By Barry Zander, Edited by Monique Zander, the Never-Bored RVers
I’m pretty sure lots of you RV.net readers are wondering why our travel articles for the past year have been mostly about the wonders of the West. Our plans are to remedy that situation later this year when we head eastward for a few months.
I want to address this blog to RVers no matter where you roam and whether you’re on the road full-time or for a weekend. It should also be of interest if you enjoy the journey or the destination. I will end up with an update on our travels around the Grand Circle.
SMALL-TOWN DESTINATIONS
We’ve been to or through thousands of small towns across North America over the past 4½ years of RVing and over many years before. Two things we have learned: 1) we can usually sense the pride of the locals in their community just by looking around, and 2) there have been very few that we didn’t find interesting.
The Mountain Village of Ouray, Colorado -- About as Quaint as They Get
Looking for something different to do one weekend out of every month? Take off in a different direction (SW, NW, NE, NW) for each excursion. If there’s some place you’ve thought about visiting but never have had the time, put that high on your list. Or just fire up the rig, fill the tanks and take off.
Tucked into the Neighborhood on a Backstreet in Astoria, Oregon © All photos by Barry Zander. All rights reserved
When you get there (wherever there is), you’ll want to walk into the old hotel, maybe get a cup of coffee in the shop that was a tavern 100 years ago. Go into the lobby and sit on one of the old sofas or chairs. That’s a great way to step back in time to begin to appreciate the experience.
No two towns are alike, but almost all of them have something the residents are most proud of, like a native who went on to fame, or a factory, long-closed, that manufactured wares vital to soldiers in World War I.
You may look down a side street and see the old jail or the Fourth of July bandstand. Take in the museum if it’s open on weekends to get an appreciation of the town when Model Ts or DeSotos were chugging down Main Street. Check at the local playhouse to see if there’s a performance while you’re in town or maybe one that it’s worth returning to see later.
Not Well Hidden in a Museum in Fargo, North Dakota
Monique frowns every time I do it, but if I pass a couple of local shopkeepers talking on the street, I may say something like, “I’m a tourist.” It can be a good conversation starter.
If you’re not in a big RV, take a tour on the often-narrow the streets behind the main part of town, the ones with big houses once owned by the lumber magnate, the banker or the railroad heir. Too big to go under the trees? Walk a few blocks.
If you see a red barn on the outskirts of town, take the picture. If it has a design painted on the side to keep bad luck away or an ad for a feed & seed brand, you get one extra point. For “SEE ROCK CITY,” that’s a 5-point bonus.
The best thing about this travel plan is that you can do it anywhere in America or Canada. So Step 1 is – Pick the weekend.
Tucked into a Neighborhood in Oklahoma
BACK TO THE BEAUTIFUL WEST
What brought all this to mind was our side-trip last week through the old mining towns of Ouray, Silverton and Ridgway, Colorado. All three are quaint, all little painted ladies that hope to entice rich RV drivers to stop in to buy lunch, a refrigerator magnet, or the big score, a t-shirt. We ate at the True Grit Café in Ridgway, an old brick structure erected for the movie True Grit. John Wayne’s picture is on the wall, many times, and I assure you, it was a treat for our traveling guests, Monique’s brother and sister-in-law from France.
John Wayne is Part of the Woodwork in Ridgway, Colorado
That was a day spent touring from our base in Durango, one of our favorite tourist towns. Lots of neat shops, where two different shopkeepers gave guidance on where to get a better deal than they offered.
We didn’t take the Durango-to-Silverton cog railway this trip, but it’s one of those “must-do” things in a tourist town.
It May Not Look Real, But These Are the Ancestral Homes of the Puebloans in Mesa Verde, Colorado
And now, for the travel blog. We arrived in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, Thursday, and on advice from the tour ticket seller, bought four tickets for the Cliff Palace Tour that afternoon and the Balcony House tour Friday at 10:30 ($24 for 8 tickets). The times are important for photography because of the sunlight. Sister-in-law Solveig does not like the thought of climbing and climbing from level to level on wooden ladders and, even worse, crawling though dark tunnels in the cliff dwellings. She went anyway and is glad she did.
Each Mesa Verde area offers different views and slightly different historical information.
From Mesa Verde, we traipsed across the Four Corners – where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah meet (one of those places that you visit to say, “I’ve been there”) – and today we drove into Bluff, Utah. The free film at Bluff Fort is astounding: as incredible as the building of the Alaskan Highway films).
A side note: while we were awaiting the start of the Mesa Verde Ranger Talk Thursday night, we got into a discussion with a grandfather (a geologist from Tennessee) taking his grandson on an extended tour through some western sites. They mentioned Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, which we haven’t visited yet. I asked the 12-year-old boy why we should brave the 13 miles of bumpy road to go there. “It depends on what you’re interested in.”
Boy, isn’t that what all this is about, anyway?
From the “Never-Bored RVers,” We’ll see you on down the road.
© All photos by Barry Zander. All rights reserved