Break Us In Slowly – Pueblo, CO USA, October 1, 2024

This leg of our trip has been the first time since the beginning of the year since we have been able to travel without a schedule.  Between having to be at a specific dock to graduation we both feel like it has been a fairly consistent race to “get somewhere.”  It is nice to slow down and make the decision for where to go next based on what we feel like.  Our next scheduled date isn’t until Christmas.  We started by stopping in southwest Colorado at Zapata Falls.  It was a great campground (sadly without power or water) which gave us a chance to really try out our new boondocking set-up.  The hiking here is challenging to say the least.  Day 1 we went only about 4 miles but somehow managed to cover 9,000 feet in elevation.  Day 2 wasn’t much better at 4.2 miles and 10,000 feet.  The elevation makes it much more difficult especially since we didn’t see the falls.  Apparently, you have to climb through the cold river in order to get to the falls, so we skipped it and settled on the beautiful views instead.

After our first two days hiking elevation, we thought we were ready to climb the dunes – Great Sand Dunes National Park that is.  About ½ way up the huge dune we both decided it ranked on one to the top 10 dumbest things we have done in a while.  Talk about challenging!  We made it to the top and once again the views were stunning, but this is definitely a one-day deal.  According to the visitor center this is a very unique landscape where the mountains, desert, and wetlands work together to create the largest sand dunes in North America.

Following our challenging climb of the dunes we moved on to see San Luis Lake just on the other side of the park.  This time of year, the mountain melt and runoff has completely dried up meaning we could stand in the middle of the lake!

In addition to our site seeing, Ron had been working to upgrade the controller for our solar set-up which ended up being a bit more challenging than anticipated.  The good news is our set-up does allow us to have heat when boondocking which is a major upside now that is it getting down to 40 degrees at night! 

We are still waiting for any news or payment from insurance and decided to do some preventive maintenance on the RV in the meantime.  This meant we would get all new tires for the RV.  Ours were from 2016 and I learned you should not go more than 5 years whether there has been an issue or not.  Passing quite a few other folks with tire issues along our travels makes this a worthy investment.  Although we assumed Tire Discounter would be an expert on tires this wasn’t the case.  When Ron showed the manager the special tool required to change the tires his response “never seen one like that before.”  Uh Oh.  Ron ended up back in the shop with about 4 different Tech’s helping them remove and reassemble our run flats.  The manager offered him a job and a place to park the RV.  Well, that was unexpected and brought a good laugh.  Good to have such a capable husband for sure! 

With our upgrades now set the only question is now where?  With the aftermath of hurricane Helene being so severe it looks like we will be out west for a while.  Our only direction is going to be trying to avoid the wildfires and snow.