We have been out of town on vacation for the last two weeks. We went to see some old friends in Denver, and had hoped to drive over into Utah to see Arches and Canyondlands National Parks. We saw our friends, but not the national parks. (Thanks, Tea Party. I hope your shutdown didn’t inconvenience any of you.)

We drove and towed a travel trailer. I know a lot of people look down on RVs. It’s not really camping. Some even consider it irresponsible. RVs use too much fuel. But I have some very fond memories of traveling with my parents in their RVs. I would love for Leah and me to have the same kind of experiences that they had.

I start out with a natural inclination to like this mode of travel. Leah, on the other hand, never did it until we got married. OK, twice before we got married. But still.

We had a small motorhome that had all the necessary conveniences. I stayed in it while working in Huntsville. It was a little small for me, and way too small for Leah. So we decided to sell it, and my one-year-old Nissan pickup, and get a decent-sized trailer and a used truck big enough to tow it.

I’ve done the drive from Georgia to Denver a bunch of times, including on my motorcycle, back when I rode. I always did the 1300 miles in two days. But towing a trailer is different, especially with two dogs along for the ride. We took four days.

On the third day, my outside temperature monitor showed 90 F early in the afternoon. By that evening it was 55 F. With that kind of temperature gradient, you can expect a strong wind, and that’s what we got. The last day before we reached Denver the wind blew strong and steady pretty close to directly into us. My fuel mileage dropped by about a third for that day, and when we stopped, it was hard to open the truck or trailer door.

The wind had moderated by the time we reached the Denver area. We stayed at Chatfield State Park, which is just a short drive from where our friends live in Littleton. It’s a convenient but not particularly pretty park. The sky compensated. This is what we woke up to one morning.

Sunrise at Chatfield

Here’s the view in the other direction, with the Rockies illuminated by the red morning sun. These are the best shots we got of the sunrises and sunsets.

Sunrise on the Rockies

There were some pretty skies in Colorado but most of the time it was impossible to get decent pictures because of utility poles, ugly buildings or lack of a good place to pull over while driving.

We arrived on Friday and had planned to leave the next Tuesday morning for Utah. We had hoped that the government shutdown would be over by then, but, of course, it wasn’t. So we stayed a couple of more days and then drove down to Colorado Springs.

We drove up Pikes Peak, but it was so cold and windy at the top that Leah didn’t get out of the truck, and I didn’t get out for long. That afternoon we drove around the Garden of the Gods, which is a park located in Colorado Springs. I have pictures of my mother and father going horseback riding in the Garden of the Gods during the war, when my father was stationed at what was known then as Camp Carson. He learned to ride because when he first went into the Army, he was assigned to the horse-drawn artillery. It’s hard to believe the Army still trained soldiers with horse-drawn artillery in the 1940s. He never went into combat on a horse, but, according to him, he managed to stop biting his fingernails when he worked with horses. Unfortunately for us, it was foggy and drizzling when we were there.

We left for home on Friday morning, a week after we arrived. The forecast was for more strong winds in eastern Colorado and western Kansas, mainly from the northwest. We didn’t feel much of it, and it didn’t compensate for the headwind we had coming out.

If you have never driven across eastern Colorado and Kansas, you can consider yourself lucky. I don’t know who coined the expression “miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles” but it applies really well to Kansas. It’s flat. The highest relief is usually a highway overpass, and I don’t think I have ever seen as many overpasses that crossed dirt roads in any other place. The most common man-made features are grain silos, with churches a close second. I cannot imagine living in the small communities out there, where the closest grocery store might be an hour away.

This was the most dramatic sky we saw in Kansas.

At least something’s going on in the sky

This was taken through the windshield so there are some reflections, including the light streak near the top.

The wind in Kansas doesn’t go entirely to waste. It’s hard to see here, but there is a line of windmills that spans the horizon.

Windmills marching across the horizon

They are right at the horizon, which makes them so far away that they’re hard to see. The fact that you can see them at that distance means they are really big. These windmills are huge. They seemed alien and unreasonably outsized in this landscape, which made it hard for me to grasp their size accurately. I estimated a radius of around 80 feet. Based on Wikipedia, I might have underestimated by a significant amount. One article says that one of the wind farms along I-70 uses windmills with a rotor diameter of 80 meters, which would make a radius of around 130 feet. I’m not sure the ones we saw were that big, but they might have been.

I counted a rotation period of about five seconds. They looked like they were rotating lazily, but  If the rotors were 130 feet in radius, the tips would have been traveling at over 110 miles per hour.

We enjoyed visiting our friends and hope to go back before too long, but the trip out and back made me kind of discouraged about this country. The interstate highway system is an engineering marvel. It’s a great accomplishment that took a tremendous national effort at great cost. We had the resources and wherewithal, but, more importantly, the national will to build this transportation system. Now we have the resources and wherewithal, but apparently not the will to maintain the roads. Oh, there is a lot of road construction everywhere, but it never seems to make much difference in the smoothness of the roads. It seems to me that it’s what you get when no one really cares about the quality of the work. I have to assume that the construction companies build to the accepted specification, but why are the roads so rough?

I suppose you could argue that interstate highways are a thing of the past, and gigantic windmills are the future. But don’t tell that to the truckers; according to the Department of Commerce, trucks carry about two thirds of all freight shipped in the US. My guess is that the national highway system is declining because the important people don’t drive cross country; they fly, so rough roads mean nothing to them.

That leaves the unimportant people like me to experience this particular sign of our national decline first hand.