Week Three in a Camper Van

Our third week in and with Minnie Winnie is all about Colorado really. On our way there, we stop in Laramie, Wyoming, for lunch, known to be a city where quite a few special characters played once a role, including Billy the Kid. We move on to Colorado in the afternoon, wide lands stretching left and right, with black Angus cattle here and there as well as wild horses and antelope, hard to catch with the camera.

Into the Rockies

When we enter Colorado, we take a deep breath of relief. Behind us lay several days through desert type landscape with little vegetation and only very few higher than the sage-green sagebrush bushes along the road. Colorado feels like a freshmint after this dryness and scarceness, although Wyoming was already doing its best to be green. But the evergreens in mountainous Colorado with moss covered boulders and the Rockies ahead of us just cool you down nicely. We wonder why on earth the settlers back then decided to move further west from here into wide stretching desert and rough terrain.

We arrive at Glen Haven right next to the Rocky Mountains National Park in the evening, after Minnie Winnie has done a terrific job climbing up windy roads to our friends’ cabin swerving around rocks and underneath trees as if that was her favorite activity.

Our hosts welcome us with open arms and a wonderful dinner on their terrace. It is something like a 15-year reunion as our host Heather and Juliane shared a little house in Los Angeles for a couple of months back then and have not been in contact since. Lots of catching up and re-connecting, their two lovely sons aged 10 and 13 become our twins’ favorite guardians over the next days, together with three dogs of all sizes and colors that our children immediately fall in love with.

We snack at Rocky Mountain National Park the next day which is mostly due to the little time we have and the altitude sickness that hits me a little unexpectedly, but we are at roughly 10’000 feet, if not more. The soothing atmosphere of our hosts’ cabin is just perfect for the rest of the day, while the children build little wooden boats and let them float on the nearby creek.

To Fort Collins

We accept our friends’ kind invitation to spend the next day and night at their house in Fort Collins, pack up our things and maneuver Minnie Winnie back onto the mountain road that it climbed up. I admit that I wasn’t all so sure about that, but it turns out that Minnie Winnie actually is a real Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep.

Heather’s boys ride with us, listen patiently to our twins telling them jokes in German, and guide us to Fort Collins, where we spend a lovely afternoon strolling through this charming town, sorry to learn that we will be missing a Donavon Frankenreiter concert by a couple of days. I could also have stayed at their beautiful home the entire day. Such an architectural marvel with just the right touch for combining different styles to turn it into what I would call “Modern Coloradoan”.

I leave four new friends (not counting the dogs) the next day and we take many precious memories of friendship and togetherness with us on our way back East to ultimately San Francisco. I live a special moment when their 13-year-old hugs me good-bye asking if he could stay with us as an exchange student in high school.

West again

Before heading towards our next stop, Glenwood Springs, Colorado, with its hots springs, we meet old friends of the larger Wagner family in Boulder at the Dining Hall of Chautauqua Park near the Campus of the University of Colorado. I had seen them last after my graduation from high school in 1995, when I did a three months trip through the US all by myself, and visited friends of mine and of my parents throughout the entire country from Vermont to Boulder, and San Francisco to Michigan, and ultimately New York. We only have a couple of hours but lots to say, and we will need to reserve more time next time we meet.

Later that day we reach Glenwood Springs after another spectacular drive in the pouring rain, quite nice for a change, and we sleep well and safe in Minnie Winnie, raindrops trickling on its roof. The next morning, we take off early to the hot springs and enjoy a couple of hours in the warm water and slide down waterslides with the kids. Afterwards, our son looks at me with a very serious look on his face and says: “I only have one word to say… cool!”

Minnie Winnie then collects us a little sunburnt and tired, but very happy, and takes us further West down I-70 to our next stop in Utah, Moab and Arches National Park. On the way, we stop in a town called Rifle a couple of miles West of Glenwood Springs, and the name of the town was not made up for no reason: We have lunch at the “Shooters Grill” where “guns are welcomed” and some of the waitresses wear a machine pistol at their belt. I think there will be a separate article on this topic…

The local post office where we drop off a few postcards after lunch, is quite a little jewel though. And the Rifle Creek Museum comes as a most charming surprise. Started 50 years ago, it has been collecting all sorts of artefacts and exhibition pieces over the decades, and we follow through the history of the place, from the Native Americans in the region to the time of the settlers and up to an exhibition Christo and Jeanne Claude did here in the early seventies when they hang a big orange curtain across the canyon. Because it is fabulous that people keep such a place alive, I want to donate some money, but the credit card machines don’t work, and despite an almost half hour effort to make my financial contribution possible, it remains spiritual in the end.

The drive to Moab is spectacular. Nature’s sculpture garden presents almost everything it has to offer: rock formations and canyons of all kinds and colors. We watch the landscape in awe, thankful for the opportunity to experience all this.

We arrive in Moab shortly before sunset, set up camp at a very nice campsite in town, wash off the travel dust in the pool, playing water polo with little Austrians and Americans and then eat way too much at a local Mexican restaurant, marking the end of Week Three with Minnie Winnie. It dawns at the horizon that only few days are left with her until we have to turn her in next Monday. We have agreed that we will enjoy the last days and drives with her without letting our minds sadden by this inevitable perspective.