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The guest house

Is not really a separate house. It’s attached to the main house on one corner, with a separate entrance.

We get our own little deck for morning coffee.

And the view from the deck doesn’t suck.

That’s Mount Sopris in the background.

The main house is terrible for getting an outside picture. You can only see little bits of it at a time.

The guest house is that two story part sticking up off to the left behind the pine.

Here is a picture from diagonally opposite. This shot gets the most house in one picture I could.




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Carbondale!

It didn’t take long for the Cortez pinon/juniper/sage to give way to lush riparian and alpine forest.

All we had to do is go up. Up through Dolores, Rico, Lizardhead Pass, Telluride (as a quick side-trip), Sawpit, Placerville, Dallas Divide, Ridgway, Montrose, Olathe, Delta, Hotchkiss, Paonia, Somerset, McClure Pass, Carbondale. We’re here, outside Carbondale!

No more motels for us. Jim and Elle have kindly offered us their guest house for as long as we need it.

We finally decided we need it.

…and Henry likes it too!









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Cortez

The high desert volcanic scenery of Arizona, to sandy decaying mesas spotted with monuments,

to the pinon juniper sage of Southwestern Colorado.

We drove straight to the Cortez KOA to say hello to all our friends there. We used to stop there every year, but it hasn’t made the itinerary the last couple years. Hard to skip a place that feels like home.

Now we’re in our motel for the night, Tomorrow, Carbondale!

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Flagstaff, Arizona

 We’ve made good our escape from California.  Maybe now I can get that Guy Clark tune, “If I can just get off of that L.A. Freeway without getting killed or caught.” out of my head. 6 year-old Conner learned a lot on his trip to Great Britain.  He learned to stay out of the nettles.  Three times! Brother David commented recently on the evolution of travel across our country.  It used to take six months to travel from the east to the west by wagon train.  Then the railroad changed all that to six days.  Then airplanes changed it to six hours.  We’ve improved on that six hours a little bit in the fifty-plus years since, but that’s all.  No more paradigm shifts. Now we’ve been building this incredible grid of power lines across our country for the last hundred years.  They’re particularly visible criss-crossing the desert.  Giant power stations spewing out electricity to distant destinations.  It’s time for a paradigm shift in power generation and transmission as well, isn’t it? A beautiful drive across the desert to Flagstaff.  Eroded volcanic terrain with grass, cactus, and bushes grown into it, giving way to pinion juniper forest, then full fledged Ponderosa Pines, still with volcanic peaks in the background. Tomorrow, Cortez, Colorado.  
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A successful day

We’ve left Palmdale behind. Palmdale was good to us; a nice respite. Stuffed everything back into the Silver Bullet



and drove south, over Cajon Pass, down Interstate 15, 215, and Interstate 15 again, back to Escondido by noon. We got all our stuff transferred over to the Jeep, turned in the rental car, and were ready to check the Jeep out of the repair shop, where we ran into the warranty company rules. They don’t authorize payment until the final paperwork, including the rental car, is submitted, so the repair shop could not actually check us out until they faxed the paperwork and got a response. I asked about the turnaround time for approval. The warranty company had advised that they’d try to get it done within 2 hours.

Two hours? We were buried deep within Southern California traffic and now it was 1pm. We wanted to be long-gone before rush-hour started and turned our 3 hour trip to Barstow into a 6 hour trip. We gave them 15 minutes. Time to create a solution. We paid our share of the repair on our credit card. We paid the warranty company’s share on our credit card as well. The repair shop is paid. We’re good to go. When the warranty company payment comes through to the repair shop, they’ll credit our card back. No harm, no foul, we’re gone.

We retraced our morning route on Interstate 15, 215, and 15, to the north this time, continued past the Highway 138 turn to Palmdale, and stopped in Barstow for the night. We’re on our way back to Colorado. Tomorrow night, Flagstaff, Arizona.