Strasburg, CO

I'm in Colorado! Yay! One of my 3.5 home states. (Montana, Colorado, Utah, and sort of Connecticut). It feels great to be back, though I'm still not to an area of the state that I've actually been in. I actually keep forgetting that it is CO and am surprised by the many CO liscense plates and Broncos stuff. It's still sorta flat and Kansas like out here. (We're about 40 miles east of Denver on I-70 right now).

The drive across Kansas really wasn't that bad. Not nearly as bad as I was expecting after the nightmare that was my Nebraska journey on my way east. It really helped a lot having a copilot! Even when we weren't talking (though we talked a lot!) just having another somebody there and awake with me, pushing me to keep going when I'm tired helped a lot. The miles really flew by. And best of all, the sun came out! Yay! It felt so so SO amazingly good to see and feel the sun again. At first we were noticing just a few random stripes on the ground that seemed a bit more brightly lit than the others. If we looked just right we could see where the sun was coming from to make those stripes, though it was still behind clouds.

Then, the moment happened. Blue sky! Just a speck of it but I was so excited I made Jody get out my camera and take a picture. It's been almost an entire week of no blue at all, and a couple of weeks that have been mostly gray. Sooooo not my style! The blue speck started to grow, and became a larger blue stripe. Then we started seeing more and more blue stripes as the clouds seemed to be peeling apart in front of us. Considering that we could see forever (one of the advantages of flatness) we could watch the clouds separate and move apart, turning the sky from thick and gray to beautiful blue.

All afternoon and into the evening the clouds were incredible and the lighting was perfect. For a little bit the sky was almost completely clear (and I got to be out in a t-shirt without freezing!), and then the clouds started making all sorts of crazy patterns in the sky. As the sun began to set, the clouds to the east were still thick, creating an amazing dark backdrop as the sun lit up the golden grasses and the green trees before it. Nearly every time I looked I saw something that belonged on a postcard.

So overall today was just a lot of driving, though we did spend a bit of time relaxing in the sun in Burlington, CO. I admit, I got off the highway because they had a carosel exciting enough to warrant a sign on the highway and I had to check it out. (And I was getting hungry and was hoping to find some "local grub" in an "adorable downtown locale"). Unfortunately we had no real luck on either front. No cute local restaurant, and the carousel is only open in the summer. However we did get to read the sign about the carousel, which described the animals it had....including a bear, a giraffe, and even a hippocampus. Yeah. Apparently along with the bear and giraffe there was a piece of brain matter. Or somebody relying far too heavily on spell check. The frightening part is that the town posted this as the large, official sign, and nobody noticed. I only skimmed the sign and didn't notice either, but Jody, an even better editor than I am, noticed and pointed it out to me. Unfortunately neither of us remembered to take a picture before we left.

While enjoying the grass and sunshine we decided it might finally be a good night to camp rather than heading all the way in to the city. We decided on the Strasburg KOA, the closest option to the metro area.

The place reminds me a lot of the KOA in Arkansas. The tent sites were most definitely put in as an after thought. We are again sandwiched between an interstate and a railroad track, with a patch of dry grass as our "site". Granted, there's nobody else out here so we really could use whatever area we wanted. To make it worse, they're no longer selling firewood so we couldn't build a fire. A rather pathetic introduction for Jody to Colorado camping, but it's turning in to one of those so ridiculous it's amazing kind of nights. Oh, but my personal favorite part of all of this is that the main street in Strasburg is Colfax, so tonight I am camping off of Colfax. I'm pretty sure that's the one and only time in my life that those words will be able to be uttered in a sentence!

We had planned to cook, but it was getting dark, getting windy, and getting cold, so we decided to head over to the itty bitty local BBQ place next door. After all we never got our good BBQ we'd planned on last night. So the two Jewish gals ventured out again in search of the very best pork. And the place was awesome! It more than made up for the crap we ate last night. We got the sampler platter so it had a bit of everything, along with 4 different sauces. Everything tasted amazing...except for the sausage. But who needs sausage when you have chicken, ribs, brisket, and some other sort of pork-like thing. Oh, and for dessert we had a deep fried twinkie. Neither of us really had room for dessert, but it was something we both wanted to try and figured what better time than now. It was really good, but we both agree it's sort of a been there done that thing. Nothing we're likely to crave again. Hopefully.

The restaurant (if you can call it that, it was 3 tables in a room about the size of your average living room) was just brimming with all the local fun and ambiance imaginable. It wasn't a tourist place at all. It was just the little spot where local Strasburgians spend their time and eat their meat. As far as I could tell it was being run by a woman and her mother, and there were cowboys and girls of all sorts coming through. Yeah, pretty much everything we could've asked for. And a lot more awesome than spaghetti over a camp stove!

We've changed time zones once again, and that's my excuse for now being VERY sleepy. Well that and that we drove for a good 10+ hours today! I think it's time to curl up in my sleeping bag on our most beautiful of dirt patches. And hey, it's right next to the playground, so who am I to complain? :)