Held Up in the Mountains

STATE VISITED: Colorado

AAAAAHHHHHHHH!!! I left my computer in the lovely Grand Hyatt in Denver. The charming people in security have promised to UPS it to me, but the way we're moving around, there's no easy place to have it shipped to. So they're sending it back to New York. Meanwhile I have to use Tom's computer, which is much cooler than mine. Niiiiiiice.

Well, when I should have been packing my computer, we were having one last walk around Denver, while Bob took care of some phone calls back to the office in New York. That's when we found the Brown Palace Hotel, which has one of the coolest lobbies I've ever seen -- a nine-story atrium with a stained-glass skylight at the top, and wrought-iron railings around all the balconies overlooking the atrium. Awesome, especially considering that it was built in 1892,, way before the Hyatt Corporation started slapping garden atriums on all their hotels.

Near the elevators I was fascinated by a facing pair of murals, one depicting travelers arriving by stagecoach, the other showing them descending the steps of an airplane (albeit a 1940s-era plane). The more things change...




We hit the road at (ahem) 10:30 (those pesky phone calls) and headed due west on I-70. I kept snapping pictures to show how the mountains grew taller around us, mile by mile -- the scrubby brown hills were overtaken by pine-shrouded peaks, and eventually granite summits with patches of snow.


We never got quite high enough to have snow around us -- I don't think they build highways that high -- but we did get over 10,000 feet in places. As we first hit the Continental Divide at the Vail summit, our ears popped -- and so did a bag of Tostitos we had in the back seat.

Back east we have roadside signs warning to watch out for deer crossing. Out here, the signs alert you to look for elk and bighorn sheep. No actual wildlife sightings, however, except for some jackrabbit roadkill, a pair of deer waiting to cross the highway, and one scared little bunny trembling by the road's verge.

We went a little out of our way so we could see Vail, the chi-chi ski resort, all tricked up to look like a mini-Gstaad. There were cyclists all over the place (they've laid out a nifty bike path), and some people lounging by pools and eating on the outdoor patios of restaurants, but nothing like what I imagine the crowds must be in ski season. It's a little precious, I must say.

We turned off the interstate just past Vail -- ignoring the commands of Ms. Garmin, that interstate-obssessed minx, who wanted us to go all the way to Grand Junction -- and started our day's odyssey down two-lane mountain highways, where the towns are few and far between. The next sizeable place we came to was the poetically-named Leadville, where fortunes were made in lead mining in the 1880s and 1890s. The main downtown street is still lined with substantial stone buildings, and wide enough for quite an impressive gun shoot-out, like in the movies. All the place needs is hitching posts in front of the saloons instead of parked cars.

We had lunch in the Golden Burro Cafe (with the adjoined Brass Ass Bar). Here is a picture of Hugh enjoying his Coke with an improvised extra-long straw. Note that the rest of us at the table do not get to have straws with our drinks; Hugh commandeered them all. Ah, well, let's indulge him, he'll be going away to college soon.

Several miles south of Leadville, we turned west again on US 50, which runs through the Gunnison River Valley -- a truly spectacular stretch of mountain landscape. For a while, the river frisks along next to the highway, twisting and turning through the mountain meadows. Eventually, though, it widens into the beautiful Blue Mesa Lake, which runs for a few miles. At the bottom is a dam, and below that the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, a national park that we wished we'd had time to hike around. That's the trouble with this cross-country agenda -- all we can do is skim the surface. On the other hand, when you think that just two days ago we were rolling through Kansas wheatfields, the compare-and-contrast aspect of this odyssey is amazing.

We stopped for McFlurries at a McDonald's in Gunnison, which seemed more of a viable town than Leadville -- a bit of historic downtown left, but lots of motels and restaurants and even a college in town, Western Colorado State.

In Montrose, we turned south on Highway 550. I hadn't realized that this road -- a route we picked for convenience's sake -- was the fabled Million Dollar Highway, which I wrote about in 500 Places to Take The Kids Before They Grow Up. It's named that because it cost a million dollars to build, back in the 1880s or whenever, to serve a string of mining towns during the gold and silver rushes. The section from Ouray to Silverton is incredibly scenic -- and one of the scariest drives I've ever had to drive in my life. Hairpin turns and switchbacks, at intense altitudes, with no guard rails -- now I regret that I recommended it to readers. (I'm glad I dropped it from the second edition.) And I had the bad luck to be the driver on duty for that stretch of road, with some serious backseat driving from my co-driver. Do you know how hard it is to accelerate uphill when you've just had to slow down to 10 MPH to get around a sharp curve? I'm just glad we weren't trying to cross that pass an hour later, when it was beginning to get dark.

Around 7:30 we pulled into Silverton, another of those historic mining towns, though one with a bit more pizzazz than Leadville. We're staying at the Wyman House Hotel, built in 1903, a lovely late Victorian hotel that's now a frilly bed-and-breakfast. Not our usual hotel fare, but that's the only type of hotel they have in this town. Well, I guess we can sleep in brass bed with flowery wallpaper for one night.

Rocky Mountain High

STATE VISITED: Colorado

You've gotta love a city that's as pedestrian-friendly as Denver. The city fathers here have really figured out the transit alternatives -- light rail, buses, a free shuttle that crosses downtown continually along pedestrianized 16th Street. There are bikes everywhere, too. I gather that Denver's downtown used to be sketchy, but now you walk around and there's shops and cafes lined up, blocks between the skyscrapers turned into neat public parks, and warehouses on the edges of downtown converted to condos and lofts. Somebody is clearly doing something right.

We walked first from our hotel to the state capitol, with its tall gold-skinned dome. We were told that if you stand on the thirteenth step leading up to the capital, you'll be exactly one mile above sea level. Unfortunately, there was some sort of bill-signing ceremony taking place right on the thirteenth step, so we couldn't check it out for ourselves.



Those pioneer trails we learned about back in Independence? One route, called the Smoky Ridge Trail, ended right here in Denver, an end point for both of the big stagecoach companies of the time, Butterfield and Wells Fargo. This fountain near the capitol marks where that stagecoach terminus once stood. I love the statue of the gun-toting stagecoach guard on top.

The guy who founded Denver, a General Larimer, did the shrewd political thing and named the city after the then territorial governor, who was called Denver. But the general couldn't resist naming the main commercial street after himself. During Denver's mining heyday in the 1870s and 1880s, Larimer Street was where all the action in Denver was. When the silver market went bust in 1893, however, this silver-mining boom city became a bust city, and Larimer Street turned into a notorious skid row.


Then, a few years ago, urban renaissance targeted Larimer Street, and the decrepit old buildings were all spiffed up. Now they've got Starbucks, cutesy shops, and cafes in them. I guess those cables strung over the street (the historic bit is only a block long) are strings of lights at night, which may be an enchanting effect. In the daylight, though, it looks more like some kind of aviary at a zoo.




I do like Denver's 19th-century architecture though -- the round arches, the big blocks of stone, the little neoclassical cornices and borders. Maybe it's because Denver's boom ended so abruptly that these turn-of-the-century gems didn't get knocked down. This is a cool one we saw -- the name (if you can read the carved stone plaque over the doorway) is the Ghost Building.

In other cities you have stone lions guarding the steps of the main courthouse; in Denver, it's bighorn sheep perched there. I wouldn't mess with them.


Denver feels to me a lot like Seattle -- the same kind of progressive, no-nonsense vibe. Okay, so it's got mountains instead of Puget Sound, and it doesn't have the Space Needle or Pike Place Market. (Significant losses, there.) Still, it has a great city personality.

While we were walking around downtown, we discovered this great walkway / bike path running along a rushing creek, sunken below street level. They keep the speeding bikes and skaters on one side and walkers and joggers on the other, so you don't get run down. On a hot day like today, it was great to be strolling next to the water, hidden away from the traffic.






In the afternoon we drove out to Boulder, which is only about a half hour northeast of the city, snuggled even closer to the mountains. Boulder is the sort of big college town where I'd bet people never leave, even after they graduate. Why would anyone leave? It's full of bookstores and cafes and record shops and trendy clothing boutiques; the west end of town has block after block of handsome Queen Anne-style houses with broad front porches and enormous shade trees.


Two completely idiosyncratic landmarks we had to find in Denver: Jax Fish House (left), where some guy named Hosea who was Hugh's favorite Top Chef contestant cooks; and this anonymous looking tech-park office on the outskirts where some cycle wizard is supposedly building a super-customized bike for Bob. If it ever gets finished.

Then back to town for the Rockies game! Coors Field really impressed us; it's got that retro thing going (I love these downtown stadiums where people can walk to the game), but inside it's roomy and nicely open to the mountain breezes.















The obligatory fountains in the outfield . . . .


... and the Rockies mascot. I think it's a stegosaurus. How that is connected to the Rockies, I have no idea, but the little kids loved him. Probably because he reminds them of Barney. (Is Barney still on TV?)

This was probably the best game we've seen so far. It was tied 4-4 from the fourth inning on, but there were lots of hits, so victory always seemed to be in the balance. Plenty of pitching changes, pinch hitters -- all sorts of unpredictable elements. The crowd was noisy and friendly; there weren't a lot of fans from the opposing team, the Washington Nationals -- too far away -- so everyone could afford to be genial.

The Rockies finally squeaked out a run in the bottom of the eighth, and their closer managed to wrap things up in the top of the ninth. The bizarre thing was that the win was credited to a relief pitcher, Alan Embree, who came in briefly in the 8th. Just after he took the mound, the Nationals runner on first tried to steal, and Embree whirled around and caught him out, ending the inning. In the next inning, the Rockies scored the winning run, when Embree was still technically the pitcher, so he got credited with the win. But when the Rockies next took the field, Embree was replaced -- he never actually threw a single pitch. How often does that happen, that the winning pitcher didn't throw a pitch? You gotta love the wackiness of baseball.

We're Not In Kansas Anymore

STATES VISITED: Missouri /Kansas / Colorado

Today was our biggest mileage push, barreling across the whole of Kansas and a goodly portion of Colorado – over 600 miles in one day. We figured there were fewer attractions to see in Kansas, so we might as well just drive like a batmobile out of hell.

Naturally, once we got going, we discovered that I-70 through Kansas offers non-stop tourist action. The Legendary Dorothy House, in Liberal KS! The Steinberg Natural History Museum in Hays KS! The hometown of Wild West sharpshooter Annie Oakley in (you guessed it) Oakley KS! The world’s largest prairie dog town in Grainfield KS! The Prairie Museum in Colby KS! And, only a hundred miles or so off the road, Castle Rock, the Pioneer Museum (in Nebraska, actually, but so long as you’re in the area), and the world-famous Rock City in Minneapolis, KS, which used to be advertised in huge yellow letters on the roofs of barns all over the Midwest (those that weren’t already advertising Mammoth Cave or Mail Pouch Tobacco). Alas, we had no time for any of it.

On the other hand, the landscape was worth the whole trip. First, between Manhattan and Salina, we rolled through the Flint Hills, a luminous rolling panorama of rounded hilltops and wooded hollows and outcrops of gray stone, in spots almost reminiscent of Ireland. The soil here is too thin and rocky for much agriculture, so a fair bit remains of the original tallgrass prairie that used to blanket this part of the world. The grass grows taller here because eastern Kansas isn’t as dry as western Kansas, and it’s a rich mix of blue stem and other grasses sprinkled with wildflowers. It was still too early in the season for the really tall growth – five or six feet high – but beautiful nonetheless.

We stopped for lunch at a Dairy Queen in Abilene, home of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Not surprisingly, after yesterday’s Truman marathon, the kids refused to visit the Eisenhower site. Oh, well, another opportunity squandered.

By the way, notice that yellow emblem on the road signs. It’s supposed to be a sunflower – Kansas is known as the Sunflower State. After the beehive on Utah road signs, this is now my next favorite state highway emblem.

The terrain became much flatter west of Salina. The only trees we could see were planted in a dense cluster around the farmhouses – otherwise it’s just a horizon-wide sweep of high plains. Crops stretched out on either hand – first soybeans on the right and wheat on the left, then changing to wheat on the left and soybeans on the right, the soybeans sparkling in intense green, the wheat a plush carpet of dry gold.

There wasn’t as much corn as I had expected, though -- so much for “I’m as corny as Kansas in August.” Maybe it’s just too dry for corn. Wherever we saw corn, I also noticed these spidery steel irrigation contraptions.

Houses are few and far between out here. Every once in a while, you'll see something mirage-like shimmering on the horizon that looks like a cluster of condo towers, but it turns out to be a huge complex of silos and grain elevators. It made me think of the scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy and her friends see the Emerald City towering in the distance -- I wonder if L. Frank Baum had this in mind?

Another thing I noticed, agriculture-wise -- instead of those spotted herds of dairy cows like we have back east, the cows here were mostly these brawny black cattle. Black Angus? Some kind of beef cattle, for sure. I suppose this is the part of their lives where they get to frolic free before they get shipped off to some hellhole of a feedlot. (See, I've been reading my Michael Pollan.)

Given the wide open spaces, I guess it’s not surprising that we’d roll through a few miles of land that have been converted to a new high-tech wind farm.

If you look close, down to the right you’ll see an old-fashioned prairie windmill, like something out of Shane or High Plains Drifter, dwarfed by those gleaming steel blades of the new giants. (Props to Hugh for getting this all in one shot.)

Past the wind farm, we also saw a few farms with a number of little oil wells pumping away amidst the soybeans. The heads of these pumps remind me of the cartoon crows Heckle and Jekyll, dipping their beaks rhythmically up and down.

At long last we crossed the line into a new time zone – the evocatively named Mountain Time – and soon after crossed the border into Colorado. We thought we'd see mountains right away -- HA! No, just more high plains, though it did get a little more hilly, with tufts of silvery sagebrush cropping up in the grassy margins along the road.

And hey -- guess what the speed limit is here? TAKE THAT YOU CONNECTICUT WIMPS!! Needless to say, everybody still drives at 10 miles over the speed limit.

Then the real drama of the drive began -- we drove right into a violent thunderstorm. We could spot it several miles ahead across the plains -- really dramatic. It lasted for about 20 intense minutes, then we could see the blue skies ahead, and we got our first glimpse of the Rockies in the distance. (You can't see it in these pictures, though.) Here's the sequence:

Traffic in Denver was abysmal -- there had been a six-car pile-up on I-70 east of downtown, and we got caught in the standstill traffic. By the time we pulled into the Grand Hyatt, we were thoroughly exhausted from our long day's journey into night. Which meant just one thing -- room service dinner!! YAY!!!!!

Independence Day

STATES VISITED: Missouri / Kansas

Not making much progress, eh? Well, the way the baseball schedules worked out, we had to stay in one place over the holiday weekend, and we had piles of laundry to do, too. All of which made a perfect excuse to take an extra day in Missouri and drag the family up to Independence to visit the home of one of my favorite Presidents, Harry S Truman.

As I think I mentioned earlier, I've been reading a book called Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure, by Martin Algeo, which chronicles a cross-country car trip Harry and Bess made in 1953 from Independence back east to Washington, D.C., and then back home again. It's a very entertaining account of early auto tourism, and as it happens, Harry and Bess stopped in many of the towns we've visited on this trip -- Hannibal, Indianapolis, Columbus, Wheeling. It just seemed too perfect a coincidence.

The more I read about Harry Truman, the more I like him. This high-gabled white Victorian house was where he and Bess lived from the day they got married (when they lived with her mother and brothers) to the day he died, with a few stints in Washington thrown in here and there. While he was President, it was referred to as the "summer White House," but there's hardly anything Presidential about it. Inside, it's furnished in a random mix of antique love seats and needlepointed slipper chairs along with mid-century chintz-covered armchairs and end tables. The kitchen is circa 1950, with a red-Formica-topped kitchen table where Harry and Bess ate breakfast and lunch. Harry's book-lined study is more of a Father Knows Best-ish den than a baronial reading room. Those books weren't just for display, though -- Truman, who had no more than a high-school degree, was a largely self-educated man and voracious reader. The house is a great testament to Truman's desire not to get swell-headed just because he'd accidentally landed in the job of President.

Though it's only a few minutes from Kansas City, Independence still feels like a sleepy small town where everybody knows everybody else. Except for a series of brass plaques identifying certain landmarks -- the church where Harry and Bess got married, the barber shop where he had his hair cut, the store above which his regular poker club met, the courthouse (right) where he served as judge for a dozen years or so -- the town isn't cashing in on the Truman association, certainly not the way that Hannibal cashes in on Mark Twain.


I guess that's because Truman himself refused to cash in. Though his finances were often tight (no presidential pension back then), he turned down lots of lucrative offers because he felt they would demean the presidency. Instead he spent his post-White House years writing his memoirs and raising funds to build archives for all his papers: the first presidential library, and some say still the best. I haven't been to the others so I can't compare, but the Truman Library was fascinating. The exhibits on Truman's presidency walk you through a complicated era -- rebuilding Europe, the development of the H-bomb, the dawn of the Cold War, the Korean War, McCarthyism, the birth of the civil rights movement -- concisely and yet intelligently, so that even the kids could make sense of it. Poor Truman -- what a world he inherited. And yet he managed to wade through it, making tough decisions and steering a clear course.



Besides the exhibits on the Truman presidency, the Library has preserved Truman's own on-site office, where he met with high-profile visitors from Richard Nixon to Pat Boone, as well as a detailed reproduction of the Oval Office in the White House at the time Truman occupied it. Naturally they have the original desk plaque for which Truman was most famous:



Harry and Bess are buried side by side in the courtyard of the Library, under modest white marble gravestones. (She outlived him by ten years, continuing to live in the family house in Independence.) There are several of his letters to her on display, and it's absorbing to read them -- you sense how much he adored her, and how she kept him grounded.



At one time, Independence was apparently a big deal -- the launching point for wagon trains setting out on the Santa Fe Trail and the homesteading wagons of pioneers hitting the Oregon Trail. In its heyday, Independence had no less than 7 blacksmiths helping folks get geared up for the long road west. We stopped in the National Frontier Trails Museum to get that story, but there wasn't really too much we didn't already know (I did, after all, write a book once on the Pony Express) and we were getting hungry.

Grace went to her first drive-in movie last night, and so today she went to her first drive-in restaurant -- not a drive-through but a drive-in, with carhops and everything. It was just an ordinary Sonic, but a new experience for the kids. Apparently it turned them temporarily goofy.

Back to the hotel, time for a dip in the pool and then a visit to the coin-op laundry in the basement. (Man, how fast the dirty clothes pile up.) Then we went back to the Plaza for dinner, taking a roundabout route that crossed over the state line into Kansas, just so we could say we'd done another state. We drove through Mission Hills -- plenty of choice real estate there, I must say.

I wanted to eat at P.F. Chang's, but Grace held out for the Cheesecake Factory across the street. In my opinion the Cheesecake Factory is the lowest-common-denominator kind of chain restaurant, but there is no arguing with Grace. Happy now, Grace?