Durango

Walmarts and driving for a couple of days thru Rock Springs WY and Craig CO heading towards Pagosa Springs where we spent a pleasant vacation a few years back.

The questions people ask are quite funny to us. The concept of not having a house to go back to baffles a lot of people

Here’s some questions and our answers to them.

Where do you live?

We live wherever the RV is parked. We sold everything and we are just having fun

Where are you going?

We aren’t going ANYWHERE, and we don’t have to be there anytime soon. So if we find somewhere we like, we’ll stop there. If we are somewhere we don’t like, we’ll leave.

How do you get your mail?

We try to discourage paper mail and try to use e-mail wherever possible. We have a mail forwarding service and all the paper mail goes there. We find a Post Office along the way and have our mail forwarded there, General Delivery. When we get to the town we stop at the Post Office and pick it up. It may be weeks before we get mail but that’s OK by us.

Won’t you be cold in that RV in the winter?

No. We’ll drive it to someplace that’s warm.

This week we’ve been applying the “Goldilocks Principle”. That’s where you move your RV until it’s “Not too hot and not too cold” Just like the Fairy Tale!

The nights were getting too cold in Yellowstone so we moved south about 500 miles and now the weather is “Just right” 70’s daytime and upper 40’s at night. If it gets colder here we’ll move again, provided we’ve seen and done everything we want to here.

We’re proud members of the “Elks”.

http://www.elks.org/

Elks are a benevolent organization supporting local and national charities, with Lodges across the country. The Elks organization isn’t some secret society, there’s no secret handshake or mystic ceremonies. If you are a US citizen in good standing and believe in God you can join.

Some Lodges have RV parking for members. This is really good for several reasons.

1 There’s a welcoming place to go to, you feel at home as soon as you arrive

2, Lodges are generally in populated areas so if you want to spend time visiting a city then the Lodge is close to the city center unlike the average RV park.

3. Your fellow Elks know all the good places to see and things to do and gladly share that knowledge.

So now when we refer to the Elks in our blog you know what we’re talking about

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You can see the roof of our RV to the left of the Elk's Lodge roof.

We stopped at the Grand Junction CO Elks Lodge. We stopped there because we like to cut our travel time down into reasonable chunks and 150 miles a day meant Grand Junction was going to be a good break. We’d never heard of Grand Junction before. As far as we know it’s not famous for anything. We’ve never heard people say “You have to visit here”.

It has been a pleasant surprise then to find that the city has a pleasant Main Street. four breweries, an awesome National Monument, very reasonable gas prices, good shopping, good restaurants, two car museums, an Air and Space museum, a Western Museum and a whole lot more.

It would be fair to say that we LIKE Grand Junction and I expect we’ll be back.

We had planned to drive to Silverton or perhaps Durango depending how I felt. The road is known as “The Million Dollar Highway” and it was worth every penny. It climbed from 4500’ to 11000’ with corners as slow as 10mph and 8 % grades up and down. It was magnificent scenery made breathtaking by the fall colors at altitude that wrapped around the mountains.

In the end we made it to Durango but had a struggle finding somewhere to stay.

Turned out there was an art festival on the weekend we arrived. The only campground we could find close to town was the “United Campground” which was expensive and rundown. Handy for the center of Durango however and we did a little exploring. We were here several years ago. The big attraction is the Durango - Silverton Railroad. A steam train ride thru the mountains. It’s a “Must Do" trip if you’re here, and funnily enough it runs right thru our campground! Not just alongside but right thru the middle. You get to enjoy the train whistle four times a day.

We weren’t happy with that park and spent a day getting caught up on business things and finding another park. We found one 20 miles away on the other side of Durango in Bayfield CO.

The Bayfield Riverside RV Park was everything the other park wasn’t. Well maintained, clean, quiet and outstanding beautiful, in fact we believe this is the prettiest campground we’ve ever been to ever. Same price as the other one but with cable TV, and instead of a railroad running thru it this one has a privately stocked trout stream! 

Because it’s private you can fish there without a license. It’s what’s called “Catch and Release”, you can’t keep any fish you catch. You have to release them unharmed. 

Not a problem for me, if you don’t catch anything you don’t have to release them!!

Oh and they have this character there. Al the Alpaca.

One final selling point? The small picturesque town of Bayfield. Barely a mile from the campground has a Brewery with some nice beer. Visit the Bottom Shelf Brewery if you’re in town. The Oatmeal Stout is nice and the Red excellent.