WFRV

Another bright and hot day and we decide to see Red Rocks Park and Amphitheater. But first we check out a place called Heritage Place about a mile up the road; it's billed as an 1800's town with amusements. It's cheesy but fun. We start out on the alpine slide, a half-mile concrete trough that starts 490 feet up and winds its way down a mountainside. You take a chair lift up with a plastic sled and ride the sled down the trough. There are actually two slides, one for speed demons (Mike and Ben) and one for people with a survival instinct (Denise and Sam). After that we try out the mini-golf 'Challenge Course'. We've given Sam a two-stroke handicap because otherwise she refuses to play. She ends up playing so well that she almost beats us without the handicap. After being outside at midday for two hours we head indoors to the Notz Landing Diner for lunch. Thankfully they have free refills on giant drinks and we all quench our thirst; we are, after all, in a very dry place.

After lunch we're off to Red Rocks. The road there winds up into the mountain past many levels of parking and ends at the Visitor Center and Amphitheater. The Visitor Center tells us about when the amphitheater was built (1941) and about all the bands that have played there (to our delight the Grateful Dead hold the record for most concerts played at 25 - Jerry!). After learning about the amphitheater we step out into it and it is truly magnificent. The bench seats are situated between two huge cliffs of red rock and overlook not only the stage but the entire valley surrounded in the distance by cliffs. We climb all the way down to the stage (69 rows) and of course that means we have to climb up again. Ben runs up, Mike is close behind, and Sam and I rest twice. I'd learned in the Visitor Center that at Red Rocks there's only 80% of the oxygen I'd get at sea level, and that because it's so dry I should be drinking twice my usual amount of water and at least taking naps if not getting a lot of sleep. I've done none of that and find myself extremely tired doing things that normally wouldn't bother me. I mention this and Ben wonders about the Broncos and whether they have an edge when they play a home football game. Mike says the lack of oxygen doesn't apply to top athletes. I am not a top athlete.

After a while spent absorbing the view we head back to the campground. We leave the kids in the air-conditioned RV watching a movie and go to a nearby RV sales center; we're curious to see what the giant busses that we've seen at every campground look like on the inside. We're gladly invited to look inside anything on the lot, so we do. The busses amount to small and fancy apartments on wheels and we're impressed with both the design and the materials used on the inside. The one we like best is listed at $330,000. (For comparison ours lists new at $70,000.) The only thing I'm dismayed by is the driver's seat; I can't imagine steering one of these things. Our rental agent told us that anyone can buy one of these busses and drive off the lot; lessons or a special license aren't necessary. "Think about that," he'd said, "the next time you see some seventy-five-year-old guy zooming past you on the highway in one of those."We also looked at the smaller towable RVs (one has four bunk beds, a queen-size bed, and could easily be towed by, say, a red Ford pickup truck) and finally we look at a camper like the one Mike's family took cross-country when he was a kid. It's got a place to sleep and a tiny burner and is extremely hot inside; Mike's parents pulled this behind their station wagon with three kids across the desert, eating and sleeping in it every night. They didn't have cell phones so they stopped at pay phones to call ahead for campsites, and they went through a lot of ice which filled the cooler in the back of the station wagon. Having been on our current trip for a week and a half, I can only say, and I love them very much, that my in-laws must have been temporarily insane.

From there we're off to the grocery store. Menu-planning is important as we don't have a lot of food storage and very little refrigerator space. Mike and I have what amounts to a date wandering the aisles of the grocery store; one thing we're not getting is any alone time. We return and make a gourmet dinner (grilled salmon with balsamic fig sauce, grilled asparagus, and cheesy biscuits from scratch) from a cookbook that's come in very handy, Campfire Cuisine. Everyone goes to bed fairly early because tomorrow is an eleven-hour drive to Virgin, UT (outside Zion National Park).

# posted by LDW @ 9:21 AM