So on Friday Lori and I decided to go pay one last visit to the boat in Granby to prep the boat for winter, and use Granby as a launch point to do some adventuring into points that would normally be prohibitive from our home base in Denver. So we packed up our weekend gear, grabbed the doggies, and after work we headed for the hills. We didn't quite realize that we'd be putting 900 miles on the car that weekend, but... I guess we really enjoyed all the new sights and knocked off a few things we'd wanted to see for awhile.Granby
We spent the night in the boat in Granby, and that was a rough start to an otherwise-awesome weekend. By the time we got there it was way past being dark, and (un)lucky for us it had just finished raining so all the areas around the marina were quite muddy and slippery. This meant we had to carry the dogs to the docks (in the rain). Also, the marina had shuffled all the docks so we had to spent several minutes tromping about in the mud and almost getting the car stuck before we found the slip our boat was on! Then we settled down for the night in the dark because we had dead batteries...
The next day I had to put some heet in the gas tank and swap out the batteries with some new ones so the marina could pull the boat out that week. This is where the fun started. While chatting idly with Lori, I blissfully poured the heet into the fresh water tank by mistake, not realizing it until I'd emptied the bottle. Yikes. Then, a bit off-kilter from that, I started unplugging the batteries without taking a picture of what was connected to what, like I normally do. I then had to spend a couple hours retracing the cabling and making sure I wasn't going to die in a battery explosion.
One of our batteries was not as charged as we were told by the AutoZone guys, which set off the #*($! carbon monoxide detector in the cabin (which doubles as a chattery battery tester). That #*($! detector is hard-wired to something that is then wired to the batteries, so after much grumbling and attempts to disconnect the detector, we gave up and unconnected the battery in question again. Arg.
On to Craig
Undeterred, we grabbed an awesome breakfast in Granby and headed for Craig, CO, in the northwest corner of the state. We'd been to Craig once in 1999 to pick up our Subaru wagon from a dealer up there, but it was time for another visit. Also, we thought if we were lucky we'd be able to quick pop into the eastern side of Dinosaur National Monument and head home Sunday.
On the way to Craig, it was drizzling almost nonstop. The gorgeous Rabbit Ears Pass was not so gorgeous that day, as we hit dense fog and might as well have been in Kansas for all we could see. The fog also made for slow going but cleared as we dropped down into Steamboat Springs.
In Steamboat we grabbed an awesome geocache. This was at the site of a very picturesque barn which has adorned many "Come to Colorado" posters that I've seen (see barn pic at top). We snapped many pics and also grabbed some travel bugs that would end up being dropped off in Maine...
About the time we hit Hayden the rain started letting up and the sun started peeking out. By the time we hit Craig it was mostly sunny. We drove by this really bizarre pointy house that turned out to be an old drive-in movie building, although we had some great guesses on Facebook as to what it might be!
Northwestern Colorado High Prarie
At the McD's in Craig it was around 4:30pm and we decided to push on to Dinosaur, CO, and see if we could stay the night there or in Utah. We drove through some amazing high prarie and saw things like the Johnston Homestead (way in the middle of nowhere) and the site of the "I Do" wildfire. We also grabbed a few caches on the way, but didn't quite make it to Dinosaur before dark. We did get to drive a ways up into the east entrance, which climbs up the backside of a
beautiful canyon that was very reminiscent of the area where I grew up in northwest New Mexico.
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