Day 3

After all the star gazing last night, we didn't get off to a very early start. Before leaving Ft. Collins, we visited the Colorado State University campus and enjoyed walking around its park-like grounds. I suppose this is what our English Cottage Garden next to the Japanese garden could look like--if we never went on road trips.

As we passed through Denver and the heavy traffic, which is not even close to Los Angeles, I remembered why I moved to Moscow where it doesn't even take five minutes to get across town during rush hour--which lasts about ten minutes. It was good to leave Denver behind and be back in the countryside again where we saw more antelope off and on the rest of the day as we cut across the top corner of New Mexico past volcanoes on a mile high plateau to Texas.

Before making a beeline to Amarillo, our goal for the night, we stopped in Pueblo, CO for a stroll through the historic Arkansas Riverwalk district and some lunch. Talk about gentrification. Pueblo took this forlorn, dismal area and completely transformed it into a riverfront of vibrant shops and lots of foot traffic paralleling San Antonio.

I wonder what a little water would do for revitalizing downtown Moscow. Maybe some of that reclaimed sewer water would do the trick. We could have gondoliers and everthing. Moscow could become known as the Venice of the West. But, instead of Gondoliers, we'd have Vandaliers named after our football team.

Even though the light was wrong, I couldn't resist a picture of the magnificent Pueblo railroad station built in 1890 when the robber barons reigned supreme. It sort of puts the station at Kendrick, Idaho to shame. This one's for you, Janice, and there's a municipal court across the street so you would feel right at home.

It has been a trip of trails starting off with Lewis and Clark and Chief Joseph in Idaho and Montana. Then the Oregon trail in Wyoming. Today we crossed the Kit Carson trail and the Santa Fe trail. We even visited the site of the famous LP ranch in Texas where just about every desperado and cowboy hung out for novels to be written about them including Billy the Kid.

Gas prices so far were the lowest in Coeur d'Alene and pretty much consistent elsewhere at $2.99 with an occasional dip to $2.85. We've paid as much as $3.19, however. Expecting gas to be really cheap when we hit Texas, it wasn't--at least in the hinterlands. And that is in the land where I think gas was invented. However, in Amarillo where we are spending the night tonight gas seems to be about $2.87.

I wonder why they call Amarillo "am are rill o" when it really should be pronounced "am are ree yo". I guess it's for the same reason that in Idaho a llama (yama) is called a "lam a"--as in Dalai Lama.

Roadkill count for the day was a mere two racoons and a skunk. I think the people in Colorado eat their roadkill quicker than the people in Wyoming and Montana. We're expecting some armadillos tomorrow or as they call them here, Texas road bumps, as we head to Houston.