It Keeps Changin' Fast, And It Don't Last For Long
The best laid plans and all that. The second day of our Southwestern road trip was rough. We started out on a Thursday. We got up and left at 6:30 am, only a half hour later than we planned. Which, for us is REALLY good. Our goal wasto drive to Glenwood Springs, Colorado, which was supposed to take us about fourteen hours. Of course, the winds were insane all through Nebraska. I told John that he might have to pry my hands off the steering wheel, I had to hold on so tight. One semi got blown almost halfway into my lane. I was able to slide over enough, but I was so scared I almost pooped myself. Then there was construction and single lanes and reduced speed limits, and finally, when we were about 20 minutes from our goal, we were just stopped for a while. When traffic started rolling again, we didn’t see any accidents, or any other reasons for the hold-up, so who the hell knows what that was all about. ANYWAY, we made it to Glenwood Springs right about at 9:30, and we even found a good place to eat dinner. That day wasn’t THE day I started talking about in this post, but it was stressful, and that’s where the next day started.
We woke up Friday to a view of snow covered mountains from our motel balcony. I was giddy because I had a plan for the day - a cheesy and ridiculous plan, but those are my favorite kind. I love road trips. I love all the weird quirky things you can find in small towns around the country. I want to see the world’s largest ball of twine, I want to check out all the murals, I can’t wait to experience some crazy thing I can’t see where I live in Iowa, and I am lucky that John will put up with all my kooky dreams.
We had most of a day in Glenwood Springs. So, I checked out the dorky things to do around town and found a rail to trail that went to Aspen. We weren’t going to have time to do the whole trail, but we COULD do part of it. In my research, it looked like we could drive to the town of Woody Creek, park our car, then ride about 9 miles to Aspen, where there just HAPPENED to be a John Denver memorial at the end of the trail. I should probably be embarrassed by this, but as most of you know, I don’t have any shame. I used to LOVE John Denver when I was a kid. Even after all the Mormon kids in my neighborhood told me it was bad to like him because he mowed his lawn in the nude, I still loved him. When I was nine I wanted to move to Colorado and hug trees and marry John Denver. Yeah, I never said I was practical.
So, when I heard there was a John Denver Memorial and that I could ride my bike to it, I was all in. My poor husband rolled his eyes, but he figured out all the logistics to make my nine year old girl dreams come true…Or as close as I was going to get, since I was already married, and John Denver died in 1997.
My grand plan was to ride bikes from Woody Creek to Aspen, pay my respects to Mr Rocky Mountain High, kick around Aspen for a little minute, ride bikes back to Woody Creek and have lunch at the bar where Hunter S. Thompson used to hang out. You know, just to make sure we got the full spectrum of quirky pop culture experiences in the time allowed us. It sounded great, right? Well, maybe not to most people, but I was excited.
So, we drove our car to Woody Creek, and before we could find a place to park, we saw a sign that said, “Speed bump”. I should have thought of that sign in 1970’s terms. We were used to 2025 Midwestern college town speed deterrents. A kinder, gentler version that isn’t even a bump, so much as a hump. Silly us. We slowed down and If it were a normal speed hump, we would have been fine. But this one must have been put in place back when John Denver was singing songs about Jacques Cousteau’s boat and it was closer to the size of a pony wall. Did I mention that we have a Honda Fit? They are pretty low to the ground, and it was no match for this speed BUMP. We went over it and our car bounced so hard that the mountain bikes on the rack behind our car slammed into our back windshield and shattered it. Have you ever heard of such a thing? I was kind of in shock. I just kept asking, “How did that even happen? I don’t understand how that happened?” To which, John had no answer. Nor should he have. It was a conundrum.
John tried to call auto repair shops around Glenwood Springs, but no one had a windshield handy. They don’t make Honda Fits anymore, so they would have to order the windshield, and one person told us they could get us one by Tuesday, but we were going to be two stops away on our road trip by then. One company made us give her all of our insurance info before she even looked to see if they had a windshield handy. Which they didn’t. By that time, I was done being in shock, and had moved right on to having a nervous breakdown. I’m mercurial that way.
In the above conversations, there was mention of a thing called a “crash wrap”. We had to take a good hard look at our options and make a decision. We could order the back windshield from a place in Iowa City, and turn around and drive AAALLLL that way through forty days and forty nights of Nebraska back home, or we could drive back to Glenwood Springs and see if we could find a place that had a crash wrap and continue on our trip, hoping that our car made us look trashy enough that no one would want to take a knife to our crash wrap and steal all of our janky crap. We opted to head to Glenwood Springs, driving slowly enough that all our clothes and camping gear wouldn’t fly out of the gaping maw that was our hatchback.
Back in Glenwood Springs, we were lucky enough to find a place that not only had a crash wrap, (basically, a glorified gigantic piece of Saran wrap that clings to your back windshield) but put it on for us for free. John asked, “So, this will withstand highway speeds?” To which the crash wrap installer answered, “That’s what they tell me…” Needless to say, we sped over to the nearest Target for some tape enforcement.
At this point we were faced with two new options. We could either drive to our campground in Moab early, or do what we were originally going to do that afternoon - head to the hot spring pools. I said I would love to just go and chill out and get to do at least one of the things I planned for the day. So, I went to my first hot springs. This place appeared to be the mother of all hot springs. It had a two block long hot springs pool, several smaller hot springs of varying temperatures, with waterfalls, and one had an infinity edge, and another had built-in jacuzzi lounge chairs. I even paid the few dollars more to be able to use the athletic club, so we had access to their gym, sauna, steam rooms, showers, (which we needed after smelling faintly of rotten eggs) and racquetball courts (if we knew how to play racquetball, that is). It was a great choice, if I do say so myself. It was a lovely way to recover from my nervous breakdown, and it felt so fancy.
After taking the waters, we went to downtown Glenwood Springs to get lunch, which is just an adorable town. We found a place with good food and on top of that, we got our drugs of choice to further settle our nerves. By that, I mean John got a beer and I got a chocolate milkshake. Then we got into our white trash mobile with all our possessions, literally held together with plastic wrap and duct tape, and like the Joads, we headed West into the sunset, leaving my 1970’s pop culture dreams behind, to be fulfilled on a later road trip.
This is truly the glass half full!
Oh man! Those hot springs sound like salvation after a day like that. Thanks for sharing and here's hoping all goes well in your future travels.