Bea and Mark’s Excellent Adventure

Thursday, Aug. 23

We got up early and drove into Denver to find someplace with Internet access. We found a little place called Metropolis Cafe that probably had some of the best coffee we’ve ever had. Neither of us are coffee-heads, or coffee-aholics, or whatever they call people who are addicted to coffee, but this was good stuff. When I was done working we headed into the city to check it out.

Denver Art Museum, the U.S. Mint and exactly one mile high

We didn’t actually go to the art museum, but outside there was this large sculpture of a broom sweeping crumpled paper into a dustpan, so I took a picture of Bea from afar to make it look like she’s cleaning.

We walked around that general downtown area, which includes the state capitol building, a large city and county building, and plenty of parkspace. Both of us left Denver thinking we could probably live there pretty easily. Nice people, great weather, lots of things to do outdoors, etc.

So we walked over to the U.S. Mint and got ourselves some tickets to tour the place. Only thing was we had to go back to the garage where our car was to drop off our camera and cell phones because you can’t bring them on the tour. Only thing you can bring is a wallet and that’s it. You can’t even bring in outside change into the mint.

That tour was awesome, though. They were making pennies when we went in there. The blanks, which the mint ships in from an outsourcer, are in these huge bins. Then the machines suck them up and stamp them on each side, and then they get poured into another bin. One thing I didn’t know before is that all the coins made in Denver get shipped west of the Mississippi; all the ones in Philadelphia east of the Mississippi. There are also two other mints I didn’t know about. The one in San Francisco does proof coins (which are stamped a handful of times to make the image stand out more) and the one in West Point does investor’s coins and the Presidential Medals of Honor.

Anyway, the Denver mint makes something like $2 million worth of coins every day. Nice. This was one of our favorite sites in Denver, and actually favorite sites overall. We both got blank pennies as a free souvenir.

After the U.S. Mint tour, we retrieved our phones and camera and walked around some more, this time venturing up the stairs of the state capitol building. On one of the steps, I think it’s the 18th, you are exactly 5,280 feet — one mile — high. So we took a picture because we’re tourists and that’s what tourists do, and it was cool nonetheless.

East into the long state of Kansas

It was getting late by this time and we still had a healthy trip ahead of us to get to Kansas City. So we left Denver and headed east into Kansas.

Once you get east of Denver, Colorado flattens out like a pancake. And it’s a ways before you get into Kansas. After a while we drove into Abilene, Kansas, where Dwight Eisenhower was born. It was getting dark fast, and the museum and library were closed, but we were able to take a picture of his house, which was nice.

Along the way in Kansas we had to pass on a bunch of cool-looking roadside attractions because it was getting late. A quick list: The Oz Museum, Greyhound Hall of Fame, little Sweden, and lots and lots of forts.

Then we continued on continuing on. We weren’t really sure where we were going to stay that night. There were a few state parks we could camp at, but they were 30, 45 minutes out of our way. Plus, we drove through a couple of thunderstorm warnings in central Kansas on our way to Kansas City (never hit any serious rain), and as it was nearing the end of our trip, we weren’t sure that we wanted to get soaked by the rain. Bea had heard from her mom that they had gotten just pelted up there.

So as you can probably guess by now, we decided to stay in a hotel. We got to Kansas City around 10 p.m., maybe, and then started stopping at places, calling places, trying to find wireless Internet so we could look up places. Finally we ended up driving back west out of Kansas City, Miss., south through Kansas City, Kan., and into a southwest suburb called Overland Park. By this time, it was well after midnight, so we checked into the Doubletree, got our free cookies, ate them, and went to our room to sleep.

Wednesday, Aug. 22:

We woke in Moab, Utah and I started work in the KOA site, which had pretty good wireless Internet access. We got out of there around 1 p.m. again and headed north toward Arches National Park.

Arches National Park

It’s full of these naturally formed sandstone arches and spires that come in all different shades of red and orange and brown. The theory is that millions of years ago the area was once an ocean, and when dried up, it left a giant salt bed. Thick layers of rock were eventually deposited on top of the salt bed. Because there was salt underneath, the rock eventually eroded underneath, leaving these gaps that turned into arches and spires. Got it? There will be a test later on all this.

We didn’t have a whole lot of time here, so we weren’t able to drive and hike to the Delicate Arch, which is the most famous of the arches in the park. It’s the one that’s on a lot of Utah license plates. But we did get to go on a short hike to the North and South Window arches, as well as the Turret Arch. I actually think my favorite would have been the Landscape Arch, which is the longest in the park at about 300 feet. Sometime recently a 60-foot-long piece of rock just fell from the underside of this arch, making it even thinner. If you were under the arch at that time, you would have instantly become part of the geology.

East into Colorado

Once we crossed Utah and into Colorado, we started hitting these tremendous hills and our car’s engine groaned in protest, shifting to a lower gear automatically to pull us and all our junk up the inclines. At one point we were driving at about 11,000 feet and I was thinking that we were higher than any spot in New England, by about 6,000 feet. Our ears were popping like something that pops a lot, like soda or something, or like “pop,” as they call it in the Midwest.

For much of our Colorado drive, we were also following the path of the Colorado River, which was incredibly cool. At the Grand Canyon, we looked down at the river. Now we were driving alongside the river and looking up the mountains on either side of us.

Anyway, driving alongside the Colorado reminded me of William Least Heat Moon’s book River-Horse, where he travels across the country by rivers, from New York Harbor to the Columbia (even though he doesn’t go on the Colorado, I don’t think). If you haven’t read it, check it out. It’s probably my favorite book by him. It also reminded me somewhat of his more famous book, Blue Highways, because we were in the middle of a big trip. Then it occurred to me that those two books are about avoiding fast food chains and interstate highways and the general commercialization of America, and although we didn’t eat any fast food on our trip, we were all about the interstate highways. Then again, we didn’t have three months or however long it took for Moon to travel the country on its secondary roads, like he did in Blue Highways. I still think we’ve seen some cool things.

Vail and Cherry Creek

Eventually we drove into Vail, Colo. and took some pictures of the ski slopes and checked out the village areas there, which are very nice and fancy and so forth. But it was starting to get late by this point so we continued on toward Denver.

This was actually the first night in our trip to California and back that we didn’t have some kind of a reservation. Every other night, we had a reservation, even if we didn’t end up using it. But it was getting to be near the end of August and we were noticing that the campgrounds were less busy. The kids were going back to school. So we figured we would just find a campground and a spot pretty easily.

We were right. We went to Cherry Creek State Park just southeast of Denver and there were tons of spots. It took us about 20 minutes to figure out how to pay for a campsite during after-hours, but then we set ourselves up in a corner on a nice grassy spot. It was dark out but we’d gotten used to setting up the tent in the dark, so it was quick.