The State of the Adventure
Well friends, here we are about a week into our adventure in Colorado. There is so much that has happened so far that it’s hard to recap it all. But, here’s a try.
We arrived in Denver on December 30th, fairly late at night. We slept in a Walmart parking lot. It was our first night sleeping at Walmart, and it wouldn’t be the last. Walmart, as it turns out - LOVES the casual car vagabond, and their official store policy welcomes RVs and other overnight campers at most of their locations stating, “Walmart values RV travelers and considers them among our best customers. Consequently, we do permit RV parking on our store parking lots as we are able.” The idea is that people who camp at Walmart, and use Walmart bathrooms to brush their teeth or, as in the case of your distressed author, wash their hair, will also say, “Hey, I should buy some yogurt for breakfast after I finish my sink shower.” I’ve always hated Walmarts, borderline reviled them, the over bright fluorescent lights and feeling of truckloads of cheap plastic being thrown at you from every direction - but I’ve come to sing a different tune since sleeping in their parking lot for four nights and knowing, with a deep gratitude, that I have a safe place to park the car and sleep a whole night through.
Hey, I should buy some yogurt for breakfast after I finish my sink shower.
We spent our first three nights in Denver. On December 31st, night #2, we were graciously hosted by former NDI CTO, and former boss of Christine, Chris Spence and his wonderful wife Maggy.
They held an incredible fiesta with world class Tequila, an impressive offering of food and beverage, and the honest-to-god best tamales a person has ever tasted. They offered us use of their guest bedroom for the night, and it was the first time after a week of traveling that we had a bed and shower. It was incredible: the bed felt huge and soft and the shower purifying.
One of the big lessons we’ve learned so far, is that car camping in the frigid cold comes with unique gifts and a set of challenges that we hadn’t expected. It takes an incomprehensible amount of time to get ready for bed and to get up in the morning. There are a series of tedious tasks that must happen every night and every morning and, while we’ve gotten more efficient at them, we still take 30 minutes to an hour to perform them, depending on how cold it is. With temperatures averaging around 10 degrees at night, staying warm is crucial, and we often oscillate between baring the cold and seeking warmth. At night, while preparing for bed, we must first find a place to park. We’ve spent four nights in Walmart parking lots, two nights at rest stops, and two nights parked at trailheads. Finding a place that’s quiet, and mostly legal is always our first concern. Once parked, we unload our essentials for the night from our tightly packed under-bed storage.
We need: toiletries (toothbrush, please!) pajamas, window shades, water bottles, headlamps, reading material, solar-powered electric blanket, and a propane powered heater for the especially frigid nights. We also need to put on layers to stay warm enough while we unpack and repack the car, usually two shirts, two jackets, two pairs of leggings, gloves, hat, and scarf. There’s not enough room under the bed for all our belongings, so what rests on top of the bed at day (food, extra clothes, etc) has to go into the front seat for the night. Once we’ve unpacked, packed, cleared and made the bed, and taken sufficient care of hygienic requirements, we have to change, in a now frozen car. We squeeze into the front seat along with grocery bags, spare jackets, and other items that need to remain there for the night, and perform a yoga-like series of movements to remove shoes, change clothes, and flatten ourselves into bed and under the sheets, while hoping to heaven we haven’t forgotten anything and wont need to make a nighttime bathroom stop. The bed is too close to the ceiling to sit up, and it’s not easy to get into, so once you’re in, you really don’t want to get up. It also turns out that many Walmarts aren’t 24 hours, and a nighttime restroom stop can become an hour-long un-packing, repacking, odyssey to drive to mile away away gas station bathroom.
We also talk about how hard it is to share all your personal space with someone all the time, even someone you love a lot.
Then, we negotiate. We’re two fairly tall people totaling just shy of 300 lbs, together. We share a child-sized bed with a 20lb sleeping bag and an armful of clothing: small bits of space matter, a lot. We talk about what the halfway point is between the bed, how the other is sneaking a toe past the sacred line, and whose side has better storage. We know it’s petty, and we also talk about how hard it is to share all your personal space with someone all the time, even someone you love a lot. Then we play the same game we play every night, roses and thorns, where we each share our highlights (roses) and lowlights (thorns) of the day. Always our highlights are the incredible sights, the awe-inspiring majesty of the mountains, and the thrill of adventure. We enjoy this kind of reflection and find it helps us to be both thankful and mindful of our days. You should try it too!
In the morning, we wake to a frozen car: our breath has formed condensation and frozen throughout every surface: the windows, the ceiling, and uncovered hair. We climb to the front seats, we turn on the car, we light our propane heater, and we wait for things to melt. While we wait, we brew some tea with a portable water boiler that plugs into the car’s cigarette lighter and definitely is not BPA free and eat fruit. We chat, we make plans, and we feel grateful, so grateful for the beautiful day dawning.
We’ve skied over 46,000 feet already over four days. We’ve gone ice fishing, which deserves a post in and of itself, and on Friday we’ll pick up a new alpine touring ski setup for Christine: Rossignol skis with Dynafit bindings and Scarpa boots.
On Sunday we do our first backcountry skiing to the 10th division huts in Colorado, and next week we’ll go dog sledding outside of Breckenridge.
Many more updates to come.
