Day 3, June 20, 2016 Rio Rancho NM to Limon CO

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Up early (6:10am!) and after breakfast and packing the car, we hit the road.  A long amount of driving today, around 500 miles, so we wanted to get an early start. 

We headed north through Santa Fe, where we remembered a lovely week we spent there several years back).  Our reminiscing brought us by Abiquiu, where Georgia O-Keefe did much of her painting, and by Ghost Ranch, where we took an amazing tour previously where we went to many of the actual spots where O’Keefe painted and then saw prints of the paintings in front to the astounding landscapes.  We had so much fun that we somehow missed our main road route that was to easily take us into Colorado.  

 Instead, we found a “scenic byway” with breathtaking views. 

The highlight of this was seeing The Toltec Scenic Railroad.  We saw people getting ready to go up the mountain on this steam engine pulled narrow-gauge train. Another time, we thought…we’d love to see that in action.  As it turned out, soon, as we were driving we saw smoke, Patti said, “Is that a fire?”  Dick replied, “No, that is the train.” 

And so we began an hour of leap-frogging the train as it went through mountain meadows and class train stations.  We caught up with it and were able to see up close just how lovingly this train has been cared for. We even had a deer jump out in front of the picturesque pond as the train went by. Stunning! 

The smell of coal burning brought memories of childhood back to Dick, and Patti swore that the sound of the train really was “I think I can, I think I can!”  Not on our agenda, but well worth the out of the way trip.

Our real goal was the only national park in Colorado that Dick had not visited:  Great Sand Dunes National Park, a little ways into Colorado in the middle of the state.  Sounds straightforward, right?  We kept losing our highway due in part to an appalling lack of route signs.  Even our trusty GPS “Joanne” (as we have named the woman’s voice who tells us what to do) couldn’t really help us.  She would keep” recalculating” our route and our estimated arrival time slipped later and later into the afternoon.  Persistence (or stubbornness) kicked in. We were going to find this park!

At last, we could spot some large sand-colored areas up against some tall mountains.  Yay, we were here!  No, it was still nearly 30 miles away, these dunes were so large, we just kept driving and driving

How did there get to be sand dunes in the middle of Colorado? you ask.  Here is the simple explanation:  The valley had originally been the bottom of a sea, breaking volcanic rock into sand.  When the water left, the sand remained.  Strong winds swept down the valley, pushing the sand against the mountains.  Counter winds from the mountains formed the sand into dunes.  These are the tallest dunes in North America, over 750 feet tall and covering 30 square miles.  So impressive, especially with the snow topped mountains behind them.

Having watched the excellent film about the dunes, looked at the exhibits in the visitor’s center, we were at last ready to go explore.  However, the major short-term exploring meant wading across some fairly fast moving, deep, muddy water, then putting your shoes back on to clamber around on the lower sand dunes.  Although clearly many people were totally enjoying this….the buzz of mosquitoes and the muddy water, plus knowing we still had a number of hours more driving led both of us to the decision, we didn’t need to go through the water to be up on the dunes.  We had climbed dunes in several other places so knew what they could be like, but thought we would pass on these.  We could be impressed without walking onto the lower dunes. They were gorgeous and rare, and we were satisfied with having gotten there to see them.

We packed up and headed another couple hundred miles down the road to Limon Colorado for a greatly appreciated night at our hotel.   One sign we had  never seen before at a hotel check-in desk asked guest to please not smoke pot in their rooms…. Marijuana is totally legal in Colorado…I guess they need to be more specific with their "no smoking" signs. We followed that request.