factoring in any way to access the choir loft. By the time it was done, the nuns had no money to rebuild. Apparently an itinerant carpenter appeared one day who heard about their problem and built this staircase, which contains no nails or metal work (or didn't until the railing was later added) and is completely self-supporting.

New Mexico's capitol building is more low-key than some, with no dome

Santa Fe seems like a fantastic getaway spot for adults, particularly known for its art scene, as well as its restaurants and its architecture. Our kids were not particularly thrilled by those things--more interested in the motel pool--but they did enjoy the low-budget children's museum, which was basically a converted warehouse well-stocked with playthings where they busied themselves for three hours.

Who knew that all they needed to be happy was a lot full of old tires?

A penny horse ride never hurts either