Water Into Wine

Breakfast needs to be a serious affair as the badly thought-out trip to Safeway demands we eat the following:

  • 14 sausages
  • 24 rashers of bacon
  • 2lbs of mushrooms
  • Lots of fried bread (which I’ve not eaten since school)

We cook the produce and eat 0.5% of it, thinking we’ll bag-up the rest and have it on the road instead of the traditional nachos and water; but we both know it’s going to be bear-food in a hundred miles.

Ashly is quiet, and obviously sad to be leaving the John Denver Memorial Cabin. So am I, but never show weakness or emotion when you’re getting going in the morning. The home-schooled kid is peeking through the curtains as we pull away. I worry for him…

This is a big ol’driving day on real mountain roads. West across Colorado and then south to Durango, we cross the Continental Divide before 10am, we wonder what happens at The Bay Of Chickens, pass ‘lakes of sand’, a store that specialises in ‘Gifts, Gold and Guns’ and many impressive High Chaparral style ranch entrances. A nutter beats his truck with a stick, Honeyville Honey Factory is best-thought-out-name-of-the-day and the Cimmaron Car Dump has no cars. We have nothing to do except look out of the car window…

No! Hold the front page! We are going to take the healing waters at Ouray CO. Forgot about that.
We drive through snow, put on jackets and dig out the bathers. Pulling in to the Ouray Municipal Bathing Thing I’m a little wary, we pile in regardless and; blow me down it’s magnificent! Hot pool, hotter pool, colder pool, hot pool, hotter pool. I sit in ‘hotter pool’ until my skin starts to look like a very old mushroom, and by golly you do feel better. The mountains are above you covered in snow and you’re being healed by the waters… only a beer and a fag are missing. I’ve never seen Ashly happier. Again.

The road is so engrossing I make my first fuel error by getting very low outside Silverton CO. Mr Fuel-Hypocrite fills up and his wife tells him the garage guys surely think he “pumps gas like a girl” – she has obviously watched too many musclebound truckers pumping gas. I buy T-shirt #14: “Kum And Go”, a chain of Colorado gas station/stores. I later learn that the ‘Jackass’ tv guy wears one.
The night in The Strater Hotel (historic) is memorable – well, almost. There is a guitarist performing in the bar who has an astoundingly eclectic set-list, it runs from “Amarillo By Morning” through Jethro Tull, Gram Parsons, The Hollies, acoustic Zeppelin and all points Eagles. He doesn’t play “Rocky Mountain High” which slightly sets me off on one: I embarrass my wife and what’s left of The British Empire by being royally twatted and boring. The singer wants to kill me but is too professional and polite. He does a very impressive version of Don Henley’s California anthem “Boys Of Summer”, not easy to make a solo acoustic version of that sound passable. Then I followed up with garbled shouting about gun control and healthcare. I apologise to the good people of Durango and beg forgiveness, they were all lovely.

All other recollection of the night is rather hazy M’lud…