Colorado Adventure, part one
We were up in Loveland, driving to Lake
Boyd State Park, where Freddy had had a great time fishing in a beautiful
stream feeding into the lake, when it happened. POW! SHIT! SPLASH!
Some asshole driving south had thrown a large iced coke out his window.
It crashed into the cabface side of the camper and splashed into my face.
I don't know if it was thrown deliberately, by some hater of Florida Camper
Adventurers, or just an accident. In retrospect, I hope it was an accident.
But that's the way things happen, isn't
it? You're happy, the sun is shining, there's a beautiful pink sunset
over the mountains, and suddenly you've got ice cold cola getting sticky
all over your face and left arm.
Take the generator on Rocinante, the money
sponge. One minute it's running beautifully. I'm watching television
and getting my notes organized for the memoirs on the computer and suddenly
it just stopped. Dead. For a moment, I wondered if the jerk who
sold me this camper hadn't nailed the generator to the perch. It's
a Norwegian Blue, pining for the Fiords.
When we first got the camper, we had to
spend $350 to put a new computer card on the generator. I could have
done it myself for under $200, but I was afraid that if I replaced the part,
the trouble could be in a different part and the $200 would be wasted.
I knew if I did it myself, it wouldn't be the circuit card after all, and
if I did have the RV place do it, it would be only the circuit card.
Naturally, I was right. It was only the circuit card and so it cost
twice as much when they installed it. Next, the generator refused to
charge its battery. We needed a whole new converter for another $375.
Having put $700 into the generator (repairs
plus changing some expensive oil), we thought it would work fine. I
never expected it to die in the parking lot at the Convention Center of the
Holiday Inn in Denver. Things were going well. We had made the
cost of our table before 10:00 am on Saturday. I was just soaking in
the view and so many things I loved about Colorado. I was actually
humming, "Beautiful People of Denver," from THE UNSINKABLE MOLLY BROWN.
Earlier that day, we had learned Aurora, Colorado even had its own Graumann's
Chinese Theatre.
We collected about $300 on Saturday.
It wasn't as much as we had hoped, but it gave us high expectations for Sunday.
Great Expectations. We didn't sell much on Sunday at all. Monday
morning found us in Loveland, staying at another WalMart and having a new
bearing put on the generator. It was a simple job, but it required
that the generator come out of the van and be taken completely apart.
Parts cost about $50 including a new fuel pump. Labor cost $455.
We spent the day in Loveland, letting Freddy
go fishing in Boyd State Park, and went to the library, so I could get caught
up on e-mail. Susan, one of the Librarians, was extremely helpful.
Diane found herself getting quite fond of Loveland, and we decided to go
to the County Office to get job applications. It seemed that the community
had some modest homes and we thought if we got jobs, we might be able to
buy a home in Loveland.
The Denver area, including Aurora and
Littleton, had a number of housing developments being built, with prices starting
in the low $800,000's. Loveland looked a little better. I asked
Kevin, the man who was fixing our car, about the area.
"Kevin," I said, after explaining that
we were interested in relocating, "are there any homes in white neighborhoods
in Loveland that cost less than a quarter of a million dollars?"
Kevin laughed and shook his head in a
way that made me very hopeful. "Of course. My wife and I just
bought a modest little three bedroom home in a nice neighborhood last year
for just $175,000." Great, I thought. We'll buy two--on fifteen
year mortgages.
We did a little investigating. The
only things we could find for under $140,000 were homes that required automobile
registration papers.
We had a day to wait for the generator
to be fixed, and the camper was a lot lighter without it, so we decided to
take a ride to Rocky Mountain National Park, one of our favorite places.
I knew (Knock on Wood) that the other thing that could go on Rocinante was
her transmission, so I really worried about driving through the highest highway
in the United States, but we had to put things to the test sometime.
Things went pretty slowly at first.
I was afraid to push it, my eyes resting on the engine temperature gauge,
continously changing gears until Rocinante seemed to be climbing at the proper
speed for her. We passed a couple in a red pickup truck that had overheated.
It didn't do much for my confidence, but I remembered that they had passed
us awhile ago, going too fast up the mountain road.
There was much more snow on the mountains
than we had ever seen before. In some places on the sides of the road,
the view was completely cut off by mounds of snow, cut by snowplows, eight
feet high. Freddy had never seen so much snow. He was all excited,
begging us to stop. He wanted to do all those snow things he had never
done as a Florida boy--throw snowballs, make a snowman, slide down a hill
on a piepan like Clark Griswald, make a snow angel, and write his name in
the snow with urine.
He tried the sliding thing, but couldn't
slide. He tried running at full speed, then jumping onto his aluminum
turkey cooking tray, and stopping dead in the wet snow. He never slid
an inch, no matter how hard he tried. He ran, then fell chest deep
into the snow, telling me to look at the deer over the hill. I ran
after them with my camera, and found myself wading in two feet of wet snow,
wearing sockless deckshoes. Then the snow started.
And did it ever snow! There was
a blizzard up there! Freddy tried to write his name when we pulled into
the parking lot at Alpine, the summit, but it was so cold and the snow was
coming down so heavily, he gave up after writing F. We had some coffee
and hot chocolate up there, surrounded by the snow, and I waxed nostalgic.
It had been so long since I had sat in a snowstorm sipping a steaming cup
of coffee. It felt good.
I did worry about the ride down.
The roads were wet and slippery, and it was about 6:00. I worried that
it would get dark and the ride down could become even more dangerous.
There were no lights on that road--not to mention guardrails. Of course,
we all know that real mean don't need guardrails! I suppose we could
have just spent the night up there, unless the pipes froze. It gave
me visions of the Alferd Packer party, who had resorted to cannibalism when
lost in a blizzard in the Rockies, just south of us. Of course, our
refrigerator was pretty well stocked.
It turned out I had nothing to fear.
The ride down was slow, but perfectly safe. I kept dropping into second
and first gear, safely going down the mountains, while we smelled the burning
brake linings of other cars in front of us. I remembered the last time
we had driven down Pike's Peak in our van. Halfway down, rangers had
a checkpoint where they measured the temperature of everybody's brakes and
told most of the drivers to stop for coffee until the brakes cooled to a
safe temperature. Because I braked with the transmission, my brakes
were so cool, the ranger, disbelieving, checked them twice.
More important for my pocketbook,
Rocinante's transmission did the job. It felt tight, worked well, and
we went back to Loveland with more speed than we had left it. If anything,
after that stress, the engine seemed to run better. We got to Loveland
in time to watch a lovely pink sunset at 8:00. As our State Park pass
was good until noon the next day, we had dinner in the park and let Freddy
do some more fishing.
At dusk, several fishermen arrived, claiming
the walleye, like Jaws, were night feeders. I suggested to Freddy that
he fish at a curve, where the current slowed. He tried it and hooked
a huge walleye--it must have been 24" long. I told him to play the
fish, not hog him up. He only had six pound test. "Fight him,
Freddy. Wear him out."
He did just that, then finally pulled the
fish up to the shore.
"Grab it, Daddy!"
I hadn't expected that. I held a
camera in my left hand, ready to take Freddy's picture. I reached for
the leader--completely forgetting that Freddy had not used a leader--and it
broke! The huge fish flopped back into the water.
Once again, I had earned the enmity of
another fishing pal. All that night, I remembered the time I had gone
with night sharking Gary and Timmy. They had hooked a very large hammerhead,
gotten him up to the boat, and I had missed with the gaft, allowing the shark
to break the wire. Gary STILL brings that one up!
We left the park at about 10:00.
We had thought about staying there overnight, but it coast $18 for a campsite,
in addition to the $6.00 entry fee, so we spent the night at Walmart again.
The next morning, we went back to the park, used the RV dump and the
laundry, filled up our fresh water tank, and headed for the next cat show
in Wisconsin.
We slept at a Walmart in North Platte,
Nebraska, after stocking up on supplies at the dollar store--especially reading
glasses. Those damned things disappear everyday! As I walked
the dogs, I looked back at our camper, a tiny, old Tioga, surrounded by six
or eight big, beautiful rigs, the cheapest of which had to be $150,000; the
most expensive, a huge bus, probably cost more than a house in Denver.
They were all looking down on Rocinante, the cheap camper, the outcast from
the wrong side of the tracks.
Rich people with expensive campers spending
the night at WalMart because they're too cheap to go to campgrounds.
How do you like that? Maybe they were the interlopers.
CHAPTER SEVEN