2002 Cross-Country Roadtrip
Day 34, Lake Wolcott State Park, Idaho August 19th 9:25pm
I had no idea it had been six days since I had written. Tonight is the last night of our road trip sadly and gladly. We are looking forward to being back home with friends and in our house, but the road trip has been really fun. We’ll cruise into Seattle tomorrow evening.
So, we stayed in Denver for another day and night, mostly hanging out with Brian and Michelle who have a great little house full of neat homemade things and projects. They are quite industrious; Martha Stewart would be jealous (even if she weren’t in a jail cell.) I also visited my cousin Karen, her husband Brian and their new baby Ethan. Ethan was quite the cutie. Back at Brian and Michelle’s we watched “The Lost Highway” by David Lynch. Bizarre and seemingly without a point. I was feeling ornary right after I watched it because it didn’t seem to make sense. But upon further reflection it grew on me a bit. I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, but it is very well done, just like most of David Lynch’s stuff. Wednesday morning we packed our growing amout of crap back in the car and headed for Telluride. Brian sent us off with a six pack of his home brew, which upon later tasting (see below), turned out to be delicious. We had a beautiful drive down to Telluride and arrived to be greeted by the smiling faces of Cedar’s sister Soleil, brother James, cousin Alexander and step-dad Jan. Telluride as usual was spectacular, surrounded by cliffs and mountains. We ate a yummy chicken and veggie dinner and proceeded to enjoy each other’s company while playing poker, drinking beer and gin and tonics and watching movies. We tryed Brian’s beer and were thoroughly impressed (mini-micro brews are always the best). We also watched “Ocean’s Eleven”, which was a good, fun heist movie and managed to get caught up in a time warp which made us go to bed at 3am. The next day we woke up bright and early (at least that is what 9am felt like), and proceeded to have a fun day of tennis and hanging out. Cedar and Jan played two sets which were 6-1 Jan and 3-3 (the game was cut short by other people who wanted to play. The nerve!). That afternoon we cooked up a couple yummy lasagnas in preparation for our trip to Lake Powell in Utah. Except for the smoked chicken flavor imparted to the top layer of cheese fromthe previous night’s dinner, the lasagna was superb. That night we watched “The Score”, another heist movie which was also very good (Ed Norton was great). The next morning we packed up and had a great drive to Lake Powell. Utah has just about the most breathtaking scenery there is. Lake Powell was created by damning the Colorado river. Apparently Glen Canyon, which Lake Powell filled, was a beautiful canyon with some really amazing water sculpted rocks. No more. But Lake Powell was pretty too. Saturday we camped in the desert, but not before losing the other car for an hour. Cedar and I spent about 40 minutes offroading in the Maxima trying to find Jan and the others, but it turned out they were at another campsite altogether. Luckily we found them. It was really hot, probably upper nineties at 9pm. There was a hot wind blowing off the mesa and cliff rocks, which act like pizza stones, retaining heat (mmmm . . . pizza). We had cold lasagna for dinner. The next day we scooted down to the lake and rented a ski boat, water skis and a wakeboard. We spent the whole day taking turns recreating in various ways. I tried about 28 times to get up on the wakeboard, but it was not happening. Later that day I got up on the water skis after 2 or 3 tries, so I must just have the wakeboard technique wrong. Xander took a while, but once he got it he was great on the wakeboard. James had some spectular, entertaining and painful spills (the swan dive was particularly graceful). On Soleil’s first try she got up, but then proceeded to try to switch which foot was forward and did a pirouette as she fell. She did well the rest of the day. Jan didn’t like the wakeboard much, but he was a demon on the skis; we got him going really fast. Cedar impressed us with his one-handed style and his face-plants. The water was a beautiful green color, and it was a nice temperature, about 80 degrees (which felt refreshing relative to the 100 degrees of the air). We exhausted ourselves thoroughly (Cedar and I were the last ones to bed at 11pm, which was bizarre). We had sandwiches for dinner (cooking was a ridiculous thought in that heat) and played scrabble (Cedar won, mostly on one 45 point word, but he held his lead despite Jan’s comeback attempts. I jumped right into last place and held it easily). We had a restful nights sleep and packed up the next morning. Cedar and I were headed back to cool, crisp and moist Seattle (our noses and lips had looked like a crocodile’s ass ever since we got to Telluride).
Our drive through Utah was really awesome, those rocks, cliffs and canyons can’t be beat. At one point we saw these amazing purple and red hills. We drove through Salt Lake City (we’ll remember Salt Lake City for the traffic jam we got in) and into Idaho. I had a revelation while in Ihado. Old people drive cars that look like cop cars because they want everyone to have as high blood pressure as they have. We saw a huge cloud of smoke drifting across the landscape. I concluded that it was one of two things. Either there was a wildefire in the nearby hills, or the locals had been crop burning. I think it was probably a wildfire, there was too much smoke for someone to do that on purpose. We stayed at a lovely little state park (Lake Wolcott) in Idaho. We’ll remember the honey bees bombarding us. One even stung Cedar while trying to crawl up his shorts (who could blame him?).
Quote of the day: “They sure don’t make these things easy to get into”, Jan about half a second before he careened forcefully out of the boat while trying to climb into it.
Thats all folks!
