I wrote last seven days and 1260 miles ago. We have added two more states to our map, Colorado and Kansas, and some wonderful time with friends. After leaving Moab, with a promise to ourselves to return, we drove to Simonne and Steve Shuey’s new house in Glade Park, CO. The nearest real town is Grand Junction. For those who do not trace our family, Simonne is Dan’s sister-in-law, or more pointedly, Malena’s sister. Dan described the house as being “on top of the Colorado National Monument.” I did not quite grasp the meaning until I got the directions to the house. From Grand Junction one takes the Monument Road eight miles and at least 2,000 feet up through the park to a turn out for Glade Park about a third of the way up. We had been warned that there was a low clearance tunnel that we ought to be able to negotiate, but we had our doubts. For the complete story on that read Carol’s piece “What a sight we must have been” at http://cgstudio.net/mim/ I cannot improve on her telling. We had a wonderful visit and finally got to know Steve and Simonne as individuals and not as part of a family mob. Don’t get me wrong, I love family mob time, but we had nice time with them and plenty of time to talk, ride and hike.

We kept asking ourselves, out loud even, what route will we take from here and where will we go next. I have been getting a bit itchy to get east, as we have only three weeks left in our planned outing and Carol wants to get further south to get warmer. I 70 did not seem to be a compromise so we set out on US 50. Thank you NPR! They have done two pieces on the election process interviewing people who live along this most central US highway that predates the Interstates by many years. We asked about the weather and whether the road was in good shape. We never got around to asking how it crosses the Rockies. The short answer is it climbs from 7000 feet to 11,000 feet in 7 miles and them come right back down. We crested the summit in a very low gear going about 28 mph, I had time to read the speedometer and check all my gages as the engine, for the first time I can remember, was starting to miss and it clearly was laboring from the climb and the altitude. The trip down was in the same low gear and not much faster. I did not want to lose control on the descent. We motored on into Canon, CO and found the Fort Gorge RV Park, not open, but willing to take our cash and provide electric and sewer, water not turned on yet. Having plenty of fresh water and a surplus of gray water the combination was perfect for us. We used our on board water supply and left with empty holding tanks in the morning.

While we were brooding over the route we kept staring at the maps as if they had the answer to what route we should take. We noted that Kansas City was “only” a couple of hundred miles out of the way and we had friends, Dianne and Marty Lustig, who we had not seen in many years and when last heard from were in Prairie Village, KS a suburb of Kansas City. A quick internet search revealed that a couple of that name still lived at the address and with the phone number Carol had in her paper address book. We waited until a seeming appropriate hour the next morning to call to see if they remembered us and wanted to see us. They did and they did. A review of the maps showed that continuing on US 50 no longer made sense so while Carol continued to drive east I reset the mapping software and found a route up to I 70. We crossed the rest of Colorado, the high plains, and half of Kansas that day. Enough said. We alternated drivers every two hours through four shifts and called it quits at a roadside RV park in Russell, KS, birthplace of Robert Dole and Arlen Spector.

The next day, found us stopped at an auto parts store looking for a replacement for the windshield wiper that had had enough sun, sand, salt and whatever and started to shred as we drove through the rain. Thirty minutes of fussing and finally cutting down an oversize replacement and we were underway, having noticed that our Tow Defender, which is supposed to protect the car, has broken in a new and different way. This is not a show stopper, but it is very annoying and I will be having words with the manufacturer soon. A $400 safety item should stand up to the normal abuse we dish out. If not, it is worth nothing.

We had a wonderful visit visit with the Lustigs and the five grandchildren they are helping take care of. As we know about grandchildren under our care there are two wonderful moments. Hello and Goodbye. Of course by the time they are 16 they are much easier to spend a lot of time with.

Our route out of Prairie Village has taken us south to Springfield, MO where we are camped in the yard of a large truck service company. They are authorized Allison service people and we are here to have the 50,000 mile service on the transmission done tomorrow. It is really hard to believe that we have pushed this wonderful coach over 50,000 miles already and we still have a couple thousand before we get home. On the way we passed through Butler, MO the birthplace of Robert Heinlein, one of the all time great science fiction authors. We skipped Lamar, the birthplace of Harry S Truman.