12:05...

Durango, Colorado... reportedly a pretty place. Right now it's snowing, can't see shit. We got a late start this morning, we both woke up at 07:00 and went back to sleep. When we did get up, Karen went up to the lobby to get coffee and came back saying that it was snowing. Sure enough, it was...

More about last night: Karen has an old, old boyfriend that lives in Divide, Colorado. She ran into his brother when she was in Parsons at her dads' funeral last May and got his address and phone number and she's been off and on about calling him on this trip. This is a guy that she hasn't seen since he graduated from high school a year ahead of Karen, and she hasn't seen him since, so she was having some misgivings. I finally convinced her to call him, since todays' schedule would depend on whether or not we were going by Divide or doing a more southerly route.

Well, Karen couldn't find her address book, so she called information and got a number... she said that it didn't seem right but maybe it'd changed since she got it from his brother. So she called, and left a message on the answering machine, giving our number at the motel to call back.

We then went out to eat, then checked for messages when we got back. In the meantime, Karen had found her address book, and sure enough, it was a different number. She called, and the phone was answered by Kens' wife. There are evidently two Ken Browns in Divide, CO... anyway, Karen was talking to the wife, told her who she was and that she was from Parsons, and then Ken got on the phone. Her remembered Karen, of course, and was very surprised to hear from her.

Ken told Karen that they had just got back from Parsons less than an hour ago... from burying their son. He was 33 and going through a divorce and committed suicide. This was very obviously a very bad time to plan a visit. Karen and Ken made plans to get in touch in the future and we headed for Durango, since it was snowing in Cortez. We decided to wait on breakfast for Durango... mistake.

Durango is only fifty miles from Cortez... straight up, then straight down, it seemed like. There is a pretty high pass there, and we got blizzarded once again. It was 23 degrees F in the pass, and 36 F in Durango. And it continued to snow heavily while we were driving around Durango looking for a place to eat.

We wound up eating at Franciscos', a pretty good place, but it was mexican food again. I opted for the buffalo-burger (real buffalo) and it was pretty good. I just couldn't stomach any more mexican food, I'm pretty well sick of it. "Authentic Mexican Cuisine"; Hah! I'm sick of it. Give me my Taco Tico Americanized shit, please!

We will probably just head back to Kansas... watching the weather forecast on the TV in Franciscos... rain/snow here for the next three days... no fun at all... such is the life of the itinerant vacationers...

We continued eastward, and ran into more snow again on the next pass... the roads on the passes here seem to be fairly standard... two lanes going up, one coming down. Well, as we were ascending, there was a slow, heavy truck going about 20 in the right lane. There was a line of cars and other vehicles descending, one of them being a combination snow blade/sand spreading machine with his blinking yellow lights on. They were all in the right lane, where they should be.

I pulled out to pass the slow-moving truck and was almost up to his rear bumper when the sand-spreader pulled out into my lane not more than 100 feet ahead of me. I slammed on the brakes and just barely pulled in behind the truck as this vehicle passed by, not giving an inch. The asshole... my knees were weak for the next hour!

We were soon leaving the Rocky Mountains behind, out onto the great plains of Eastern Colorado. There were thunderstorms scattered around, some of them containing hail; we passed just to the north of one such storm which had just coated the ground white up to about 200 feet from the road that we were on. Hailstorms are impressive, from a distance as well as from within... we go just a little bit of small hail from that one, nothing exciting at all. We could see the clouds coming down, then getting blown back up to consolidate and solidify their loads of hail: I'm sure that they were producing some large hailstones.

The wind started picking up, gusting from the north at about 50MPH, shaking the old Cadillac around pretty good. Shortly after dark, it started raining like hell and blowing tumbleweeds over the road at amazing speeds. I told Karen that the tumbleweeds were restless... KAREN WAS NOT AMUSED. She does not like driving after dark or in the rain. "Not Amused" is not really very apt... very pissed is probably closer to the truth. The alternative, however, was stopping in a town twenty miles before it started raining, and I wanted to make it to Garden City, KS before we stopped. I love driving at night, and the rain and wind don't bother me at all. Since I was doing the driving, we made it to the Garden City Motel 8, going the last hundred miles in stony silence.

Man, I really hate it when that happens.