Musings at Altitude

It took 51 hours to drive home from Houston.  This was about 24 hours longer than usual, as we got held up in Wichita Falls, Texas, waiting for the highways to open after a fast moving blizzard blocked all the roads that would have taken us back into Colorado.  Fortunately, we found a hotel with a Starbucks 10 minutes away and a Red Lobster within walking distance.  It doesn’t get much better than that if you’re stranded.  And it certainly was significantly better than the last time we heard the roads were closed and kept driving hoping to get as far as possible before having to stop.  That time, just a couple of year ago, we ended up staying in an emergency shelter on New Year’s Eve in Dumas, Texas.  We learned some valuable lessons through our time at the shelter, so this time we stopped further away from the closed roads where hotel rooms were still available!

When we got back on the road today and I spent hours staring at the fairly non-descript Texas landscape, I realized how much I really appreciate Colorado.  I have two pictures to share.

This first one is the view from the road in Texas:

And this second one is the view from the road in Colorado:

There is a stark contrast between the flat and truly sleep inducing view in the plains of Texas versus the mountainous and quite majestic views in Colorado. 

I find myself literally waking up as I get sight of the Rockies in Northeastern New Mexico, and then I’m wide awake as I charge through the mountain passes and enter Colorado. 

So I’m glad to be home!  I’m excited to wake up to the purple mountains’ majesty this week and enjoy the serenity of the views and mountain breeze.  I’m also excited to quit looking for ways to entertain ourselves on an incredibly long drive. 

At one point during the most boring parts of the drive, we kept tracking the numbers on our mile-o-meter, and even took a picture when we hit “five of a kind”.  The full house was interesting.  Four of a kind was pretty exciting.  But nothing beats five of a kind!

By the fact we were taking pictures of our odometer you can hopefully sense how non-descript the scenery was at that time outside the car!

But we’re home, and we’ll quickly get back in our routine.  And hopefully we won’t be on another long road trip for a while.  At least not until we’re close to the next five of a kind on the mile-o-meter (that’s 88,888 if you were struggling with that one) and in the middle of the summer so absolutely no chance of road closures because of blizzards!