We left the smoke of Island in the Sky and said goodbye to Utah as we headed into southwestern Colorado. I started planning things for us to do: with our CO-VID vaccines fully active, we finally felt comfortable enough to be out and about more in groups of people. While Mike worked, I booked us on a whitewater rafting trip and a ride on the Silverton- Durango line. We also looked forward to spending time with Tina and Lou in or around Denver, so had lots to look forward to.
Unfortunately, we started to get news of Mike’s dad having some health issues around this time too. We figured we would have to go back to Florida at some point, but pushed on to make the most of the time we had. We also started the ball rolling on moving his parents up to Madison at some point in the near future.
The Mesa Verde area was the first stop in Colorado. We found a little bit of shade (trees again!) in some dispersed camping on BLM land near the entrance to Mesa Verde, so parked for a couple of nights so we could visit the park.
Our lack of planning bit us on the butt a little here. Half of the park was closed as the road was being worked on and all of the tickets to the accessible cliff dwellings were already taken. We enjoyed the drive in amongst all of the green and visited the dwellings that didn’t require tickets.
It was interesting to learn about the different kinds of pueblos that were built and inhabited over the years and at least view some of the bigger cliff dwellings from afar.
The next day we moved on to some paid camping at Mancos State Park. One night, but it was near a lake which we hadn’t had in quite a while! I reserved a site that looked like it had some more privacy and maybe a view of the lake and we found out when we got there that it also had quite an incline. We walked the site a lot and then Mike did another masterful job of backing Scarlet in. The tongue jack had to be extended far enough that I was a bit uncomfortable, but it all worked out just fine.
We enjoyed a walk around the lake and Mike did not enjoy what seemed to be the start of some kidney stone issues. And we were figuring out that we would have to make our way to Florida sooner than we had hoped.
We moved a little further east to some BLM land that had a good cell signal, but Mike was not able to take advantage of it. He had a full-on kidney stone attack and fought pain and nausea as we made plans to book it up to Denver and then head south to Florida. He had one day and night of absolute misery and then was thankfully feeling well enough to not only ride in the truck, but drive too.
We drove up to Denver to not only see close friends, but obtain all of the mail and purchases we had sent to them for future pick-up. Tina and Lou were nice enough to deal with moving around purchases of new stabilizers and rugs (and lots of other stuff) as they dealt with getting a new kitchen and having to empty out their whole first floor for new flooring. Thanks Tina and Lou!
It was really nice to be able to relax, cook, and eat with them before we headed down to Florida.