Finding America

Day 17

We both kind of get an itchy feeling when we’ve been in a place for two days. There is this allure of the next adventure that it could be just around the next turn in the road and that we need to pack up and get going.

We waved goodbye to Taos and started heading for the Colorado border. Just outside of Taos we crossed the Rio Grande River and stopped for a view of the amazing gorge below the mesa. Whoa…That’s a long way down. Someone had pushed a car over the edge and its remains laid crumpled part way down the canyon wall. I would have loved to have witnessed that. Not that I condone littering, but the inner boy in me likes to see explosions and things being crumpled. It’s like that weird fascination I had as a child of the junkyards with the cranes and their big magnets which grabbed cars and dropped them in to the crushing machine. To see an old Lincoln crushed into a 4×4 cube of metal is enough to make any boy go wide-eyed and long to be behind the controls.

As we headed North it wasn’t long before we crossed the Colorado border. We stopped for the obligatory border crossing photo and then made a bee line for the Great Sand Dunes National Park.

Seeing so much sand in the middle of and alpine Colorado mountain range was surreal. If you narrow your focus and basically blind yourself to the towering mountains overhead you could easily imagine yourself in the middle of Saudi Arabia. Walking to the edge of the park was like approaching the beach, the edge of the park even had sand dune like beach vegetation only when you walked past this little bit of landscaping you see a stretch of beach that just keeps on going and rolls higher and higher with no surf to be seen. Anyhow here is the video of our little foray into the biggest sandbox I’ve ever seen.

After the park we put our heads down and just started barreling north. Again the topography changed. The road meandered through broad pasture lands bordered by picturesque mountains and ribboned by little snow melt streams and creeks. This was cattle country and the per-capita horse and cattle population increased each mile we headed north.

We traveled through several small towns and through some truly gorgeous river carved canyons. Little did we know that these steep walls were just another preview of our next stop. Our original plan was to stop for the evening in Canon, Co but as we approached we discovered that the RV parks were either still closed for the winter or were a little beat up. So we decided to drive Kodi up the Royal Gorge Bridge and see the attraction and then look for a place to stay after that.

The Royal Gorge was like the granddaddy of the little canyon we had crossed this morning leaving Taos. The sheerness of the cliffs and the engineering of the bridge were a significant upgrade. We parked Kodi and caught a ride to the bottom of the gorge via a vertical railed tramway.

When we left the gorge and looked for and RV park again we couldn’t find anything suitable so we pushed on to Colorado Springs. We ended up at a nice park and then had dinner at Albertaco’s a 24 hour drive through taco joint. The food was actually really good and we hardly put a dent in the generous portions.

Whoa what a long day. Needless to say we had no trouble falling a sleep tonight.