Also known as the day that Jerry nearly drove me off a cliff. Literally this time.
We bought tickets for the Colorado Prison Museum in Cañon City and shot down there to poke around this morning. The museum was small but they provided a read along pamphlet that talked about the different aspects of prison life. They also had actual equipment that prisoners used to wash laundry, cook, etc. Did it compare to my lifelong bucket list achievement of touring Alcatraz? Hell no. Was it still cool? Yes. The two… ok, three things that stood out the most to me were the gas chamber, all the prisoner art, and the table they made out of all of the confiscated murder weapons. I didn’t take a picture of the confiscated murder weapon table because I’m a big dummy head. I did take some pictures of the prisoner art though. It was fascinating.
After we left the museum, we weren’t quite ready to go home and we saw a sign for a dinosaur quarry that you could just walk around. We headed for that but never exactly saw it. A few times we saw signs for dinosaur this or that but it looked like we needed to hike to see it. Marian was asleep in the car and the smoke from the wildfires was THICK, so we passed on that. We just kept going on that road trying to figure out where it would take us.
The answer was: on the stupidest road of all the stupid roads in all the stupid lands. We came to a sign that said “pavement ends” and then BOOM we were traversing a mountain through hairpin turns on a road with no guardrails and no pavement. It was about 1.5 cars wide in most places with the very occasional baaaarely 2 car width but it was a two way road. We encountered our first car when we were pretty much at the highest point and the guy was able to pass us with maybe a quarter of an inch to spare.
I told Jerry to turn around 3 times but he insisted we carry on. We asked one guy how much longer it went on for when we passed him. Hopefully he didn’t have corona virus because I could for sure tell you what he had for lunch. It was about a 20 mile stretch between Canon City and Cripple Creek. The road has been in use since 1892 and people with very mucho larger testicles than I used to cross that in a wagon. Hell to the naw naw naw to the nth degree, thank you very much. We crossed paths with a guy pulling a Coleman RV and that was awful enough. There is zero chance I would ever be coming round that mountain when I come driving 6 white horses. I am not cut out to be a pioneersman. I’d just tell my family that I liked Pennsylvania fine and I’d get creative with meals.
Here’s a video to illustrate our death defying feat.
We obviously made it home in one piece and are settling in for the cold weather. We are supposed to get snow tomorrow. It was 90 degrees today. Colorado never ceases to surprise me or maybe nothing surprises me anymore. Either way. I pray that the snow tamps out the wildfires because I don’t know how much more my lungs can take. And also they’re catastrophic and all that.
drewonpaper.com 