Thursday. This is it. Last day in town before we head out to the wedding in Fort
Morgan. We were lucky enough to live across the street from Archie for thirty years.
Great old guy. He was always old, even thirty years ago, because he was
always older than us. Young at heart, active, interesting: that was Archie.
We crossed the street and talked to him over the fence for thirty years.
Ultimately, he actually did get old and die. But before he died, his
daughter Lolly, and her husband Larry, and their daughter Jodee, moved down
from Fort Morgan to help take care of him. And stayed. Now we’re lucky
enough to live across the street from Larry and Lolly. Daughter Jodee is
getting married, back at their old stomping grounds in Fort Morgan, so off
we go to hang out with them for a couple days, and see if we can help more
than get in the way. Larry tells me we have a nice flat space to park the
motorhome right next to the barn. The hog barn. I’ve got my Honda legs back under me, and it’s a nice car again. I
particularly like the climate control. What a logical thing to do. Instead
of chasing the changing conditions with the heater controls, trying to find
the temperature you want to be, just pick the temperature you want to be,
and let the mechanism take care of all the details. I wonder why they don’t
offer that on the dashboard of motorhomes. Guess there is too much climate
to control from there. I have to confess. I’ve discovered I’m an elitist. Driving to work
yesterday, to a new client’s office, I wasn’t looking forward to driving
through the middle of Denver to get from our house on the northwest side, to
the client’s office way out east. That’s a lot of driving, and a lot of
traffic all the way. I had allowed an hour for this exercise. Leaving
Louisville, at the top of Murphy’s hill, I realized that the new beltway
would loop all the way around to the north, then east, past the airport, and
south to the neighborhood I was headed for. And the best part is: it’s a
toll road, so there was hardly anyone else on it. My own private road! I
can pay extra and have my own road with no traffic! I’ll take it. We have a transponder in the glove box of every car, so it is painless to
pay. Just throw it up onto the dashboard, the machine reads it as you pass
through, with no slowing down for tollbooths. It was good. And, it only
took half an hour to get there.