We drove an easy 3 hours over the heart of the Rocky Mountains, including Independence Pass. What a beautiful part of the world. We were headed to another amazing part of Colorado: Aspen, home of the amazing Maroon Bells mountains. It is a very busy area, but we decided to ride from Aspen to the Bells on rented electric bikes. This was our first time riding these. It took a bit to get used to how they worked, but we were very appreciative of being able to use the electric assist to help go up the 7.5 mile grade to the foot of the mountains. Patti would like to testify that she still worked pretty hard on the ride and opted to let Dick continue the last mile for the best view of the Maroon Bells. She saw them close enough and took a little rest before going FAST downhill to the bottom of the road. She also had a slight mishap of accidentally turning the electric bike off, which drastically reduced the amount of assist available. Luckily, she worked it out. The mountains are spectacularly beautiful and it was the perfect day to see them from a bike. We even saw a deer on the way down.
After our ride we had another four hours to Moab, Utah. We are steadily heading for home. The change of scenery on this drive was dramatic: tall, rugged mountains to ever drier plateau to the desert of Utah.
In Moab, Patti had found us a vintage motel: The Apache Motel. This motel's claim to fame was this was where John Wayne liked to stay when he was filming westerns in the area. There was lots of John Wayne cut-outs and memorabilia around the hotel. Our room was actually next-door to the one that he had stayed at a number of times. We both have a lot of ambivalent feelings about who John Wayne was, but this was a really funky ,well kept up motel, and we enjoyed being there.
One of the things that made it fun was obviously this motel was on the radar of many travelers from around the world, and you could hear many languages being spoken.
We had a particularly nice interaction with a woman who was staying at the motel with her family. She works for the US State Department and is now on vacation away from an assignment overseas and back in the US. We had a very good conversation, talking with her about the realities of working for the federal government these days and the challenges for people like her, who really cared about the work they were doing. We were glad to be able to hear her perspective and offer some support. It is indeed a challenging time. She agreed with us that sometimes even in challenging times going on vacation to beautiful places was just what was needed.
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