Worst Vacation of My Life (So Far) - Part Three

Again, we did a great job waking up and eating breakfast. One the road by 7:00 again, we were nearing the western end of Rio Grande County when we reached a highway closure because of an accident. The federal highway was being diverted onto three miles of county-maintained dirt roads. As semi trucks and RVs tried to pass each other, the detour was itself blocked by a cattle drive. I don’t blame the cattlemen, who probably were expecting a car or two, not a diverted highway-full of traffic. Our family enjoyed seeing actual horse-mounted cowboys (the last cowboys I saw were ATV-mounted in New Mexico) driving cattle right next to our car.
Once back on the highway, we continued on through a county that many consider the most difficult to reach in the lower 48 states: Hinsdale County, Colorado. It’s such a challenge because there’s really no reason at all to go there or go through there unless you are meaning to do specifically that.
To get there we went through Creede, Colorado, which I thought was one of the most beautiful parts of the state. However, it was while driving through Creede that we had the misfortune to start listening to Judy Blume’s Superfudge.
I normally like Judy Blume. I will forever be grateful for what her book Wifey did for me when I was a teenaged boy. But the Peter Hatcher character is unforgiveable. He’s a jerk to his brother Fudge, sure, but he’s also a jerk to his parents for having another child, a jerk to his dad for moving the family to Princeton, a jerk to his mom for wanting to go back to school, a jerk to his friend from New York and his new friend from Princeton, and yet for some reason thinks some eight-foot-tall Amazon in his new class is going to like him. When I was a kid and read these books, I was focused on Fudge, so I was surprised to find out this time that he wasn’t even the main character. It was all Peter, all the time, and Peter was a jerk. When we finally finished the book I declared we would not be listening to Fudge-A-Mania.
Coming down from Slumgullion Pass, our brakes got weak and I could smell them, so we pulled over at a bathroom halfway down to let them cool off. (It is a 10-percent grade, which is the steepest I’ve ever driven on.) We had a nice view of the Slumgullion Flow, a still-active, slow-moving landslide. Continuing on, we used first gear all the way to the bottom.
We made another stop at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. This stop had been planned. Persephone likes when we have something to do in the middle of our driving days so we don’t spend 10 straight hours in the car. At Black Canyon we discovered the junior ranger program, which our kids loved because they got badges. (Joe loves wearing badges, and even brought his Douglas County Junior Sheriff badge with him on our trip. Jane just loves free things because she’s a packrat.) What they DIDN’T love, though, was having to interact with another adult, as both refused to say their oath. In the visitor center I saw a stuffed yellow-bellied marmot. It looked like a big tan beaver with no tail. I thought of the line from “The Big Lebowski,” but hardly made a note of it. What does or does not constitute a yellow-bellied marmot ended up being one of the main controversies of our vacation.
It had been so long since we left Topeka that reaching Grand Junction made it seem like we were in the Big City. (We weren’t, though; we were in some dry western craphole. But it SEEMED like the Big City.) We continued on into Utah, where I had a run-in with the town of Green River. I remembered Green River actually being more than a flyspeck. When we approached the first exit and were completely unimpressed with our dinner options, we went on. The second exit was no bigger, but I was reasonably certain there were options at the US-6 interchange. I was wrong. We had to turn around and go back, since it was 110 miles to Salina, Utah, with no services between.
Don’t let my reticence to lambast my children fool you: they were a pack of jackals. If Noel Gallagher had a baby with Amy Winehouse and then sent the aforementioned spawn to a finishing school deaned by Satan himself, that child would be more of a pleasurable companion for long-distance auto travel than my children. Jerome spent several hours at a clip screaming, demanding everything the other two kids had in their hands with his mantra, “Ma ma ma ma ma!” Jane and Joe complained of boredom, always needing “something to do.” When I reminded them that, at five years old, I had made the drive from Ohio to Utah and back with nothing more than a hand-held mechanized (not electronic) Pac-Man game, they blinked blindly and then asked if they could open another present. (Persephone got the idea from a friend to bring presents to open along the way to make things not so boring. Here’s how that panned out: hours of demanding the next present, opening said present, tossing it aside because it’s boring, and beginning the cycle anew.) Finally, nearing Richfield, Utah, when Jane said, “What does anyone have for me to do?” I yelled, “What does anyone have for ME to do? I’ve been driving a car for three days!”
Once we were on US-89 we thought it would satisfy them if we told them we were really close. Joe asked, “Where’s Grandma and Grandpa’s cabin?” I’d point in the approximate direction and then he would ask, “Then why are we not going that way?” I’d say, “Do you see a road that goes that way?” Five minutes later we would complete this dance again.
Finally we reached the first of the three gates between the county road and the cabin. We had to park our car just inside this gate, since the roads further on were impassible for anything other than a four-wheel-drive SUV. This added feature heightened the cabin fever by making us into virtual prisoners, while making unloading and reloading our car a delightful challenge.